The golden years of the cinema

While today we enjoy watching blockbusters like Dances With Wolves, Schindler's List, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbour, Gladiator, The Pianist and many others in state-of-the-art cinemas, senior citizens like myself who always enjoyed a good film, cannot forget the golden years when many villages in Malta had their own popular film theatre.

During the 1940s and 1950s, going to the talkies was the number one entertainment for the Maltese family. Film stars were revered like gods and watching a great movie in a packed cinema was the most exhilarating experience of the time.

For the Sunday evening shows at the Embassy or Ambassador, and all leading cinemas for that matter, one had to book early in the week and any such evening was the most satisfying especially if the whole family enjoyed the film together.

I remember with nostalgia the many times my wife and I, and our small children, enjoyed such an outing in Valletta after which we would go for drinks and cake at Bonaci's confectionery.

We would wait impatiently for such biblical and religious spectacles like Joan of Arc, Song of Bernadette, Miracle of Fatima, Marcellino Pane e Vino, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Ben Hur, etc. to start showing in Valletta.

And how can one describe the joy of watching such entertaining musicals like On the Town, Easter Parade, The Wizard of Oz, An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Kiss Me Kate, Annie Get Your Gun and Calamity Jane? Or the excellent thrillers and adventure films such as Captain Blood, Adventures of Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, The Big Sleep, White Heat and, last but not least, the Walt Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi and Pinocchio?

As a boy and until I got married, I used to go frequently to the Melody theatre in Zurrieq, as I come from that southern village. There was another theatre at the time called the Plaza but for us boys who came from Nigret, which forms the upper part of the village, the Melody was our favourite of the two.

There we used to congregate every Sunday afternoon for the regular matinee Roy Rogers or Gene Autrey feature and to exchange lengths of film discarded by the projectionist.

I started recording the names of the films I watch at the cinema when I was a boy and up to now I have seen over 7,000 films (including on TV, videos and DVDs), which include almost all the important films produced during the history of the cinema.

Today, I cannot say I see all the films released in our cinemas as I used to in my prime. Old age can take its toll on many luxuries but I still enjoy as many as I can on TV and DVD.

In those years, almost all filmgoers had their favourite star and would not miss one of his/her films. Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Doris Day, Betty Grable, Esther Williams, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth were some out of thousands of idols who had many Maltese fans.

Many young men used to invade the Melody theatre every evening. They used to go to the place on their bicycles from Safi, Qrendi and Mqabba. During the screening, bicycles and prams were safely kept downstairs.

As boys, we enjoyed collecting various photos of film stars, given away with chewing gum and other sweets. Years before, such picture cards used to be found in cigarette packets. As we grew older, we would start buying the Pictureshow and Picturegoer and, later on, the Photoplay. More serious students went for Films and Filming and Sight and Sound.

The golden years were filled with exciting stories about our beloved film stars found in these magazines. Lon Chaney was born of deaf-mute parents. Leslie Howard's plane was shot down by the Germans during the war after it left Lisbon, thinking that Churchill was on the same plane. Johnny Weismuller, who remains the most identified with the role of Tarzan, broke three swimming records in 1924 at the Olympic games in Paris.

Roy Rogers never kissed on the screen lest he would scandalise his teenager fans! Ingrid Bergman scandalised the world (it must have been a puritanical world) by leaving her husband and daughter for Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

Esther Williams could not dance, sing (she was always dubbed) or act, but she was a pretty good swimmer and the biggest money-making female star after Betty Grable, in 1949 and 1950.

Betty Grable's legs were insured with Lloyds of London for £250,000 (cf. Fred Astaire at £200,000, Marlene Dietrich's at £175,000). Joseph Calleia sang in Maltese in Tough Guy. Oreste (Chircop) starred in The Vagabond King with Kathryn Grayson. Alec Guinness visited Malta to star in Malta Story and Jeffrey Hunter came to film Singlehanded. Other films shot in Malta followed.

For the past 40 years I have lived in Luqa where for many years - until it had to close - I watched pictures at the local Metro theatre, which was a little cosy cinema not far from home.

Two amusing (if you can call them that!) stories which I cannot forget connected with these happy times at the cinema are the following.

At one time my wife and I, with our little daughter, entered the Embassy theatre when the lights were already out. We sat on the first vacant seats we found and soon after our two-year-old girl complained that there was something sticky and smelly where she sat. I took her immediately to the toilet while my wife went to report to the management. The manager promptly came to investigate and soon brought me soap and wash cloth to clean my daughter out of that mess.

He wanted to call a taxi but I said we would manage somehow. We concluded that some other little child must have used that seat as a toilet with her parents leaving the theatre too embarrassed to inform the manager.

The second story was when I bought a couple of shirts before entering to watch a film at the Coliseum. As I left the parcel for a minute on the nearby seat to light a cigarette, a collector of shirts must have picked them up without the least disturbance. If my memory serves me right, once, while I was watching a film at the Embassy, a vicious murder took place in the darkness of the cinema.

In those times, although the village cinemas especially were nowhere near the state-of-the-art of today's, we were still satisfied and happy to frequent these modest places to enjoy watching films.

The talkies - as we used to call it - offered the greatest entertainment of all.