Madras Talkies

I fell in love with the movies in the darkened cinema halls of Madras. They were called halls then, not movie houses, cineplexes or multiplexes. They were places of reverence, some grand palaces of velvet red curtains, rococo ceilings and seats as comfortable as sofas.   And visiting them was an event in our young lives. Going to the cinema involved negotiations with my father or grandmother. She was much more of a cinema fan than my father so it was always easier persuading her for us to go to the cinema. My father was more serious in his choices, historical cinema like ‘Anarkali’ was more acceptable than American or British films.

            The nearest cinema hall to us, a fifteen minute walk along almost deserted streets with scarcely any traffic, was the Roxy in Pursawalkam. It was a wondrous, huge hall, one of the finest examples of a cinema theatre, built in 1918 by the film pioneer Raghupathy Venkaiah. He first called it The Globe but then changed it to the sexier, Roxy. Its architectural style was baroque and it had a large entrance hall, so cool after the hot sun, where we bought our tickets. On either side of this hall were stairs leading up to the balcony but as we (sisters, brothers, cousin) were only allowed matinees, we never sat in the balcony. We entered the main hall through finely polished teak doors, and stepped on teak floors as we made our way to our seats. We chose them as central as possible and sat with expectation and impatience for the great curtain in front of us to reveal the silver screen. Overhead, fans whirled slowly, stirring the warm air and for some reason, maybe because of its size and height, the hall always seemed cool.

            Then, at 3.30 pm, the curtain rose and the programme began. For the first half hour or so there were the cartoons – Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Popeye and others, I no longer remember. But the main attraction for us, every Saturday, was the serial. The serial was the forerunner to our television serials. Not soaps but real serials. They were all shot in black and white and were all action stories. The most famous one was ‘The Perils of Pauline’.  Pauline was a young, and I thought as a child very stupid, beautiful woman who was constantly chased by bad guys and ending up with her life in peril.  Apart from her constant, and irritating screams, and the grunts of the villains, there wasn’t much dialogue. So we never quite knew why the pursuit. The serial would run for about 20 minutes and end with Pauline either hanging by her finger tips from a skyscraper or else being tied to the train track as a steam train came roaring down towards her. There it would end with a ‘continued next week’ caption, accompanied by our groans of frustration. This of course ensured we’d back next week to see whether she fell off the building or was run over by the train.

But the matinee wasn’t over yet. There was the interval where we discussed Pauline’s predicaments in detail. We didn’t have cokes or pop corn then and, in fact, I believe the theatre forbade us bringing in food. Nor did they sell it. When the lights went down again, we’d be treated to another serial. This one had to do with spies and gangsters and the hero, thankfully a male, also ended up hanging either from a plane or strapped to a submarine about to dive. And it ended too with ‘continued next week’. Those weren’t the only films we saw, whether at a matinee or the 6.30 show. We also loved Bud Abbot & Lou Costello, Laurel & Hardy, the Three Stooges and, of course, the Marx Brothers. The fun was innocent as well as the violence. When someone was shot they just fell down, and blood didn’t splatter the screen.  The Roxy hall still stands on Pursuwalkam High Road, now densely crowded with shops and chaotic traffic, decrepit, neglected and hidden behind ugly hoardings. I’ve thought of wandering in but it would be too disillusioning and ruin my happy memories.

            Sometimes, if an adult, grandmother or an aunt, accompanied us, we could venture further afield for more serious cinema and even attend the 6.30 show. The Elphinstone was another hall, though not as splendid as the Roxy, on Mount Road, opposite the roundtana. Today, Annadorai’s statue stands somewhat near to where that old roundtana stood. This, for a start, was a large one with parking within it and, at most, there’d be a dozen cars in the space. The Elphinstone, named after a Governor of Madras Presidency, showed more adult fare – westerns, film noirs, romances, comedies (Francis, the Talking Mule) and musicals (‘Anchors Away’, ‘Singing’ in the Rain’) . We’d always go a half hour early as slap next door was, Jaffa’s, the best ice cream parlour in the world.  There were tables and chairs, of course, but it also had a long zinc-topped counter with stools that spun around. Jaffa’s ice creams, milkshakes and sundays were even more seductive than the movies. They were served in tall, heavy cone glasses and we scooped them out with long silver spoons.

The Elphinstone also kept its doors open right through the film. They were half doors, like those in a horse’s stables, so the sea breeze, along with the fans, could keep us pleasantly cooled. Madras then being what was there wasn’t even the sound of a passing car, once the film started, to disturb our concentration.  We, adults and children, were in the Elphinstone watching a Rita Hayworth/Glenn Ford film (I forget the title) on January 30, 1948 when the film stopped midway through. We waited as this happened not infrequently. Then we saw a familiar figure, our driver, searching for us. ‘You must come at once,” he said. We didn’t move until a hurriedly scrawled message appeared on the screen – Gandhi killed.

            But the strangest of all the halls was the Minerva. It was in Georgetown, a most peculiar location for a cinema hall and even more peculiar was that it was on the second floor of a commercial building. I’ve forgotten on which street it once stood, but like all Georgetown’s streets was narrow. Yet, in retrospect, it wasn’t that unusual a location for a cinema hall. In those days, Georgetown was the cradle of Karnatic music and singing. The great singers and musicians lived along those narrow streets in far humbler surroundings than their wealthy land-owning patrons who occupied grander houses in the same area. The Minerva then nestled alongside our culture, although it showed mostly English language films.  The Minerva was the first cinema hall to be air-conditioned. This in fact was a miracle for us and the hall was more of a cineplex style, small with maybe a hundred seats at most but it was a sheer pleasure to walk into that cold air. But the Minerva had to be showing a ‘must-see’ film for us to persuade an adult to have us driven right across the city.

            There were other cinema halls we’d patronise. Around the corner from the Elphinstone was the Casino, still standing, with what was then a spacious parking lot in front, a curved drive. The Midland on General Patters road, the Globe on Mount Road, the Laskhmi along the Coome, to name just a few others.  They showed Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films, each sticking to its linguistic speciality. It’s in one of them that I fell in love with Nargis. I don’t remember the name of the film but she played a village belle who fell in love with a philandering musician, Dev Anand, and came in search of him in the city.

Madras was a city with one of the earliest histories of Cinema in India. The first (date unknown) short films, in black and white of course, were shown by a European in the Victoria Public hall. They were non-fiction and all about daily life. Victoria Public hall, a great example of Raj architecture, still stands next to Rippon Building, but like the Roxy is in a state of total disrepair.  Samikannu Vincent, an employee of the South Indian Railways in Trichy, purchased a film projector and silent films from the Frenchman Du Pont and set up a business as film exhibitor. He erected tents for screening films. His tent cinema became popular and he travelled all over the state, then Madras Presidency, with his mobile unit. In later years, he produced talkies and also built a cinema in Coimbatore.   To celebrate the event of King George V’s visit in 1909, a grand exhibition was organised in Madras. Its major attraction was the screening of short films accompanied by sound. A British company imported a Crone megaphone, made up of a film projector to which a gramophone with a disc containing prerecorded sound was linked, and both were run in unison, producing picture and sound simultaneously. However, there was no synched dialogue.

  R.Venkiah, a wealthy landowner, in 1912 built a permanent cinema in the Mount Road area named Gaiety. It was the first in Madras to screen films on a full-time basis. This theatre is still functioning, although under different ownership.The Electric Theatre, on Pophams Broadway, off Mount Road, later screened silent short films back in 1915. It was  built by Warwick Major and his partner Reginald Eyre but it wasn’t a great hall. Just a brick building with a corrugated roof and, quite rightly, it didn’t last too long as a cinema hall, though it still stands, housing the Philatelic society

            Of course, being in love with this new medium, Madras just didn’t exhibit films, the city, or town I should say, made them as well. In the very centre of Madras, in its heart, was the Gemini studios, a large garden with studios set well back. We passed under an archway with the Gemini Twins blowing their trumpets.  Gemini Studios is now only a memory called the Gemini flyover and nothing remains of that beautiful garden. But much nearer home, in fact opposite our house, was another film studio. In those days, we could wander in to watch the film in the making. My grandfather, who sometimes unwisely invested in films, also encouraged producers and directors to use part of our garden for shooting. MGR, Gemini Ganesan and others would sit around with my grandfather in-between takes and discuss the film’s story or the political scene. The films shot here were mostly religious epics because part of the garden was quite wild and looked like a forest through which Rama and Lakshman or anyone else could wander.  Quite often I’d find chariots parked in the garden in the mornings, awaiting their charioteers to be made up and costumed, and ponies grazing on the lawn.  Those old studios have long gone and film making is now concentrated in Kodambakkam which is now known as Kollywood. The AVM studios are always a bustle with films in its sound stages and, not far off, is Prasad labs waiting  to develop and print the film stock. And Gemini studios is also in the suburb though in much humbler surroundings, not making films but developing them. The stars are now bigger, and much richer, than those olden day ones.

            The love affair with the cinema, over a century long, still continues in Tamilnadu. In the last century, Tamilnadu churned out 50,000 films. Some great, but for the most part, bad. But that has never stopped the optimism and the love for making movies, and going to them. It’s no surprise that through this love affair with celluloid, Tamilnad continues to have movie stars and script writers as Chief Ministers and opposition leaders.