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sacred, that the Rialto has been some 25 countries. And these days
converted into a Revivalist centre for a most of the films I see are screening at
Jesus jumping sect based a few 9,000 metres at 1,000 kmh. Yet I’ve
kilometres from Hollywood. So, on never lost my child’s delight in the
second thoughts, it hasn’t entirely lost movies.
its transcendental role. Now I know the tricks - how Gene
Yet I only hope in that final day of Kelly danced in powdered milk instead
the 50s, when the projector fell victim to of rain (it looked better on film), how
the pulpit, when cinema lost the battle to the kids in movies eat frozen mashed
television, that the usher and the potato instead of icecreem (which melts
projectionist went through an appropriate under the lights) and how the blood in Peter Ricketts’ Collection
ceremony and desconsecrated the place. Janet Leigh’s murder scene in Psycho I want to see the Val Morgan slides
Somehow I don’t think that Kit or was really chocolate syrup (looks great again suggesting supper at Louey’s
Hopalong or Weissmuller would feel at in black-and-white). Chinese Café. I yearn to see the trailers
home in a place where people go in for It’s this fakery that lends for next weeks attractions, so crammed
total immersion baptism and hillbilly enchantment, making the whole jerry- with blazing typography and good bits
sermons. built industry all the funnier, all the that the film itself was inevitably an
The Rialto was just as important to better. It’s good for capital-A art to be anticlimax. And the slide exhorting us
our parents, who’d book their regular original, but its right that movies are as to observe the nearest exit.
seats in the lounge on Thursday night spurious and silly as possible, as fake I want swing on a vine with
to watch the total immersion of Esther as $3 bills. They are, after all, the mass- Weismuller, the greatest Tarzan of them
Williams or the hillbillying of Ma and produced dreams of the industrial all. I want to dive into a pool in the
Pa Kettle. revolution, as surely as comics are the back lot at Culver City and wrestle with
Indeed, my Grandpa was once fairy stories - with Superman a stuffed crocodile. I want to beat my
persuaded to take Grandma there, in the succeeding Cinderella. pectorals and yodel up a herd of
mid-1940s. It was his first and last visit There’s something poignant about heffalumps so that I can rescue the
to a cinema as, during the interval, he the infantility of movies, about their green eyed little yellow god from the
wandered outside to buy a packet of not-very-special effects, about their pre- evil hunters.
Turf and got lost. Well, that was his fab plots and their sweet smell of And best of all, I want to sense when
story. Grandma found him snoring in excess. Movies are the inheritors of the the National Anthem is coming, so that I
the wobbly brass bed after a frantic 48- sideshow, the midway spruikers, the can spring up the aisles before patriotic
tram ride. circus. Until they lost their innocence ritual traps me in my seat. And I want to
During the Depression, when people they were the most universal, reel from a darkened cinema into the
needed a fantasy or three, the Rialto unpretentious benevolent and generous sunlight, so as to suffer from that most
gave the locals images of glamor and of media. nostalgic form of cultural shock.
ostentation, women wrapped in What news from the Rialto? The Be warned ye Jesus jumpers, the
fantastic white furs, like the Laocoon in word is that the cinema is doomed, that it days of the Rialto as a revival centre
his serpents, of men in Bugattis. won’t survive the new technologies of are numbered. Soon I will hurl you
During the war years it provided video disc, video cartridge, satellite box from the cinema as surely as Christ
Kew with its patriotism - albeit with an office and all the other electronic tricks. cleared the moneylenders from the
American accent - and with evidence of And God knows it took a terrible temple. And I will rebuild the place
the bestiality of foreigners. pounding from the drive-in and telly. Yet exactly as it was, so that everyone can
Then came war’s happing ending only cinema can offer that curious feeling come on Saturdays and sing the
and the musicals, as over-colored, over- of collective excitement, the exhilaration matinee chorus…
sweet and over-rich as the grossest of laughing along with the crowd. Here we are again,
Sunset Boulevard sundae. Movies So it is my intention to rescue the Happy as can be,
promising a new world in which Rialto from the revivalists and to bring All good pals
society’s most urgent problem would be back the stern faced lady who used to And Jolly good company.
the counting of calories. sit in the ticket box and to exhume the Never mind the weather,
Was it really Marx, Darwin and imperious usher and offer him his
Freud who sabotaged religion? I’ve a scarlet coat. And then I’ll hand out the Never mind the rain,
sneaking suspicion it was Hollywood. Fantales with the film stars on the The movie club’s together, here we
What chance did a first-century faith wrappers and the Polly Waffles and the are again...
have against 20th Century Fox? How cordial tasting of the cardboard cups At the thought my eyes light up like
could the Vatican compete with and the dixies with the proper wooden ushers’ torches and I can feel my heart
Paramount, Universal and MGM ? As spoons - and I’ll have them part the in my mouth, along with a deliciously
soon as the word of God was mangy, plush curtains to reveal… the dissolving Violet Crumble. ★
appropriated by DeMille; Matthew, Cinesound kangaroo jumping into the
Mark, Luke and John lost their authority front stalls, Bugs saying “What’s up This column first appeared in The
to Victor Mature, Richard Burton, doc?” and the Scarlet Horseman Age Review, 4 November 1978 as
Michael Rennie and Charlton Heston. miraculously surviving a rock fall of ‘Memories of the Matinee’.
softly upholstered, rubber-filled rocks.
Twenty years later I’ve made a few It is reprinted by kind permission of
films that, as I write, are screening in Phillip Adams and The Age newspaper.

CINEMARECORD 2007 17