At one time I was known as 12.30. I loved 12.30 movies. It was where I first saw Ivanhoe, King Solomon's Mines, Back to Bataan and the like. Unlike today's movies, those films made me go out and read more. Strand Cinema on Tragarete Road was my favourite. It was the nearest cinema to me and for some reason was not as dark as the other cinemas. After the first five minutes, you could make out your friend ten rows away so you could move over and lime with your feet up on the chair in front. No one ever said anything to us. I had my own seat, in house, midway up and to the right of the right aisle. Even today it's my favourite position to see a movie whenever I can bring myself to go to that monstrosity that has taken over Invaders Bay, the most garish, un-West Indian building one could ever hope not to see in the Caribbean.
I haven't been to a regular movie theatre since about 1995 when, in balcony with my wife and after wiping the seats twice, I realised that a certain indelicate act was being consummated in one of the corners at the same time that I was propositioned by a drug dealer who refused to move.In those days you had balcony, house and pit. Doubles was something you saw, not ate. Unlike the cinemas of today, where you walk up to get to any seat, in old time theatres you had to walk down, from most expensive to cheapest. Pit was the cheapest, in my day probably a shilling to get into. As a nice little middle-class boy I went once to pit, with my classmates and teacher Mr Moore from Tranquillity Exhibition class, to see some documentary about the desert. Mr Moore was the gentleman, originally from Grenada, who taught us all about the sound a "nice piece of guava wood" made when it hit your bottom. All I remember about the movie was the narrow entry into pit from Dundonald Street and the tarantula coming out of its hole and scaring the daylights out of 30 of 40 little boys. We were so close to the screen.
Pit was the place where you heard all the picong and funny comments about the movie. One wit turned the place upside down, when, in the middle of a Dracula movie that had started at midnight (get it?), things tense, suspense building, ladies holding on to their gents (which was why you took the lady to a midnight vampire movie) and Dracula silently approaching the heroine from behind, the said gentleman suddenly shouted out, "Suck she!" The audience dissolved into laughter, tension vanished, people stopped watching and began to leave.House was where the middle classes went. I was usually taken there by my uncle Herky. Afterwards we would go to the Dairies in Phillip Street for a hamburger and banana split. You had to be careful walking down the long, darkened aisles in house. High heels, perhaps worn for the first time, you going cinema, you know, were known to cause unsteady young ladies to stumble and fall onto their willing escorts.
In house you mainly shut up, ate popcorn or sucked dinnermint and pretended to be social. It was in house 12.30 at Strand that I smoked my first cigarette. Someone had left a pack of Anchor, complete with a box of Three Plumes matches, on the seat next to me. My friend Enrique refused but I lit up, hiding the flame in my left hand as I had seen it done in the movies, took a deep puff and almost passed out. Later on, after the movie, walking home down Park Street, I tried again and staggered against the railing of Victoria Square as commonly happened to the older Corbeau Town boys but under a different influence.
Reading the Guardian special editions from 1939 and 1945 brought back fond memories of all of those old-time cinemas in their heyday, when there was little to do on a lazy Caribbean island and Hollywood was "Big" and movies were so real that steelbands were named after them. In 1939 Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland was showing at Royal in Charlotte Street, now long gone. 4.30 and 8.30 pm were the traditional start times, giving you either a half-hour to get off work and get to the cinema or time to go home, change, eat, call somebody and then walk comfortably to "teater." In those days you could walk back home too! And Victoria Square was a place where you stopped to enjoy a little company.
Roxy, now a fast-food shop, was showing a double: King Kong and She's Got Everything. It advertised the "usual cheap prices," but the start times were a bit different, 4.45 and 8.15 pm. On Friday night at 8.30, however, the show changed to Cuban Nights, featuring Mademoiselle Ondega, the International Rhumba Dancer! Papayoh! That must have caused ruction in town! Globe had Laurence Olivier in the "greatest role of his career." The movie was the topical Clouds over Europe. Empire, in St Vincent Street, Honolulu with George Burns. By now anyone over 70 is salivating and talking about the good "ole time days." All you need is The Sound of Music, seen by a certain female family of mine five times and you complete.