The current debate about films too horrific for young eyes and the ensuing censorship wrangles takes me back to the movie days when, the most daring cinematic ploy was the occasional glimpse of Alice Faye’s knee or later, the long, lissom legs of Betty Grable.
But the most dreaded occurrence at the country cinema where I cut my sharp little teeth on popcorn rather than porn, was not a young Welshman keeping a head in a suitcase under the bed or old ladies lacing the elderberry wine with arsenic, but that frenetic occasion, the forerunner of soccer riots and street battles—The Interval.
Most of us went to movies so that we could go out during the interval and shoulder the shins of the swells from the dress circle.
We were the Front Stalls Kids, the chewing-gum under-the-seat stickers, the whistlers during the decorous love scenes, the roaring urgers of Tarzan on his creeper, Tom Mix on his horse. We were the rollers of spherical sweets that, if well delivered, could marble their way the length of the theatre.
But it was interval time where we shone in the ice cream crush and the popcorn pandemonium. We got to know, almost to a split second, when the first film would end.
As they took each other in their discreet arms or the villain politely coughed his last in a modestly gut-clutching finale on the streets of Laredo, we were on the edge of our seats ready to burn up the red carpet of the aisle, as we headed for the licorice strap Shangri-la of the sweets counter.
As the final music swelled we were off in a screaming bedlam that would make a rolling start at a grand prix look like a push-off of go-carts.
It was at the foot of the stairway of the circle that we really collided with the patricians the dentists, doctors, farmers, butchers, bakers and retailers and the few stuck-up kids who frequented the lavendar atmosphere of the reserved seats.
From our area heavy with the smell of disinfectant because they tried their best to fumigate us kids, we beat over the local aristocrats like a swarm of locusts and even the duty fireman, standing resolutely in navy blue and red with brass buttons, fingered his axe irresolutely.
The usherettes flattened themselves to the walls while the women at the counter had already flung up a barricade of glasses of orange and lemon and parapets of popcorn.
If some of the older patrons had got in early I usually went for their legs with what I called the juvenile squirm, forcing my way low and lethal past vulnerable kneecaps and pinching the Saturday night bulge of some matron in her twin-set, in order to get to the counter.
Adults, thinking they were set, and off guard, would suddenly find a sea of small Gorgon-like heads appear between them and the counter with a forest of waving hands.
But it was all revenue. The horror was to be endured, the toffeed trousers, the ice-creamed britches, the screech of a matron sitting on chewing gum and finding it adhering to her in an ever-stretching elastic cable. Then the recall bell sounded and the frenzy went into reverse. It was remarkable what you could carry in full flight three licorice straps, a bag of puffballs, an ice. cream cone, a paper cup of lemon drink, a bag of jelly babies, a packet of chips.
And you could still knock a full-grown man out of his stride or send some woman cowering and slopping her orange, as you hurtled back to your front row seat just as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion was showing his dirty old teeth or that Paramount mountain ringed itself with frosty stars or the 20th-Century Fox fanfare with searchlights came up as the light dimmed and the late kids dark-footed for their seats.
Intervals tended to exhaust me. I trained for them all the week but that concentrated 15 minutes of elbowing and thugging my way to the confectionary counter and back brought a limpness to my young limbs and my coconutted fingers shook as I tore open a packet of jubes.
Of course the manager had the usual complaints about the kids?
Shouldn’t they be confined to matinees and surely it wasn’t good for them to see these older pictures of people kissing and even, maybe, Alice Faye’s knee?
But it was all because they were terrified of us at interval. And after all, we were revenue. We meant that the projectionist could have his Christmas bonus and the usherettes could have fresh torch batteries.
These sadístic days such a small eruption would pass unnoticed with everyone bashing each other in films and undressing even during the credits.
I still have a tendency to stampede out at intervals. I elbow my way to the confectionary stall but suddenly find I am almost alone.
People look at me curiously like you’d look at a dinosaur or a reliable Australian batsman. I’m an anachronism, old flotsam on the cinematic shore.
Certainly kids are eager and keen but the juvenile squirm has lost its panache. One feels so old hat taking a licorice strap to one’s cinema seat these days.
As for Alice Faye’s knee, it wouldn’t even get a second look!
Max ‘terror of the aisle’ Fatchen