Hearing me say how much I enjoyed Milos Forman’s film Taking Off when I saw it in 1972, someone who loves me ordered it from Amazon. I recommend it; I don’t just mean the film, I mean the whole experience of telling someone who loves you how much you enjoyed something years ago, then having it turn up unexpectedly from Amazon. It’s the adult equivalent of Santa coming good. Apart from anything else, it saves you having to remember your Amazon password.

And the film? As I told the people I invited round to watch it, not one of whom had even heard of it, the film has not aged anything like as badly as we had. I suspect I ruined the film for them by interspersing the screening with personal recollections, telling them when the best scenes were coming – now, in a minute, no, soon, here, now, shush! – laughing in an offensively proprietorial manner, imparting snippets of information about Forman (his first film in America, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, came next) and pointing out an unrecognisable Kathy Bates in her first movie role, singing a wistful song about horses having wings.

I won’t apologise for behaving as though I’d made the film myself. It’s natural to feel that a work of art you particularly love is yours, especially when enthusing about it to novices. I once showed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to a person who had never seen it and came close to describing what a back-breaking job it had been. And Taking Off affects me more closely than Michelangelo’s Creation, because it brings me back to where I was in 1972, who I saw it with and how new the world felt then. Talk about Adam waking up at the end of God’s finger! 1972 was when the 1960s went into orbit.

That’s its subject. The cultural explosion that was perplexing the young even as it energised them, intriguing the old even as it scared them half to death. Taking Off because that was how it seemed: lift off. The young running away from home, going missing, losing their footing, even the old, with sad irony, clumsily casting off their inhibitions.

I was entirely sympathetic to the older generation’s anger and confusion when I first saw the film. This time, I was touched by the sweet cruelty of being young. It’s a good film that waits for you to grow up emotionally. Get someone you love to buy it for you. I recommend the most excruciating striptease ever, oh, and the scene in which New York’s wealthy middle-aged are taught the joys of smoking dope. I’m only sorry I can’t be there to explain its subtleties to you.