It was the splendor which I loved most. On a late winter afternoon in the bomb-ravaged seaport of Plymouth (the original one), I was taken by my mother to what we called the cinema, for the first time. The film was Bambi, of which I can now remember almost nothing except the foreign richness of the colors on the screen. My mother had dressed up for the event, in a very smart coat, a little flared to reflect the Dior New Look which was still popular in what must have been 1956. I too had been seized and given a general brushing and tidying. Did she have a hat? I can’t remember. But she might well have done. She certainly smelled deliciously of what I then thought of as “Yardley,” the name on almost all of her many cosmetic products.
This was an occasion. There was polished chrome on the doors, there were wide steps carpeted in a rich red, and long heavy curtains of the same color. I suspect there were commissionaires with large moustaches and militaristic uniforms. There were special, expensive, and extra-large packets of sweets, which you could not get in the ordinary shops. These had my full attention, whereas the film itself seems to have slipped my mind. Did she comfort me over the cruel death of Bambi’s mother? I cannot recall. Perhaps she had no need to. I am not sure that I, often a matter-of-fact child, minded all that much anyway. Were there any other members of the family present? I cannot recall them. It was all about me. The sense of ceremony, of being allowed deep into something secret, elusive, and uncommon, remains with me now. I think that every time I go to the cinema, I hope to find it again, but I seldom do.
About seven years later, my father took my brother and me to London to see Lawrence of Arabia, when it was still new, in one of those theaters where the seats are ranked very steeply, like the inside of a volcano, and you fear you may tumble into the pit if you stop concentrating even for a moment. There were also pretty girls selling ice creams from trays slung round their necks. (Mrs. Hitchens once did this job, and found herself repeatedly watching Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon for week after week, because the film was so successful that it stayed and stayed in the cinema where she worked). But Lawrence of Arabia, far larger and more beautiful than anything I had ever seen on screen, overpowered me and I forgot the ice creams. By this stage in our lives, though we were only half aware of it, my brother and I had been largely abandoned by our parents during the school holidays, and had become frequent, undiscriminating cinemagoers, at the Gosport Ritz, the Gosport Criterion, the Odeon North End in Portsmouth and the puzzlingly named Essoldo, somewhere in that rough nautical city. We reached them by bicycle or by bus and ferry, unchaperoned. It was amazing what delights a few shillings could provide. The Ritz, a classic of inter-war ocean-liner architecture, has gone, even though it survived intense German bombing. The Criterion, a gorgeous Edwardian affair of wrought-iron balconies later became a bingo hall. I think I found the lost Essoldo on a nostalgic journey a few weeks ago, but it is many years since a projector has whirred in it.
We seem to have watched a lot of historical dramas, hoping for swordfights and cavalry charges and generally getting them. Hercules Unchained, as I recall, disappointed, whereas El Cid and Taras Bulba did not, and The Vikings was just a bit too graphic for me. Heaven knows what else we gazed at, mouths hanging open, inside those shiny portals. Later on I developed a taste for “arthouses,” decrepit pre-1914 theaters with lumpy seats and sticky floors, showing Scandinavian classics to teenage couples who were perhaps not paying full attention. How many times did I see The Seventh Seal at the sagging Moulin Rouge in an Oxford suburb? I do not know. I must watch it again one day to see what happens.
There were other decaying tiny theaters also given to showing out-of-season black and white films for trivial prices. I can’t remember which was which. But I do recall, in detail, the most pleasurably frightening film I have ever seen, The Innocents, released in 1961, a version of Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.” Almost nothing actually happens, but it is quite terrifying. The appearance of the dead, corrupted governess Miss Jessel, silently bringing the dark of midnight into the noon of the bright day, was so shocking and credible that the thought of it still brings me out in shivers. It calls to mind Mephistopheles’ warning, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Yet when I saw the same film a few years later at a university movie show, the raucous crowd destroyed the moment, and I had to leave, angry and disappointed to have been cheated out of the thrill of harmless fear. I was used to rapt audiences, led through curtains and tall staircases into a sequestered world, and gradually soothed into silence by confectionery and advertisements, where we all entered into the illusion. It was a useful lesson in subtlety, as I was in those days extremely unsubtle.
About the same time, the routine playing of “God Save the Queen” at the end of each showing was beginning to die out. Tariq Ali, Britain’s most prominent student revolutionary of the age, having been brought up respectably in Pakistan, once unwisely but honorably rose to his feet for the British national anthem at the end of a 1960s showing of Andrzej Wajda’s Cold War classic Ashes and Diamonds. He had watched it at a very nostalgic Oxford cinema, then called the Scala, much-patronized by radical university audiences. He recalled years afterwards, “Thoughtlessly, I stood up, as I used to in Lahore when the national anthem was played, only to be greeted with a uniform chant from the row behind: ‘Sit down, you fascist!’” He never stood for the anthem again, but he probably did not have to, as the ceremony was slowly dying out, through indifference rather than because of radical politics. Some audience members, in the hope of avoiding it, would gather up their coats and scarves and dash for the exits as the credits rolled.
I last saw the anthem played and (more or less) respected—with the audience clambering to their feet—at the end of The Charge of The Light Brigade in 1968, at what was then Oxford’s biggest cinema. This was an enormous 1930s brick picture palace, once called the Ritz, with a sculpture on its front wall to emphasize its devotion to culture. It has recently closed, and a few weeks ago I saw the ripped-out seats piled up in what had once been its grand foyer. I mused, as I looked at the melancholy scene, that at one point this theater had even featured its own restaurant offering “a full meal—or just a snack,” with a picture of the full meal projected on to the screen to entice customers. Later the catering shrank, and the only meals on offer were hot dogs. “An hour from now, you’ll wish you’d had one,” the blatant on-screen advertisement would claim in an ingratiating voice. “An hour from now you’ll wish you hadn’t!” the audience would sometimes chant back. The joy of the darkened auditorium continued for a while. London in the 1970s had many small arty theaters showing moderately rude, foreign, or obscure films, in black and white and often with subtitles. But in recent years most of these have gone, and if you want monochrome and subtitles then you had better look for them on T.V. or some streaming service.
I was disappointed by American movie theaters, which were usually too new and did not have the shabby, frayed glamour I liked. And my Russian was never good enough to allow me to enjoy Moscow’s Udarnik (it means “Shock Worker”), whose silvery roof is said to have been retractable, so that on summer nights the Soviet elite could watch Eisenstein’s productions under the stars. It stands next to the notorious House on the Embankment, which in Stalin’s time gathered the Communist ruling class in one vast apartment block, where (as it happened) they could all easily be arrested when they fell from favor—as most of them did. But I did spend one bitterly upsetting afternoon in the Cosmos cinema in the north of the city where, with my translator whispering in my ear, I watched Stanislav Govoryukhin’s devastating documentary on the desolation, corruption, and ruin of Soviet society, Tak zhit nelzya (We cannot live like this). Slowly, in the deep dark, it dawned on me that everyone else in the vast auditorium was weeping, because it was the first time they had ever seen the truth told about their wrecked country. It could only have happened in a cinema.
