Let’s go to the Pictures
08.11.2011, 11:23
‘It took me almost an hour to climb the hill into town to see a film at one of our tiny halls - but walk I did... because going to the pictures was an event in itself.’ Ruskin Bond reminisces on the good old days.
Hotel Budapest
My love affair with the Cinema began when I was five and ended when I was about fifty. Not because I wanted it to, but because all my favourite cinema halls were closing down - being turned into shopping malls or garages or just disappearing altogether.
There was something magical about sitting in a darkened cinema hall, the audience silent, completely focused in the drama unfolding on the big screen. You could escape to a different world - run away to Dover with David Copperfield, sail away to a treasure island with Long John Silver, dance the light fantastic with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, sing with Saigal or Deanna Durbin or Nelson Eddy, fall in love with Madhubala or Elizabeth Taylor. And until the lights came on at the end of the show you were in their world, far removed from the trouble of one's childhood or the struggle of early manhood.
Watching films on TV cannot be the same. People come and go, the power comes and goes, other viewers keep switching the channels, food is continually being served or consumed, family squabbles are ever present, and there is no escape from those dreaded commercials that are repeated every ten or fifteen minutes or even between overs if you happen to watching be watching cricket.
No longer do we hear that evocative suggestion, "Let’s go to the pictures!"
Living in a small town where there are no longer any functioning cinemas, the invitation is heard no more. I’m afraid there isn’t half as much excitement in the words, "Let’s put on the TV!"
For one thing, going to the pictures meant going out on foot, or on a bicycle, or in the family car. When I lived on the outskirts of Mussoorie it took me almost an hour to climb the hill into town to see a film at one of our tiny halls - but walk I did, in hot sun or drenching rain to icy wind, because going to the pictures was an event in itself, a break from more mundane activities, quite often a social occasion. You would meet friends from other parts of the town, and after the show you would join them in a cafe for a cup of tea and the latest gossip. A stroll along the Mall and a visit to the local bookshops would bring the evening to a satisfying end. A long walk home under the stars, a drink before dinner, something to listen to on the radio... 'And then to bed,' as Mr Pepys would have said.
Not that everything went smoothly in our small-town cinemas. In Shimla, Mussoorie and other hill stations, the roofs were of corrugated tin sheets, and when there was heavy rain or a hailstorm it would be impossible to hear the sound track.
You had then to imagine that you were back in the silent-film era. Mussoorie’s oldest cinema, the Picture Palace, did in fact open early in the silent era. This was in 1912; the year electricity came to the town. Later, its basement floor was also turned into a cinema, the Jubilee, which probably made it India’s first multiplex hall. Sadly, both closed down about five years ago, along with the Rialto, the Majestic and the Capitol (below Hakman’s Hotel).
In Shimla, we had the Ritz, the Regal and the Rivoli. This was when I was a schoolboy at Bishop Cotton’s. How we used to look forward to our summer and autumn breaks. We would be allowed into town during these holidays, and we lost no time in tramping up to the Ridge to take in the latest films. Sometimes we’d arrive wet or perspiring, but the changeable weather did not prevent us from enjoying the film. One and half hours of escape from the routine and discipline of boarding-school life. Fast foods had yet to be invented, but roasted peanuts or bhuttas would keep us going. They were cheap too. The cinema ticket was just over a rupee. If you had five rupees in your pocket you could enjoy a pleasant few hours in town.
It was during the winter holidays - three months of time on my hands - that I really caught up with the films of the day.
New Delhi, the winter of 1943. World War II was still in progress. The halls were flooded with British and American movies. My father would return from Air Headquarters, where he'd been working on cyphers all day. “Let’s go to the pictures,” he’d say, and we’d be off to the Regal or Rivoli, or Odeon or Plaza, only a short walk from our flat on Atul Grove.
Comedies were my favourites, Laural and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, George Formby, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers. And sometime we’d venture further afield, to the old Ritz at Kashmere Gate, to see Sabu in the Thief of Baghdad, or Cobra Woman. These Arabian Nights-type entertainments were popular in the old city.
The Statesman, the premier newspaper of that era, ran ads for all the films in town, and I'd cut them out and stuck them in a scrapbook. I could rattle off the cast of all the pictures I’d seen, and today, sixty years later, I can still name all the actors (and sometimes the director) of almost every 1940s film. My father died when I was ten and I went to live with my mother and stepfather in Dehra Dun. Dehra, too, was well served with Cinemas, but I was a lonely picturegoer. I had no friends or companions in those years, and I would trudge off on my own to the Orient or Odeon or Hollywood, to indulge in a few hours of escapism. Books were there, of course, providing another and better form of escape, but books had to be read in the home, and sometimes I wanted to get away from the home and pursue a solitary other-life in the anonymous privacy of a darkened cinema hall.
It has gone now, the little Odeon Cinema opposite the old Parade ground in Dehra. Many of my age, and younger, will remember it with affection, for it was probably the most popular meeting place for English Cinema buffs in the '40s and '50s. You could get a good idea of the popularity of a film by looking at the number of bicycles ranges outside. Dehra was a bicycle town.The scooter hadn’t been invented, and cars were few. I belonged to a minority of walkers. I have walked all over the towns and cities I have lived in - Dehradun, new and old Delhi, London, St. Helier (in Jersey), and our hill-stations. Those walks often ended at the cinema! The Odeon was a twenty-minute walk from the Old Survey Road, where we lived at the time, and after the evening show I would walk home across the deserted parade ground, the starry-night adding to my dreams of a starry world where tap-dancers, singing cowboys, swash buckling swordsmen and glamorous women in sarongs reigned supreme in the firmament. I wasn’t just a daydreamer, I was a star dreamer.
During the intervals (five minute breaks between the shorts and the main feature), the projectionist or his assistant would play a couple of gramophone records for the benefit of the audience. Unfortunately the management had only two or three records, and the audience would grow restless listening to the same tunes at every show. I must have been compelled to listen to Don’t Fence Me In about a hundred times, and felt thoroughly fenced in.
At home I had a good collection of gramophone records, passed onto me by relatives and neighbours who were leaving India around the time of Independence. I decided it would be a good idea to give some of them to the cinema's management so that we could be provided with a little more variety during the intervals. So I made a selection of about twenty records - mostly dance-music of the period - and presented them to the manager, Mr Suri.
Mr Suri was delighted. And to show me his gratitude, he presented me with a Free Pass which permitted me to see all the pictures I liked without having to buy a ticket! Any day, any show, for as long as Mr Suri was the manager! Could any ardent picturegoer have asked for more? This unexpected bonanza lasted for almost two years, with the result that during my school holidays I saw a film every second day. Two days was the average run for most films. Except Gone with the Wind which ran for a week, to my great chagrin.I found it so boring that I left in the middle.
Usually I did enjoy films based on famous or familiar books. Dickens was a natural for the screen. Copperfield. Oliver Twist. Great Expectations. Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, Pickwick, A Christmas Carol (Scrooge), all made successful films, true to the original. Daphne de Maurier's novels also transferred well to the screen. As did Somerset Maugham's works: Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge. The Letter, Rain, and several others.
Occasionally, I brought the management a change of records. Mr Suri was not a very communicative man, but I think he liked me (he knew something about my circumstances) and with a smile and a wave of the hand he would indicate that the freedom of the hall was mine.
Eventually, school finished, I was packed off to England, where my picture-going days went into a slight decline. No Free Passes any more. But on Jersey Island, where I lived and worked for a year, I found an out-of-the-way cinema which specialized in showing old comedies, and here I caught up with many British film comedians such as Tommy Trinder, Sidney Howard, Max Miller, Will Hay, Old Mother Riley (a man, in reality) and Gracie Fields.
These artists had been but names to me, as their films hadnever come to India. I was thrilled to be able to discover and enjoy their considerable talents. You would be hard put to find their films today; they have seldom been revived.
In London for two years I had an office job, and most of my spare time was spent in writing (and rewriting) my first novel. All the same, I took to the streets and discovered the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, which showed old classics, including the films of Jean Renior and Orson Welles. And the Academy in Leicester Square, which showed the best films from the Continent. I also discovered a couple of seedy little cinemas in the East End, which appropriately showed the early gangster films of James Cagney and Humphery Bogart. I also saw the first Indian film to get a regular screening in London. It was called Aan, and was the usual extravagant mix of music and melodrama. But it ran for two or three weeks. Homesick Indians (which included me) flocked to see it. One of its stars was Nadira, who specialized in playing the scheming, sultry vamp. A few years ago she came out of retirement to take the part of Miss Mackenzie in a TV serial based on some of my short stories. A sympathetic role for a change. And she played it to perfection.
It was four years before I saw Dehra. Mr Suri had gone elsewhere. The little cinema had closed down and was about to be demolished, to make way for a hotel and a block of shops.
We must move on, of course. There’s no point in hankering after distant pleasures and lost picture palaces. But there’s no harm in indulging a little nostalgia. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good in the past?
And last year I was reminded of that golden era of the silver screen. I was rummaging around in a kabari shop in one of Dehradun’s bazaars when I came across a pile of 75-rpm records, all looking a little the worse for ever. And on a couple of them I found my name scratched on the labels. Pennies from Heaven was the title of one of the songs. It had certainly saved me a few rupees. That, and the goodwill of Mr Suri, the Odeon’s manager, all those years ago.
I bought the records. Can’t play them now. No wind-up gramophone! But I’m a sentimental fellow and I keep them among my souvenirs as a reminder of the days when I walked home alone across the silent, moonlit parade ground, after the evening show was over.