Cinema Memories

A People's History of Cinema-going in 1960s Britain

Melvyn Stokes, Matthew Jones, Emma Pett

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781911239918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Cinema Memories brings together and analyses the memories of almost a thousand people of going to the cinema in Britain during the 1960s. It offers a fresh perspective on the social, cultural and film history of what has come to be seen as an iconic decade, with the release of films such as A Taste of Honey, The Sound of Music, Darling, Blow-Up, Alfie, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde.
Drawing on first-hand accounts, authors Melvyn Stokes, Matthew Jones and Emma Pett explore how cinema-goers constructed meanings from the films they watched - through a complex process of negotiation between the films concerned, their own social and cultural identities, and their awareness of changes in British society. Their analysis helps the reader see what light the cultural memory of 1960s cinema-going sheds on how the Sixties in Britain is remembered and interpreted.
Positioning their study within debates about memory, 1960s cinema, and the seemingly transformative nature of this decade of British history, the authors reflect on the methodologies deployed, the use of memories as historical sources, and the various ways in which cinema and cinema-going came to mean something to their audiences.

1

‘This is where we came in’: cinema-going in the 1960s

Films themselves are a central part of the experience of cinema-going. However, there has been growing awareness in recent years that they are not the only, and perhaps not even the most significant, attraction that the cinema has to offer. From the perspective of many recent writers on film, the primary appeal of cinema for much of the twentieth century was the act of cinema-going itself, as a social and cultural experience rather than as the consumption of an entertainment product.¹ Since many audience members commonly arrived at their local cinema without necessarily knowing, or perhaps in some instances even caring, what was being screened, the best way to explain what drew them to the cinema is by reframing it as a social occasion more than as an opportunity to see a specific film. As Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers have noted, Annette Kuhn’s pioneering 2002 work on 1930s British cinema audiences ‘underlined the extent to which cinemagoing was remembered as part of the fabric and routine of social life.’² Robert C. Allen has similarly argued that ‘generally speaking, for many people in many places for a very long span of film history, the cumulative social experience of habitual or even occasional moviegoing mattered more than any particular film they might have seen.’³ As these authors have noted, cinema-going was much more about who one went with and the experiences one had at the cinema than with watching films themselves.

While there was, of course, a wide range of 1960s films that would become the focus of much discussion in homes, workplaces and pubs, many of which will be discussed in the chapters that follow, the personal significance of cinema-going as an event is evident in the memories shared with the researchers working on this project. From journeys through major cities and rural landscapes to reach a favourite cinema, to the sight of clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the projector’s beam, the sensations and, sometimes, frustrations of cinema-going constitute much of the material our 1960s cinema-goers recounted. This chapter lays out the nature of these social and cultural experiences, describing the more frequently shared, and hence more frequently remembered, aspects of 1960s cinema-going. While not all respondents recall each of the elements discussed below, and while there is clear variation between urban and rural experiences, as well as between the experience of younger and older audience members, there does seem to be a general consensus about what could be expected from a night at the cinema during this period.

Journeys to and from the cinema

Journeys to and from the cinema in Britain’s towns and cities took place mainly through walking or by public transport. The experiences recounted by Ludmilla, an American who spent her teenage years in North London during the 1960s, are fairly typical in this regard in that the cinemas she frequented were ‘mostly walking distance’ from home, though she would ‘sometimes [travel] into town for Leicester Square by tube, taking about an hour door to door.’⁴ Although residents of other cities did not necessarily have the excitement of the flagship cinemas in the capital’s West End or the convenience of the London Underground to shuttle them back and forth, their journeys were also often characterized by short walks to local, suburban cinemas or the use of public transport to reach more prestigious, and not coincidentally more comfortable, cinemas, which usually screened films before they would arrive in cinemas closer to home. Perhaps surprisingly, social class does not appear to have played a determining role in the choice of cinemas that audiences frequented. Respondents in provincial cities in particular are equally likely to have listed only local suburban cinemas, rather than more prestigious inner-city locations, as ones they frequented most regularly, regardless of the social class with which they identified. For example, Marlow, a bus driver who lived with his wife and children in Manchester during the 1960s, recalls enjoying James Bond films, war films, adventure stories and westerns, though he found British social realist films ‘a bit slow,’ thought the Swinging London films were ‘not really my scene,’ and did not watch films from continental Europe.⁵ As such, his local cinema, part of the ABC chain and situated ten minutes’ walk from home, served his needs admirably. Conversely, Wendy, who was born in 1960 into a family that identified as upper middle class, similarly recalls the majority of her cinema-going taking place in a local cinema that was twenty minutes’ walk from her family’s home. Regardless of one’s social background, cinema-going in Britain’s towns and cities is most often recalled as a suburban event, taking place within local neighbourhoods rather than in the heart of a city, with journeys mostly made on foot. Consequently, the journey itself rarely played a central role in the memories recounted by these respondents.

Although shorter journey times meant that transportation is less of a feature of urban cinema-goers memories, the accessibility of other social and cultural spaces in towns and cities meant that for such audiences cinema potentially became part of a broader pattern of activities that an evening might hold. Irma, a cinema-goer from the Wiltshire countryside, notes rather enviously, ‘you have to remember that there were no other rival activities for us “rural” folk, no cafes, restaurants on every corner etc. or leisure centres, bowling alleys and so on.’⁶ In reality, most urban cinema-goers do not appear to have become involved in other activities before or after the film either, and most 1960s British cities would have struggled to have offered late evening opening hours for many leisure activities or the cornucopia of restaurants that Irma imagined. Indeed, while ten respondents mentioned ten-pin bowling as a preferred pastime, only one recalls visiting the lanes before or after a cinema outing.⁷

Nevertheless, for a sizeable minority of cinema audiences in the nation’s cities and towns, an evening at the pictures was frequently accompanied by a trip to a local pub or fish and chip shop. The chip shop in particular seems to have been a location for many people’s discussions of films that they had just watched or were about to see. Joseph from Yorkshire remembers that he combined a night at the cinema with a visit to the local chip shop ‘rarely,’ but that when he did it was to eat a ‘fish and chip supper’ while walking home discussing the evening’s film.⁸ Such experiences were particularly notable for children, who often understood them as a special treat. Natalie from Cheshire, for example, remembers having ‘fish and chips afterwards’ as ‘the big treat’ that her parents would occasionally give her, but enfolds it in memory alongside other ‘magical’ elements of a night at the cinema, such as the way in which coloured light danced on the curtains across the cinema screen before the film began, which appeared at that age to be ‘sort of opulent’ since ‘the shiny thing looked like another world.’⁹ The rare, enchanting nature of this experience for Natalie sat neatly alongside the culinary pleasures of the fish and chip shop, since ‘we never normally had those’ either and both tended to occur on the same evening.

Much as car journeys (as discussed below) facilitated rural cinema visits, but also became entangled with them in memory, so too did the fish and chip shop and the pub become part of the fabric of urban cinema memories. There were exceptions, of course, such as Anne from Essex, who remembers fish and chips as part of a weekly ritual of cinema-going rather than a rare and special treat.¹⁰ Similarly Colin from London recalls how ‘afterwards we’d go to the “chippy” and it was a form of after film treat, I’d have chips and she’d just have a bag of chips. But we always, always went to the “chippy.”’ Interestingly, even though Colin recalls combining the cinema with the chip shop on a regular basis, it never lost its sense of being a ‘treat.’¹¹ However, for most audiences the scarcity of this occurrence closely aligned with a sense of childhood magic often associated with the cinema itself and so both became parts of the potential pleasure that a night at the cinema could hold.

Of course, cities were not the only places cinemas were to be found, and the experiences of audiences in smaller communities were often radically different to those of their urban compatriots. For audiences in more rural areas, 1960s cinema-going was shaped by the pattern of cinema closures that Britain experienced during the decade. One crucial way in which these changes shaped the cinema-going experience was through the journeys that audiences made to and from the cinema. As venues closed, these journeys sometimes became longer, with the closure of rural cinemas having particularly pronounced consequences. During the 1950s, for example, there was a 29 per cent reduction in the number of British cinemas that seated fewer than five hundred people, which were disproportionately located in rural areas. This was slightly higher than the average figure across all venue sizes, which stood at 25 per cent. Even before the nation began to lose its cinema-going habit, John Spraos argued, these rural cinemas ‘never attained the prosperity of town cinemas and . . . starting from a more precarious initial position have had to succumb in greater numbers.’¹² The temporary boost afforded to more urban cinemas in the 1960s through splitting auditoriums or modernizing facades was no solution here. The costs of this were prohibitive and these practices, Stuart Hanson notes, were ‘initially confined to large premier city centre venues.’¹³ In addition to the economic vulnerability of rural cinemas during the 1960s, their closure also often had a magnified impact on the local cinema-going community in comparison to venues in more densely populated regions. While suburban and city centre cinemas were often in competition with other nearby operations, and hence the closure of one cinema would still leave others to satisfy local demand, there were usually no cinemas in small, rural communities and many cinema-goers visited the lone cinema in nearby small towns in order to watch films.¹⁴ The closure of this cinema would likely mean that audiences both from that town and from the surrounding villages were either deprived of their access to films altogether, or would instead have to make sometimes extremely long and inconvenient journeys to the next town or city where a cinema was to be found.

The journey times to the nearest cinema described by respondents who lived in rural areas vary, ranging from ‘5 minutes on foot’ to ‘nearly an hour by walking across the fields and catching the bus,’ but the majority of such journeys seem to have taken between twenty and forty minutes.¹⁵ Although most such trips involved walking or public transportation, increasingly as the decade progressed respondents recall travelling to the cinema in a car. This was, after all, the decade in which British car ownership boomed. In 1960 there were 5.8 million cars registered in Britain, but by 1970 this figure had nearly doubled to 11.4 million.¹⁶ This expansion of automobile ownership was not confined to the cities and is reflected in the number of rural audience members who remember driving or being driven to their nearest cinema too, putting cinemas that had once seemed distant within easy reach. Ciara, a respondent who lived in ‘rural Cornwall’ during the 1960s, noted that ‘by the time I was dating in 1965, most of the boys I knew had access to a car,’ making the nearest cinema, which would otherwise have taken half an hour to reach by public transport (and then only ‘if the bus was on time’), a more viable location for a date.¹⁷ Many other respondents recall being driven to cinemas by their parents, while one in particular remembers living in an area of Wales that was ‘too rural to take the bus’ and, as a result, borrowing her grandfather’s car to make the thirty-minute drive to her nearest cinema.¹⁸ While cinemas in nearby towns may have closed, the car enabled rural audiences to maintain their cinema-going by putting once-distant population centres within easier reach.

Moreover, as the car became an ever more essential element of rural cinema-going, the car journey would become the backdrop, and occasionally the focus, for these respondents’ memories of the cinema. For example, when Edna, a respondent from North Yorkshire who was eleven years old at the time, went to see the British, French and Italian co-production, Monte Carlo or Bust! (1969), which was shown alongside The Italian Job (1969), the day became memorable for her not because of the films themselves but because ‘I slammed the car door on my Dad’s thumb as we arrived.’¹⁹ In some instances, cars were also sites of cinema memories long after the trip to the cinema itself, as in the case of Jody from Gloucestershire’s observation that ‘I still know most songs from the films I saw at that time, so [I] guess we must have sang them in the car going on holiday.’²⁰ Cars were not solely instrumental to rural cinema-going during the 1960s, but also often became spaces in which cinema memories were formed.

Cinema queues

Through the memories of those who responded to our survey, it is possible to reconstruct many of the experiences and rituals of 1960s cinema-going in large city and suburban cinemas. On arrival at a cinema, the first thing many movie-goers did was to join the queue outside the building waiting to be seated. While some cinemas had marquees projecting from the front of the building, both to advertise the current screening programme and to shield waiting audience members from the elements, these often provided inadequate protection from the British climate. At busy times queues, even at less prestigious cinemas, could be lengthy, with some audiences remembering ‘queuing up the side of the road’ or around the building.²¹ As such, the line of people would often exceed the limited shelter of most marquees. For June, a student in Edinburgh, this meant standing outside the ‘grand décor’ of the local Odeon cinema ‘in cold wind and rain, not knowing for sure if you would get in.’²² Sometimes the queue was so long that people simply gave up: one woman from Newcastle recalls abandoning an attempt to see The Sound of Music and going to see Help (both 1965) instead.²³ Others were made of sterner stuff. Claudia remembers queuing for four hours to see...