SILVER SCREEN

I suppose it is the duty of parents to nurture and protect, but I sometimes wonder if mine once went a mite too far in attempting to keep me away from some perceived evil. It happened during the latter years of the last War, when I was about ten years' old, the focus of my interest at that particular moment being - and it was something my father and I saw on our regular walks in that area of town - a squat, modest building with steps leading up to front doors and the letters GEM emblazoned across the front. Though I did not know it at the time it was called a cinema, and to my way of thinking it looked interesting. Dad, however, may have thought I was too young for such things.
'What's that?' I asked, pointing. It's a place where they show pictures, he replied, somewhat hesitantly (if I recall the conversation correctly). 'What pictures?' I asked. I'll show you, he said. The doors to the GEM were closed and there was no-one about, so we walked confidently up the steps and stopped in front of a large glass-fronted showcase fixed to the wall, filled with posters and photographs. These pictures, he said.
I looked at them disappointedly, having expected something more. These images, however, seemed of only momentary interest, and so after scanning them quickly we clattered back down the steps and walked towards town, dad no doubt relieved that he needed to invent no further explanations, me hoping that the Mars bar shop might be open.

This parental ruse did not cover things up for long, of course, and it was schoolfriends who finally filled in some of the detail. What is more, they talked knowingly of the Saturday morning children's matinee, available at very cheap rates, where Tarzan and Johnny Mack Brown, Don Watson and the US Navy, Abbot & Costello, Charlie Chaplin and George Formby could be seen and heard along with the latest newsreels.
The earliest film I can actually remember seeing featured Sabu the elephant boy, though the image which even now, 70 years' later, still comes to mind is one of a crashed aeroplane in the jungle which had been undiscovered for so that creepers and exotic vegetation had grown all over it. It was something I seemed to associate with the War. However, the cinema did finally suck me in, and I have been a film fan ever since, placing the silver screen above television and even above live theatre in my entertainment affections.
I was recalling the other day that of the many hundreds of films I must have watched since the scruffy GEM issued its siren call, I have walked out of only two. One was Last Year in Marienbad, which according to my uncomprehending mind was a film of monumental tedium, and other a much more recent thing full of confused images and patterns interspersed with what seemed like brief scenes of 1950s family life.
After about 20 minutes of total bewilderment we quietly picked up our coats and tip-toed back to the silent comfort of the foyer, only to find another ten people standing there. 'Welcome to the club,' someone said with great irony. 'What on earth was that all about?' No-one knew. The cinema manager, hovering nearby, smiled thinly and tried to think of something to say.
But this was a rare cinematic failure, and one I don't begrudge because in the main it has been a wonderful journey with hundreds of nights of fascinating stories along the way. Gone With the Wind all the way to Lincoln, Doris Day to Sandra Bullock, and Clarke Gable to Daniel Day Lewis, they have all worked their magic and fired my imagination.