Tag: Screens

Our London Letter

Source: ‘Our London Letter’, The Star, St. Peter Port, Guernsey, 19 March 1896, p. 2

Text: The season has begun in good earnest, and promises to be a most interesting one, with its kaleidoscopic developments in dress, new discoveries, and dissipation generally. As we grow older, does life become more interesting? or less interesting? I am one of those who would have nothing in the past undone, and nothing repeated — on the whole. People say, one never wants to return to a house that one has once left: a wise old lady (of women the crossest, ugliest, and least life-enjoying, I thought as a fool, but now I know better, and I agree with her) told me that she wished nothing back, not her youth, not her belles années, not the brightest moments of her life. I hope, and think, that we shall feel the same when we are “on the other side”. That means that the interest of existence grows, and this year, certainly in science, new excitements are constantly unfolding.

What has chiefly electrified me — hardly delighted — it is too gravely suggestive — this month is the little Cinematograph at the old Polytechnic rooms, it is also going on at the Empire. Under this unpronounceable and unrememberable name M. Lumière transfers an elaborate form of the well-known Edison’s Kinetoscope by lantern slides to a sheet on which the picture suddenly springs into life, the men and women start walking, hustling each other, crossing each other, interrupting each other just as it happens — as did happen that moment — in life. The photographs I hear were taken at the rate of eighty to the minute, and, whilst the principle is not new, the representation of life-sized figures close to you, acting as human nature does act, the trivial and the significant all mixed up together, is totally new, and it is startling to see these congealed moments, as I may call them, suddenly become irrified at the turning of some Pygmalionic handle, the trees and bushes moving in the wind, the workpeople rushing out for dinner, mixed up with bicycles, carriages, dogs, and horses, you only miss the prattle and the argot. When the railway train flies at you, you feel quite nervous. One scene came up, “Papa, maman, et bébé.” As this is not everyone’s ideal of life, we expected little from a pair of proud parents at tea. But when with a sort of start the French mother began to pour out tea, and the French father to feed the French baby, and the baby to sputter over his food after the time-honoured fashion of babies not only in France, it was really too funny for anything. Every parent present knew the process, the bits of bread and milk that would not be rammed down by the spoon, the baby’s supreme indifference to the disgraceful mess on his nose, as he laughed up at his laughing parents — one got a glimpse of a scene as old as the hills, ever new, ever interesting to the principals — and the unconsciousness was the charm. Science now and then is quite terrifying with its hints: we have had ere this, theological, not to speak of other intimations, that something of the same sort on a larger scale is always going on, that not an action is forgotten, not an emotion lost, but once generated continues for ever along lines of etheric vibrations! If the dread Recording Angel with his Cinematograph is for ever and ever beside us, about our paths and about our beds, and spying out all our ways. If the secret blow, the small revenge, the shabby return, is to come out before our eyes some day with a horrible faithfulness, and the instant’s betrayal of “Mr. Hyde” is to condemn “Mr. Jekyll” as long as ever the Divine handle is turned, what is to become of us? Where in the world is turning over a new leaf, decent privacy, etiquette, and the rest of it? It is not at all a nice thought. And yet I was glad that the past never dies, and if it condemns us will justify us also, when I looked at the fascinating scenes of human nature that M. Lumière meant simply for our frolic! So the porter shouldered the bag, the youth waved his hat to his beloved, the lady shook out her dress, the irate gardener kicked the saucy boy who put his foot on the hose and stopped the flow, and we saw France as clearly as if we had gone there with a Cook’s ticket.

Comments: The piece comes from a Guernsey newspaper but reports on happenings in London. The Lumière Cinématographe projector premiered at the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street on 20 February, and began its main engagement at the Empire, Leicester Square on 9 March 1896. Along the films described are Repas de bébé (1895), L’Arroseur arrosé (1895) and one of the L’arrivée d’un train films (1896). Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886. My thanks to Deac Rossell for bringing this remarkable account to my attention.

The Bioscope

Source: ‘The Bioscope’, postcard, stamped Dover 21 August 1904, identified on reverse side as ‘4271 – London, after dark’, Luke McKernan collection

bioscope_posctard

bioscope_postcard_reverse

Comments: This is an unusual example of a cinema-related postcard where the message on the back makes reference to the image on the front. The writer says, “This one is rather amusing I think Don’t you. They are quite the latest style here. Some of them are quite shocking.” The postcard show the audience at the screening of films in a variety theatre. A lecturer points out the image (mistakenly shown as a circle after magic lantern practice) and an orchestra plays while the audience reveal what they are saying to one another in the safety of the dark. The messages include “Kiss me quick, this is the last picture”, “Put your foot on mine, ducky” and “Remember I’m a married man”. The Bioscope was the name of a projector that became a generic name for early film shows. Though the postcard is meant to represent London the writer notes that such film shows are popular in Dover, so this entry has been classified under both places.

Stately pleasure-domes

Source: Steve Woolley, contribution to David Thomson, ‘Stately pleasure-domes: The first cinema opened 100 years ago (arguably)’, The Independent, 17 April 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film–stately-pleasuredomes-the-first-cinema-opened-100-years-ago-arguably-david-thomson-shows-you-to-your-seat-while-other-film-fans-name-their-favourite-picture-palaces-1370670.html

Text: I was fortunate to grow up in Islington when most of the cinemas were still running. I was mad about films. I’d go to the Odeon Angel and the Rex, which is now the Screen on the Green. My dad or uncles would take me to the ABC in the evenings. I became highly attuned to audiences and the environment a film was shown in. I rate it as highly as the movie itself. If you see Performance, as I did, at three in the morning at the Classic in Victoria, it’s not the same as seeing it on the box. It was one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and coming out and walking from Victoria to Notting Hill Gate afterwards was extraordinary.

There are no character cinemas in London now. Places like the Biograph in Victoria. It was 28p to get in and a huge gay pick-up. It was great, like watching a film in a Baghdad market. The toilet door kept crashing into you. They showed films like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Then there was the Starlight, which just showed Thirties and Forties doubles. They used to serve cucumber sandwiches with the corners cut off – I’d never had them before.

At the Scala I strove to create an atmosphere, because that’s how I saw films when I was young. People say the Scala wasn’t great because not all the seats worked and the trains ran underneath, but who else would show Kenneth Anger films, or do proper late shows? It’s because of videos. People don’t seem to get it any more, they don’t want to see a film on a big screen. There was hardly a ripple when the Scala closed. It’s kind of sad.

The Screen on the Green has a really big place in my heart. I remember it as the Rex, a fleapit. I was forbidden by my parents to go there. Working as an usher there in 1976 was definitely the most exciting time. We put the Sex Pistols on – it was the summer of punk. And there were all-night Marx Brothers films. It would show Duck Soup at four in the morning. The first weekend I worked there the double bill was Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘I’m being paid to watch these films three nights a week, I must be the luckiest person alive’.

There was an atmosphere in London then rivalling France and New York – movies were suddenly hip. I was going to the cinema on my own, thinking I was mad. As I was about to enter my twenties, I realised that all these other people were obsessed too. It was a great time. It was pre-Channel 4 and before BBC 2 got its act together. You really had to search the films out.

Comments: Steve Woolley (born 1956) is a British film producer, who was programmer at The Screen on the Green in Islington, London and managed the Scala at King’s Cross, London, before establishing Palace Video and then moving into film production (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game etc). This is one of a series of memories of favourite cinemas published in an article to mark the centenary of film exhibition (in the USA).

Kinomatograph in Paris

Source: Max Brod, extracts from ‘Kinomatograph in Paris’, Der Merker vol. 3 no. 1 (February 1912): pp. 95-98, reproduced in part in Hanns Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 47-51, translation by Susan H. Gillespie

Text: On the very evening that we had set aside as a night off, after so many nocturnal exertions, for a modest meal in the four walls of our hotel and early to bed, we chanced upon a doorway on the boulevard, decked out with little electric light bulbs and a not exactly energetic barker, whose cap, however, bore a title that attracted us more magically than all his words could have. Omnia Pathé … So here we are stood at the source of so many of our enjoyments, once more at the center of a business whose rays shone so powerfully over the whole world that one would almost rather not believe in the existence of a center – a feeling, by the way, that was typical for our Parisian mood; for powerful central firms, (like Pneu Michelin, Douçet, Roger Gallet, Clement Bayard, etc.) besiege the heart of the newcomer with surprising force. We again dispensed with the night off (damned city!) and went in.

It is hard for one darkened hall to differentiate itself from other darkened halls. But for us, who are always firmly set on finding in everything Parisian something special and better than anyplace else, we are soon struck by the spaciousness – no, that’s not it yet – then, that people are disappearing through a dark doorway in the background and a cool draft seems to regulate this continuous movement of the audience – no, that’s how it is at home, too, uninterrupted showings, an entrance and an exit door – but now we feel we are on firmer ground. This freedom of people to be able to position themselves anywhere there is room, even in the aisle between the rows of benches, even on the ramp next to the apparatus, is something decidedly republican, any police force other than the Parisian police would not approve of it. Equally republican, we must admit, is the freedom of the many columns in the hall to be allowed to disturb the audience’s view in whatever way they please …

A girl in the uniform of a soldier in an operetta, on the cap, this time, the ambiguous inscription “Omnia,” accompanies us to our seats, sells us an (according to good Parisian custom, inexact) program. And already we are under the spell of the blindingly white, trembling screen in front of us. We nudge each other. “Say, the show is better here than at home.” Naturally, after all, in Paris everything has to be better.

[Brod describes some of the film programme, including travel films]

We saw, indeed we saw a great deal – by analogy to the Comédie, which puts eight acts on stage almost without intermission. We saw the doctor visit the poor sick child and turn around melodramatically several times in the doorway, with a distinctly pitying expression. We saw the mercifulness of some English king or other, hand-colored, sandwiched between some theatrical armor and a ruin (which had been created from a burned-out suburban cottage), enjoying life.

[…]

At the end , after the usual revolver shots, chases, fisticuffs, came the news. Naturally she was not absent – the one you now see on all the advertisements, candy boxes, and postcards in Paris: Mona Lisa. The picture opened with the presentation of M. Croumolle (everyone knows that it means “Homolle,” and no one protests against the perfidious way they are going after the gray-haired Delphi scholar). Croumolle is lying in bed, his stocking cap pulled down over his ears, and is startled out of sleep by a telegram: “Mona Lisa Stolen.” Croumolle – the Delphi scholar, if you please, but I am not protesting, I was laughing so hard – dresses himself with clownlike agility, now he puts both feet into one leg of his pants; now one foot into two socks. In the end, he runs into the street with his suspenders trailing, all the bystanders turn around to look at him, even those who are far in the background and evidently not in the pay of Pathé … It is a longing that ever since the emergence of the cinema lives on in me with the force of my early childhood wishes – I would like just once, by chance, to turn a street corner where such a staged cinematographic scene is taking place. What wouldn’t it be possible to improvise there! And in any case, what a sight! But to continue. The story is set in the hall of the Louvre, everything excellently imitated, the paintings and, in the middle, the three nails on which the Mona Lisa is hung. Horror; summoning of a comical detective; a shoe button of Croumolle’s as red herring; the detective as shoeshine boy; chase through the cafés of Paris; passers-by forced to have their shoes shined; arrest of the unfortunate Croumolle, for the button that was found at the scene naturally matches his shoe buttons. And now the final gag – while everyone is running through the hall at the Louvre and acting sensational, the thief sneaks in, the Mona Lisa under his arm, hangs her back where she belongs, and takes Velázquez’s Princess instead. No one notices him. Suddenly someone sees the Mona Lisa; general astonishment, and a note in one corner of the rediscovered painting that says, “Pardon me, I am nearsighted. I actually wanted to have the painting next to it.” … Croumolle, poor man, is released.

[…]

Then, in addition, the Journal Pathé. And so that everything quite resembles a newspaper, the title page and “Year III” are solemnly projected beforehand. We see demonstrations against inflation in France, which look like they have been arranged by Pathé; everyone is grinning in the direction of the audience. …

Comments: Max Brod (1884-1968) was a Czech author, best known as the friend and literary executor of Franz Kafka. His essay ‘Kinomatograph in Paris’ describes a visit to the Omnia Pathé cinema in Paris made by Brod and Kafka on 10 September 1911. The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre on 21 August 1911. The Pathé film company rapidly issued Nick Winter et le vol de la Joconde (Nick Winter and the Theft of the Mona Lisa) the following month, as a title in its ‘Nick Winter’ detective series. Théophile Homolle (parodied in the film as Croumolle) was the director of the Louvre. Brod and Kafka had visited the Louvre the day before to witness the scene of the crime. The painting was recovered in 1913. The Omnia Pathé luxury cinema was the first cinema in the Pathé circuit to be in opened in Paris, in 1906.

Links: Copy of full original article (in German) at Hathi Trust

Cinema Screen

Source: A.S.J. Tessimond, ‘Cinema Screen’, The Walls of Glass (London: Methuen, 1934), reproduced in Hubert Nicholson (ed.), A.S.J. Tessimond: Collected Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), p. 16

Text: Light’s patterns freeze:
Frost on our faces.
Light’s pollen sifts
Through the lids of our eyes …

Light sinks and rusts
In water; is broken
By glass … rests
On deserted dust.

Light lies like torn
Paper in corners:
A rock-pool’s pledge
Of the sea’s return.

Light, wrenched at the edges
By wind, looks down
At itself in wrinkled
Mirrors from bridges.

Light thinly unweaves
Itself through darkness
Like foam’s unknotting
Strings in waves …

Now light is again
Accumulated
Swords against us …
Now it is gone.

Comments: Arthur Seymour John Tessimond (1902-1962) was a British poet, influenced by the Imagists, who frequently wrote about city life and on several occasions about cinema. Another poem of his that is close in ideas and imagery to this is ‘Silent Cinema‘, p. 110 of the Collected Poems.

Musical Accompaniment

Source: Dorothy Richardson, extract from ‘Continuous Performance II: Musical Accompaniment’, Close Up vol. I no. 2, August 1927, reproduced in James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds.), Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 162-163

Text: Our first musician was a pianist who sat in the gloom beyond the barrier and played without notes. His playing was a continuous improvisation varying in tone and tempo according to what was going forward on the screen. During the earlier part of the evening he would sometimes sing. He would sing to the sailing by of French chateaux, sotto voce, in harmony with the gently flowing undertone that moved so easily from major to minor and from key to key. His singing seemed what probably it was, a spontaneous meditative appreciation of things seen. For the Gazette he had martial airs, waltzes for aeroplanes. Jigs accompanied the comic interludes and devour low-toned nocturnes the newest creations of fashion. For drama he usually had a leitmotif, borrowed or invented, set within his pattern of sound moving suitably from pianissimo to fortissimo. He could time a passage to culminate and break punctually on a staccato chord at a crisis. This is a crude example of his talent for spontaneous adaptation. As long as he remained with us music and picture were one. If the film were good he enhanced it, heightened its effect of action moving forward for the first time. If it were anything from bad to worst his music helped the onlooker to escape into incidentals and thence into his private world of meditation or of thought.

The little palace prospered and the management grew ambitious. Monthly programmes were issued, refreshments were cried up and down the gangways and perfumed disinfectants squirted ostentatiously over the empty spaces. The pianist vanished and the musical accompaniment became a miniature orchestra, conspicuous in dress clothes and with lights and music stands and scores between the audience and the screen, playing set pieces, for each scene a piece. At each change of scene one tune would give place to another, in a different key, usually by means of a tangle of discords. The total result of these efforts towards improvement was a destruction of the relationship between onlookers and film. With the old unity gone the audience grew disorderly. Talking increased. Prosperity waned. Much advertisement of ‘west-end successes’ pulled things together for a while during which the management aimed still higher. An evening came when in place of the limping duet of violin and piano, several instruments held together by some kind of conducting produced sprightly and harmonious effects. At half-time the screen was curtained leaving the musician’s pit in a semi-darkness where presently wavered a green spot-light that came to rest upon the figure of a handsome young Jew dramatically fronting the audience with violin poised for action. Fireworks. Applause. After which the performance was allowed to proceed. Within a month the attendance was reduced to a scattered few and in due course the hall was ‘closed for decorations’, to reopen some months later ‘under entirely new management’, undecorated and with the old pianist restored to his place. The audience drifted back.

But during the interregnum, and whilst concerted musical efforts were doing their worst, an incident occurred that convinced me that any kind of musical noise is better than none. Our orchestra failed to appear and the pictures moved silently by, life less and colourless, to the sound of intermittent talking and the continuous faint hiss and creak of the apparatus. The result seemed to justify the curses of the most ardent enemies of the cinema and I understood at last what they mean who declare that dramatic action in photograph is obscene because it makes no personal demand upon the onlooker. It occurred to me to wonder how man of these enemies are persons indifferent to music and those to whom music of any kind is a positive nuisance …

Comments: Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) was a British modernist novelist. Through 1927-1933 she wrote a column, ‘Continuous Performance’ for the film art journal Close Up. The column concentrates on film audiences rather than the films themselves.

Spain was indeed different

Source: Christopher Clark, contributed by the author.

Text: During the 1960s I often used to spend summer holidays with the Nadal family in Cadaques. My father and Angel Nadal collaborated at the time on the Buster comic strip: Dad wrote the storyboard and dialogue and posted the sketches to Angel who applied the artwork at a desk on the balcony of his apartment, fishing rod to hand. His eldest children, David and Ana were a little younger than me and had a large circle of friends whose families typically resided in Gerona or Barcelona for most of the year but escaped to the Costa Brava villages during the summer months. Talk between us kids was mostly about pop, heard intermittently over the radio: I taught them ‘A hard day’s night’ and the English words to ‘Amarillo el submarino es’ (Yellow Submarine). But we also talked about cinema.

General Franco and the Church ensured that censorship remained tight. The Spanish children could sense that things were different and more exciting across the Pyrenees. A few years later this translated into queues at the border to see ‘Love Story’ while it was being shown in Perpignan. I was quizzed about the supposedly lurid details and caused them immense disappointment, and even more surprise, when I told them I hadn’t seen it and was not inclined to do so either.

Cadaques is a very special place, isolated for decades by the surrounding mountains from the interior. Artists loved it: Dali had a house in neighbouring Port Lligat. Film makers loved it too and I remember witnessing a scene being shot that I was told included James Mason, though I only saw the large car that brought him there. Social life revolved around the beaches during the day and the bars and casino during the evening: dancing sardanas on Sundays. Children largely made their own entertainment, fishing, playing games of tag or going on late afternoon hikes up the mountain. Spanish TV in the 60s was uniformly dreadful, replete with overdubbed American and British movies from previous decades.

So I was surprised one evening (in 1966 or 1968) when David and Ana said we were going to the cinema. They didn’t say which film: I was just curious about where the cinema might be. I have failed to remember exactly where it was but it was close to the imposing church and may have been in the church hall. The noise was unbelievable as we went in: a bare room, concrete floor and metal-legged chairs scraping or falling by the dozen as throngs of kids (I don’t recall seeing many adults present) joked, poked and generally misbehaved at the tops of their voices – illegally in Catalan. As soon as the lights were turned off and the projector warmed up the noise level dropped but then the fingers and occasional head silhouettes started to appear on the blank screen and the hubbub resumed.

The film was Las Minas del Rey Salomon (King Solomon’s Mines, 1950) with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. I’d pretended to read the book at school so didn’t really know the story but was cross that the Spanish couldn’t get the King’s name right.

About ten minutes into the film the audience noise had subsided enough to be able to hear the dialogue, breathlessly dubbed in Spanish. Then the projector broke down, which it was prone to do regularly during that screening. The light went back on, the shouting and yelling resumed, this time levelled at the hapless projectionist.

I honestly cannot remember a single scene from that film: all I can bring to mind is the audience behaviour and the sonorous bareness of the venue. That was the only time I went to the cinema in Cadaques.

Several years later, just before and while studying Spanish at university, I went to several cinemas in Barcelona. The cinemas in central Barcelona were then, as you’d expect in a cosmopolitan centre, high class establishments and the experience was similar to an evening out in London or Paris. But out in the suburbs the experience could be closer to that evening in Cadaques. People came in and went out of the cinema when they felt like it: our group of about six lads arrived late for El Graduado (extensively cut, I later realised) and so we sat through part of the next showing to catch the opening scenes we’d missed. I decided I needed to see it again so took the bus down the hill to a small cinema next to Plaza Lesseps, which was more bar than cinema. The film was shown in two parts, so after more booze the audience was even more prone to participate during the second part than in the first. I had to wait a couple more years before I could see it properly, in the original, uncut version, on the telly back home.

Comments: Christopher Clark (born 1952) is a musician and former sound archivist at the British Library. His father was cartoonist and film animator Ron ‘Nobby’ Clark. He adds: “I’ve always enjoyed going to the cinema, ever since my Dad took me to the cartoons at Victoria Station to fill in time before our train departed. I knew from matinees in my home town of Horsham that a cinema full of kids was prone to occasional disturbances but in all my childhood years of half-term Disney first releases and westerns I can’t remember any noise above the occasional rustle of sweet papers intruding on the film’s progress. Spain was indeed different.” The films mentioned are Love Story (USA 1970), King’s Solomon’s Mines (USA 1950) and The Graduate (USA 1967).

Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue

Source: Laura Lee Hope, extract from Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1916)

bunnybrownText: Just beyond the corner there was a moving picture theatre, lately opened. Mrs. Brown and Aunt Lu had taken Bunny and his sister there once or twice, when there was a fairy play, or something nice to see, so Bunny and Sue knew what the moving pictures were like.

“Oh, let’s just go down and look at the picture posters outside,” said Bunny, as they stood on the corner, from where they could see the theatre.

“All right,” said Sue quickly.

In front of the moving picture place were some big boards, and on them were pasted brightly colored posters, almost like circus ones, telling about the moving pictures that were being shown inside. There was a picture of a man falling in the water, and another of a railroad train. Bunny loved cars and locomotives.

Not thinking anything wrong, the two tots ran across the street, looking carefully up and down first, to see that no automobiles were coming. They crossed safely.

A little later they were standing in front of the moving picture theatre, looking at the gay posters.

“Wouldn’t you like to go in?” asked Bunny.

Sue nodded her curly head.

“Maybe Aunt Lu will take us,” she said.

“We’ll ask her,” decided Bunny.

Then they heard, from down the side street, the sound of a piano. It came from the moving picture place, and the reason Bunny and Sue could hear it so plainly was because the piano was near a side door, which was open to let in the fresh air.

“Let’s go down there and listen to the music a minute,” Bunny said. “Then we’ll go back and tell Aunt Lu.”

“All right!” agreed Sue.

A little later the two were standing at the open, side door of the place. They could hear the piano very plainly now, and, what was more wonderful, they could look right in the theatre and see the moving pictures flashing on the white screen.

“Oh! oh!” murmured Bunny. “Look, Sue.”

“Oh! oh!” whispered Sue. And then Bunny had a queer idea.

“We can walk right in,” he said. “The door is open. I guess this is for children like us – they don’t want any money. Come on in, Sue, and we’ll see the moving pictures!”

Bunny Brown and his sister Sue walked right into the moving picture theatre. The door, as I have told you, was open, there was no one standing near to take tickets, or ask for money, and of course the children thought it was all right to go in.

No one seemed to notice them, perhaps because the place was dark, except where the brilliant pictures were dancing and flashing on the white screen. And no one heard Bunny and Sue, for not only did they walk very softly, but just then the girl at the piano was playing loudly, and the sound filled the place.

Right in through the open side door walked Bunny and Sue, and never for a moment did they think they were doing anything wrong. I suppose, after all, it was not very wrong.

Bunny walked ahead, and Sue followed, keeping hold of his hand. Pretty soon she whispered to her brother:

“Bunny! Bunny! I can’t see very good at all here. I want to see the pictures better.”

“All right,” Bunny whispered back. “I can’t see very good, either. We’ll find a better place.”

You know you can’t look at moving pictures from the side, they all seem to be twisted if you do. You must be almost in front of them, and this time Bunny and Sue were very much to one edge.

“We’ll get up real close, and right in front,” Bunny went on. Then he saw a little pair of steps leading up to the stage, or platform; only Bunny did not know it was that. He just thought if he and Sue went up the steps they would be better able to see. So up he went.

The screen, or big white sheet, on which the moving pictures were shown, stood back some distance from the front of the stage. And it was a real stage, with footlights and all, but it was not used for acting any more, as only moving pictures were given in that theatre now.

Sue followed Bunny up the steps. The pictures were ever so much clearer and larger now. She was quite delighted, and so was her brother. They wandered out to the middle of the stage, paying no attention to the audience. And the people in the theatre were so interested in the picture on the screen, that, for a while, they did not see the children who had wandered into the darkened theatre by the side door.

The music from the piano sounded louder and louder. The pictures became more brilliant. Then suddenly Bunny and Sue walked right out on the stage in front of the screen, where the light from the moving picture lantern shone brightly on them.

“What’s that?” cried several persons.

“Look! Why they’re real children!” said others.

Bunny and Sue could be plainly seen now, for they were exactly in the path of the strong light. There was some laughter in the audience, and then the man who was turning the crank of the moving picture machine began to understand that something was wrong.

He stopped the picture film, and turned on a plain, white light, very strong and glaring, Just like the headlights of an automobile. Bunny and Sue could hardly see, and they looked like two black shadows on the white screen.

“Look! Look! It’s part of the show!” said some persons in front.

“Maybe they’re going to sing,” said others.

“Or do a little act.”

“Oh, aren’t they cute!” laughed a lady.

By this time the piano player had stopped making music. She knew that something was wrong. So did the moving picture man up in his little iron box, and so did the usher – that’s the man who shows you where to find a seat. The usher came hurrying down the aisle.

“Hello, youngsters!” he called out, but he was not in the least bit cross. “Where did you get in?” he asked.

By this time the lights all over the place had been turned up, and Bunny and Sue could see the crowd, while the audience could also see them. Bunny blinked and smiled, but Sue was bashful, and tried to hide behind her brother. This made the people laugh still more.

“How did you get in, and who is with you?” asked the usher.

“We walked in the door over there,” and Bunny pointed to the side one. “And we came all alone. We’re waiting for Aunt Lu.”

“Oh, then she is coming?”

“I don’t guess so,” Bunny said. “We didn’t tell her we were coming here.”

“Well, well!” exclaimed the usher-man. “What does it all mean? Did your Aunt Lu send you on ahead? We don’t let little children in here unless some older person is with them, but -”

“We just comed in,” Sue said. “The door was open, and we wanted to see the pictures, so we comed in; didn’t we Bunny?”

“Yes,” he said. “But we’d like to sit down. We can’t see good up here.”

“No, you are a little too close to the screen,” said the usher. “Well, I’d send you home if I knew where you lived, but–”

“I know them!” called out a woman near the front of the theatre. “That is Bunny Brown and his sister Sue. They live just up the street. I’ll take them home.”

“Thank you; that’s very kind of you,” said the man. “I guess their folks must be worrying about them. Please take them home.”

“We don’t want to go home!” exclaimed Sue. “We want to see the pictures; don’t we, Bunny?”

“Yes,” answered the little fellow, “but maybe we’d better go and get Aunt Lu.”

“I think so myself,” laughed the usher. “You can come some other time, youngsters. But bring your aunt, or your mother, with you; and don’t come in the side door. I’ll have to keep some one there, if it’s going to be open, or I’ll have more tots walking in without paying.”

“Come the next time, with your aunt or mother,” he went on, “and I’ll give you free tickets. It won’t cost you even a penny!”

“Oh, goodie!” cried Sue. She was willing to go home now, and the lady who said she knew them – who was a Mrs. Wakefield, and lived not far from the Brown home – took Bunny and Sue by the hands and led them out of the theatre.

The lights were turned low again, and the moving picture show went on. Bunny and Sue wished they could have stayed, but they were glad they could come again, as the man had invited them.

Comments: Laura Lee Hope was a pseudonym used by American book publisher the Stratemeyer Syndicate to produce books for children, including Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue. The latter series, aimed at young children, was published 1916-1930.

Links: Copy on Project Gutenberg

Seats in All Parts

Source: Leslie Halliwell, Seats in All Parts (London: Granada, 1985), pp. 54-56

Text: … the Lido in Bradshawgate, as unprepossessing an unVenetian a building as could be imagined despite its gondola-filled proscenium frieze. Financed by a small Salford-based circuit, it was little more than a cheap shell. The foyer was bare and cramped, and the centre stalls exists were by crash doors which opened from the auditorium straight out into the side alleys, sometimes drenching the adjacent customers in rain or snow.

But we were unaware of such inconveniences on the Saturday in 1937 when we queued for the gala opening. For some reason the attraction chosen for that one night only was a revival of Jessie Matthews in Evergreen, very welcome but quite uneventful, since we had previously seen it at the Hippodrome. The place nevertheless was mobbed, and we found ourselves in a low point of the front stalls from which it was difficult for me to see more than the top half of the screen over the heads of the people in front. I was comforted, however, by a handful of sample packets of a confectionery, then new, called Maltesers: the usherettes were practically throwing them at everyone who came in, and I grabbed as many as I could from the tray on the way to my seat.

We went again on Monday to see the Lido’s first première, which was Song of Freedom, staring Paul Robeson. It was enjoyable enough while the star held sway, and I responded to his voice as to no one else’s since Al Jolson, who seemed unaccountably to have retired from the screen; but by now we had discovered two of the Lido’s failings. The first was its long, long intervals for ice cream sales, drastically curtailing the supporting programme we expected; the second was an even longer non-attraction called Younger’s Shoppers’ Gazette, a compilation of crude advertising filmlets (I once counted twenty-eight on the one reel). This was certainly not value for money, especially since the Lido was also the proud possessor of a Christie organ, and the interlude for this could stretch the gap between solid celluloid items to as much as thirty-five minutes. Though it had the advantage of a phantom piano attachment, the Lido organ did not rise from the orchestra pit as we expected, nor did it change colour as it came. From some of the side seats you could see it waiting in the wings throughout the performance, and since the main curtain hung slightly short, front stalls patrons could count the feet of the men who pushed it on stage at the appropriate moment. This musical marvel was operated by one Reginald Liversidge, an eager-to-please young man with a gleaming smile and a fine head of skin; his natty tailcoat and graceful manners probably endeared him to the matrons, but not to me. So far as I was concerned, his slide-accompanied concerts of ‘Tchaikovskiana’ were just one more nail in the coffin of a disappointing venue in which I had expected to spend many delightful evenings.

And so I was not impelled, in the years before the 1939 war, to visit the Lido very often. Its schedulers did not have the booking power of the established cinemas, and certainly not of the new Odeon which was to menace them all. It was too often to take the cheapest programme available, and I was happiest when it settled for a re-issue. One such attraction was the 1931 Fredric March version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which my mother wanted to see again, having been impressed by it when I was still in swaddling clothes. It was my first experience, in our well-behaved town, of an audience cat-calling and rough-housing during a performance. Mum said comfortingly that they only did it to prove they were not scared by Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde; I was, but tried not to show it, my fear being tempered by a burning desire to wear, when I grew up, a dress cape, cane and top hat just like Mr March’s. I realize now that this superbly crafted film, by far the best version of the story, is not only horrifying but surprisingly one-track-minded in the matter of sex, and therefore not at all a suitable entertainment for a boy of tender years; nonetheless what I most remember from that long-ago evening is how lustrous and dramatic it was to look at. Mum anxiously watched my reactions to the shock moments and, since I showed no ill effects, took me along a few weeks later to see the Lido’s ‘double thrill bill’ consisting of re-issues of The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man. This time, to our astonishment, we were forestalled by the burly commissionaire in the second-hand uniform, who informed us between pursed lips that Children were no Admitted. My mother pointed out that both films had ‘A’ certificates, not ‘H’, and that she regularly took me to ‘A’ pictures, but argument proved useless, and we could only conclude that this was an entirely unofficial rule drawn up by the management either for the public good or (more likely) to drum up business during a dull week. Adamant, the commissionaire repeatedly tapped a hanging notice on which the words ADULTS ONLY had been inscribed in shaky green lettering. Although, he assured us confidentially, he had seen both pictures and wouldn’t give you that (he snapped his fingers) for their horror content, he was powerless to help us, and could only suggest that we went round the corner to the Theatre Royal where Old Mother Riley was showing. His sister had described it as a real good laugh. Disconsolately, we took his advice; but I don’t remember laughing much: the rather primitively filmed knockabout failed to capture the instinctive zest of Lucan and MacShane’s crockery-smashing stage act which I had seen at the Grand on one recent Saturday night.

Comments: Leslie Halliwell (1929-1989) was a film historian and programme buyer for ITV and Channel 4. Seats in All Parts is his memoir of cinemagoing, including his Bolton childhood. ‘A’ certificates were introduced in 1912 and stood for ‘Adult’; from 1923 a child attending an ‘A’ film had to be accompanied by an adult. ‘H’ certificates, for Horror, were introduced by the British Board of Film Censors in 1932, to be replaced by the X certificate in 1951. The Lido cinema opened in March 1997 and closed in 1998, by which time it was called the Cannon Cinema. The site is now occupied by a block of flats. The films recalled by Halliwell are Evergreen (UK 1934), Song of Freedom (UK 1936), The Old Dark House (USA 1932), The Invisible Man (USA 1933) and Old Mother Riley (UK 1937). Younger’s Shopper’s Gazette was produced by Younger Publicity Service and ran from the 1920s to the 1940s. An example can be seen on the website of the Media Archive for Central England.