Some of the greatest British films ever made are making a nostalgic return to Shropshire’s cinema screens over the coming weeks as part of a celebration of the best in home-grown movies.
It’s a mouthwatering line-up for vintage film fans…Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1940s weepie Brief Encounter, Larry Olivier in Henry V, vintage Connery James Bond or Richard Todd in The Dam Busters.
All a far cry from the rather turgid big-budget nonsense we have been served up to keep the kids happy in summer holidays over recent years.
And it got me reminiscing back to some of the great summertime cinema offerings of yesteryear, and the milestones which have changed the face of our movie watching habits.
Twenty years ago this very weekend, there were queues snaking around the block of local picture houses for the must-see movie of 1987 - Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing.
Claire Parry, of Shrewsbury, tells a story which was typical from the time, about how she had only managed to get into the Mardol cinema at the third time of asking after seeing the “sold out” signs put up during her first two one-hour queueing marathons. Unthinkable, these days.
Rewind a further decade and there were similar scenes in Wellington, Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth for a certain science fiction adventure called Star Wars, which smashed many a box office record.
Those were the days…today’s multiplex-bred generation wouldn’t believe what many of us older folk went through.
The youth of today will miss out on sights I fondly remember from the 1970s, with grannies darning socks and knitting cardigans in the queue as they waited patiently in line with the youngsters to catch a glimpse of Grease, Jaws and Star Wars.
A harsh contrast from the big release of this week, The Simpsons, which sees the cult TV cartoon characters making their big screen debut in a film which is being shown so frequently that there’s barely a queue for the popcorn counter. (The movie’s not particularly worth queueing for, anyway - if you’ve seen any of the four trailers, you’ve already seen most of the best bits!)
Next week viewers will be watching Brief Encounter in surround sound comfort at Cineworld Shrewsbury.
When it was first launched in 1945, cinemas were rather different - I went hunting for some rare images of typical county cinemas of the time, and came up with this fascinating image of Newport Picture House, taken in the mid 1940s. Long lost, sadly, the cinema opened in 1913, but closed in 1962.
If we’re talking of movie milestones, however, none is possibly more significant than this time a decade ago, when a trawl into the Shropshire Star archives shows Panasonic were preparing to unleash a certain new innovation called the DVD player onto the British market for the first time. The price for a top of the range model with Dolby stereo?
Six hundred quid, give or take - and we paid up with a smile, thinking it was great value. Yes, times they are a-changing!
By Carl Jones
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