Last tango in Swindon…

Last tango in Swindon…

9:24am Wednesday 20th November 2013 in News

By Barry Leighton

When the golden age of cinema is in full bloom from the Thirties to the Fifties Swindon has nine cinemas, including The Palladium in Jennings Street, Rodbourne

NOT for the first time – but certainly the last – protesters are brandishing banners and chanting slogans outside a cinema in the middle of Swindon. Like their heroes John Wayne and Clint Eastwood they have a cause worth fighting for.

They want to stop the curtain coming down, if you’ll excuse the pun, on a tradition that harks back almost a century. They are calling for public support and gain the sympathetic backing from many passers-by.

Over the years similar stunts have been witnessed on the doorsteps of our picture houses.

Placards bearing the mantra “This is Evil” are in 1972 displayed by demonstrators who feel they have the right to determine what films fellow Swindonians should see.

The object of their ire is Bernardo Bertolucci’s sexually frank Last Tango In Paris, with Marlon Brando. Anyone perverse enough to make up their own mind by actually watching the film must be warned off, they decree.

Six years later, armed with banners and leaflets, protesters inform cinemagoers that by watching the action movie Wild Geese, starring Roger Moore and Richard Burton, they will in fact be supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime. One family takes note and sees Grease instead.

There is strife on the streets of Old Town in 1981 when a film banned by the BBC, The War Game – depicting the horrors of nuclear conflict – is screened at the Arts Centre.

Police are drafted in as hundreds are locked out – many waving CND placards. The film is shown again immediately afterwards, but still 60 or 70 are left outside, their anti-nuke chants fading into the cold February night Those picketing the Cannon cinema on a Saturday afternoon in March 1991 have no political or moral axe to grind.

They just want to carry on watching films in Swindon town centre as they have done since they were kids, as did their parents and grandparents. They are railing against the money men who are turning the heart of Swindon into a movie-free zone.

Outside the three-screen Cannon in Regent Street and surrounded by banners proclaiming “Save Our Cinema” and “No To The Closure of Our Cinema” avid film fan-turned-protester Lesley Walters says, with some justification: “We don’t own this cinema but we consider it ours.

“It is a facility which has been provided in the town centre for more than 50 years and now they are taking it away.” Take it away they do, despite these spirited protestations.

Swindon town centre, for the first time since gasps of amazement and wonder are uttered as The County Electric Pavilion flickers silently though magically to life in 1910, is without a permanent cinema.

Instead, Swindon’s only picture house – an ultra-modern establishment – is now based in the new West Swindon leisure zone of Shaw Ridge.

Closing the Cannon and opening the MGM, the Pathe News group – which owns them both – ushers in a new era for film fans. Now, some 23 years after the last picture show at The Cannon, the movies are on their way back to the heart of Swindon… courtesy of a £50 million development across the road from the old cinema (now the Savoy pub.) The structure emerging with commendable rapidity on the former college site will include a six screen Cineworld movie house that will continue a tradition of showing films in the town centre that begins when Queen Victoria is still breathing.

Moving pictures arrive in Swindon in the late 1890s when entrepreneurially minded locals show newsreels on crude equipment in their front rooms, charging customers a penny each.

A shop in Bridge Street and the Mechanics Institute become occasional fleapits for this captivating new phenomenon.

Similar cinematic thrills are provided by H Dee’s Bioscope at the Corn Exchange in Old Town enabling Swindon people to watch with their very own eyes weighty events such as Queen Victoria’s funeral and King Edward’s coronation. A London company in 1906 hires the Milton Road Baths to show silent screen adventures such as Rescued by Rover (an early incarnation of Lassie) and Stolen by Gipsies. The films are often accompanied by talking and singing from gramophone records courtesy of the Gaumont Chronophone System. But the synchronisation is more often than not woefully off kilter.

“Swindon is going to the devil fast,” huff church-folk as the town’s first permanent cinema, the aforementioned County Electric Pavilion opens in 1910 on the Regent Street site later occupied by Woolworth.

Mouths are agape as local footage shows men engulfed in steam and grime at the GWR Works. “Look, there’s our Bert.”

Scenes shot from the top of a Swindon tramcar provoke a similar sense of bewilderment.

According to the Adver’s critique the main feature, A Corner of Wheat boasts, “lovely scenes of the Rhine with bear-hunting.”

The Electric has a fancy sliding roof which opens to let out the cigarette smoke. This bastion of the modernity is hailed “an acme of comfort.”

Picture palaces spring up thick and fast and there is real-life drama at The Central which opens in Fleet Street in 1911. Seven children slump unconscious in their seats due a fault in the gas lighting.

They are dragged out, propped against the wall and revived with fresh air.

The Savoy – Swindon’s only art-deco picture house – opens on Monday, January 15, 1937, with Captain January starring nine year-old poppet Shirley Temple, all curls and dimples.

As the “talkies” herald the golden age of cinema, Swindon – still a comparatively small town – boasts nine picture houses.

Competition is fierce. A prairie wagon rumbles through our streets complete with cowboys and “redskins” advertising the latest must-see western But TV kills the cinema star, and as television emerges in the Sixties these once-packed palaces of fun, laughter, tears and drama flicker and die.

“Exotic striptease, live onstage,” is offered to members of the Tatler Cinema Club but that is not enough to save its home, The Palace in Gorse Hill.

Built on the site of The Picture House – one of Swindon’s first cinemas – The Odeon in Regent Circus opens under various monikers from the 1920s only to end up somewhat ignominiously as a bingo hall in 1974.

By the Eighties The Cannon – originally the Savoy, then the ABC – is last man standing.

There are red faces at Swindon Town Hall in 1981 when a movie called Hardcore is screened as part of its occasional cinematic presentations.

It is supposed to be a drama starring George C Scott but another film also called Hardcore is shown instead.

Only this one is a “bluey.” Boobs are flying everywhere. Romping is rife.

After several minutes the horrified projectionist, realising the error, stops the movie.

The show, insists manager Terry Court, must not go on. Customers file out. They are disappointed, one way or another.

The Arcadia in Regent Street at one stage specialises exclusively in cartoons, briefly becoming The Classic Cartoon In 1969 a special colour edition of Pathe News is shown in Swindon – to commemorate Town‘s 3-1 League Cup Final victory over Arsenal at Wembley.

The ABC takes delivery of 6,000 Polaroid glasses in May 1983 for Friday the 13th Part III – the first 3D movie shown in Swindon since The House of Wax more than 20 years earlier Some 50,000 people – equivalent to more than half of Swindon’s population at the time – see ET at the ABC in 1983.

Its curtains for Saturday morning flicks after 36 years in 1982 – despite the Swindon ABC regularly attracting around 200 teenies. Another institution draws to an end when smoking is stubbed out at the ABC in 1985.

A 22 year-old man from Rodbourne is the victim of unprovoked attack in 1996 when he is bitten on the neck while leaving the Virgin complex at Shaw Ridge where a new Dracula film is actually showing.

In 2000 Swindon is deemed the Cinema capital of England because it has more movie seats per person (35) than anywhere else in the country, largely due to its multiplex theatres at Shaw and Greenbridge.

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