Paris once had dozens of repertory cinemas. In those folksy medieval days long before netflix and bluray, the owners of those cinemas more or less dictated what people would be talking about in the cafés afterward. The movies could be good, bad, awful, dated, cheesy – but that didn’t matter because the whole point of the evening was to escape from your unheated, closet-sized chambre de bonne apartment for as long as possible.
So you’d have a month where Billy Wilder was the big thing, then Preston Sturges, then maybe Carol Reed or Kurosawa. Sometimes the programming centered on actors, many of them almost entirely forgotten. But you didn’t care… everybody went to old movies all the time.
During one drizzly February in the mid-eighties, my local was running a Robert Taylor festival. I plopped down my five francs and found a seat in the crowded hall. The feature was Ivanhoe, starring Taylor, Joan Fontaine and another Taylor – Elizabeth.
Refresher: Ivanhoe tells the story of a knight home from the Crusades who allies himself with Robin Hood to restore Richard the Lion-Hearted to the throne of England. Along the way, the dashing Ivanhoe has to contend with a Saxon lady, Rowena, played by Joan Fontaine, and with a Jewish girl, Rebecca, played by Elizabeth Taylor.
Okay, so jousts and tournaments and treacheries took up most of the running time, all shot in Technicolor camp and greeted by the audience with occasional snickers. Then came the climactic scene. Ivanhoe has to make his choice. Both women stand before him, Rowena and Rebecca. He chooses Rowena, the Saxon.
Close-up on Rebecca’s face.
The movie was made in 1952. Elizabeth Taylor was twenty years old.
You get the picture.
From the back of the room, a gruff voice, the voice of a homeless man, the words slurred, “Putain de merde!! Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!”
Which may be delicately translated as: “Holy shit! The fucker’s blind!!”
The explosion of laughter turns to raucous catcalls and whistles as Ivanhoe and Rowena look at each other lovingly. The crowd loses it, joyfully, and the shouts and jeers make the concluding moments of the movie inaudible.
No one cared. Suspension of disbelief had just crashed and burned.
Utterly and completely.
Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!
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This posting reminds me of my own experience, not in Parisian repertory cinemas but in my parent´s living room. It was still in the early days of Spanish TV when only two channels seemed more than enough. During the seventies and eighties, the second channel offered old movies sets and retrospectives. This was far cheaper than buying new programs. Tuesday night was, say, Kurosawa´s night, at prime time, for as long as it took to play all of his movies to date. Wednesday could be "The Western." A selection of the most representative films of the genre would be systematically and chronologically played (including deconstructions and parodies). And so on it went through genres, actors, directors, and even producers. Never an action born of thriftiness has had so much influence in the cultural education of a whole generation.
ReplyDeleteAh! Brings back memories of my visit to Paris thirty years ago...
ReplyDeleteI just recently discovered your blog. I enjoyed reading the current multi-layered vignettes like this one.