His Majesty's
The only cinema in South Africa that you could smoke in. It must have been a hectic fire risk. It did eventually burn down, but I suspect the owner Sonny Sixfingers torched the place as an insurance scam.
As Grahamstown was the end of the line of the movie circuit, the reels had been spliced and repaired over and over by the time we saw them, so often movies we’d seen the whole of elsewhere on holiday would have huge gaps left out of them.
Best Movie watched at HM: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. With Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio at their all-time best, it's a movie anchored in that time and place. So funny, sad, and redeeming. I still cry like a schoolgirl at the end, everytime I watch it.
The Odeon
Very run down, very ’40s. I always imagined people there during The War standing to sing God Save the King before the feature started. The chairs were fantastically uncomfortable, stuffed with what felt like high heels and horse hair. Luckily you could bring pillows and duvets, and bunk down for the Tuesday night R5 double feature.
Best Movie watched there: Seeing Clockwork Orange for the first time, stoned. The celluloid kept overheating and catching fire, melting the picture to a mushrooming ball of blinding white. They’d put out the fire, tape up the reel and carry on, until it overheated again. It definitely added a certain something or other to the whole mind-blowing experience.
The cinemas were both mouldy, manky, with lots of surfaces sticky to the touch, but they showed an eclectic mixed bag of the movies we wanted to see - milestones that shaped our burgeoning view of the world - and technicoloured our memories.
3 comments:
Aah, you read my mind. I was thinking last week that you must write about those two beautiful anachronisms. I remember how after His Majestys burned down, that poster for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil just stayed there for months and months.
Loved that smoking balcony in His Majestys.
AH yes. And you'd always see bits of the movie that was supposed to be out of frame. The boom mike, that sort of thing. I remember seeing Waterworld at His Majesty's (was it? or The Odeon I always got them mixed up) Anyway they were going on and on about no land anywhere, water water everywhere and yet there, right on the edge of the screen was land. And lovd those techincolour bunrnouts
I always thought it was very appropriate to watch "Cinema Paridiso" in a movie theatre like the one in the movie. And the film did break down half way.
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