O FRIENDS, NO MORE OF THESE SOUNDS! [151]

At the time of writing the United Kingdom will be leaving the European Union on Friday 29^th March, at 23:00 GMT – British Summer Time starts two days later. That night, a significant number of people will be in cinemas for the opening weekend of what I have been calling “Tim Burton’s Dumbo,” a remake twice as long as the original, in which no animals or trains will talk. The acrimony over Brexit means some may need to hear “Baby Mine” that night, a song that lost the 1941 Academy Award for Best Original Song to “Last Time I Saw Paris.”

I’ll be at home instead, watching the news – I’m not expecting anything to happen but, right now, I’m not sure anyone can tell me what will. I remember voting by post in the June 2016 referendum, meaning  I could tune out of the fighting between the Leave and Remain campaigns, but once 51.89% of 72.21% of the electorate, or 17.41 million people, voted to leave, the debate on how to interpret the result began, something that appears to be unresolved to this day: the Prime Minister is hoping to renegotiate the new working arrangement already made with the European Union, her hand forced by tribalism within her own party that dates back decades, and an inability for Parliament, with no sense of urgency until the last moment, to reach a consensus at a time when it truly mattered.

I am not happy about the state of anxiety I am forced to endure about Brexit, not least because making fun of politics in the United States is becoming increasingly hypocritical. I can speculate on what will eventually fill the shelves of the Donald Trump Presidential Library, and lament on how the divisive rhetoric is laid at the feet of man named Newt (Gingrich, that is), but this is hypocritical when British politics has fallen prey to the same partisan division. When an entire airline, Flybmi (formerly British Midland International), can collapse in your own country because of the economic effect of Brexit indecision, the same indecision that will add 10% to the cost of a new Porsche, and probably also to the cost of my next iPad – something that could also be released on Friday 29^th March – seemingly the only option left is for me to sit back and take whatever economic hit will be passed through the economy to me by being submitted to International Monetary Fund rules.

Of course, something could be pulled out of the fire, and everything could work out for the best, but anything with as glacial a pace as changing the direction of a country means we should have indicated which way we were going to turn, and whether the country will still be making any cars afterwards. I may be able to bring myself to say more come the end of March, if any consensus in this country is reached about what we actually want – even I may want to see “Tim Burton’s Dumbo” by then.

I WOULDN’T TELL YOU WHERE TO GO [150]

Last time, I vowed to enter Hollywood to sort out the film “Myra Breckinridge,” which I described as the worst film ever made.

I will admit I don’t take my cache as a film critic, of any description, that seriously – I am not Mark Kermode trying to rehabilitate “The Exorcist” here – but there are two ways to create something good from the wreckage of “Myra Breckinridge”: mount a new adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, or go back in time and change the original film.

As interesting as it could be, a new adaptation, in my opinion, will not work: the novel is a satire of a particular moment in Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, its Classical period now over, and the people in charge having been overturned. You could set a remake in its original time period, but you would have to drill the historical context into the audience before expecting them to laugh.

You could try to set it in the present day, with Myra exclaiming about “star quality” in an era where everyone is an open book, and how the franchise-driven Hollywood should return to when it made films like “Easy Rider” and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”. Moreover, a plot that uses rape as a corrective will not fly these days, and a man becoming a woman so they can conquer the sexes won’t make it through the rewrites – you may as well write a different story altogether.

So yes, going back in time to correct the original “Myra Breckinridge” may be the more feasible option here, in an attempt to correct the decisions that made the film turn out the way it did. The simplest choice is to eliminate the two people that caused the most rancour on set: director and co-writer Michael Sarne, and star Mae West.

Sarne’s treatment of the story, constant rewrites during the shoot, and his encouragement of bickering between the cast, produced the film we have. The original director was to have been Bud Yorkin, best known as a producer of TV sitcoms like “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son,” and later of the two “Blade Runner” films, and was replaced with Sarne, originally hired only to re-write the script, but after having directed the “swinging London” film “Joanna,” because it was thought Yorkin would have been too conservative in his direction – his later career would prove otherwise. Not having Sarne write the script would give previous drafts by David Giler, and Gore Vidal, another chance. Thinking about it, if Yorkin turned out not to be available anymore, George Cukor, another name once attached to the film, would have been the perfect director – rather than splice in pieces of Classical Hollywood films to enhance your own film, just get the director of “The Philadelphia Story,” the original “A Star is Born,” and “My Fair Lady” to direct the whole thing.

Why have no Mae West? Her contract to appear in the film was unnecessarily restrictive, requiring her to have two full-scale musical numbers in a film where she plays a talent agent, and having refusal on not only the costumes she wore, but also those of Raquel Welch, the actor playing the lead. One of Welch’s costumes was confiscated by Welch because it was black and white, reasoning only she could wear monochrome clothes. Welch, who later said she couldn’t work out if West herself was a man or not, was having none of it, and stole it back. One costume Welch wore appears as white on camera, but had to be died very light blue, in order to placate West – they both appear in the same scene, but Welch is speaking to a body double.

The most major change I would make would appear on screen. Both Raquel Welch and John Huston wanted to appear in “Myra Breckinridge,” and this shows in their performances, but Welch actively lobbied for her role, even before having read the script – there might have not even been a script to read at that point. She did so in the belief that she would be playing both Myra and Myron, her original male self. However, the male role was given to the film critic Rex Reed, who was promised his character was presented through the conceit of a dream, and would have approval over his sections of the script, therefore changing how the story will be told.

When “Myra Breckinridge” bombed both in reviews and at the box office, sales of the novel dwindled very quickly. Ironically, the film critic Parker Tyler, whose work was appropriated by Myra, including the memorable assertion that no insignificant film was made in Hollywood between 1935 and 1945, saw his work come back into print as a result. Gore Vidal resorted to his own sequel, “Myron,” published in 1975, where Myra enters a film that Myron was watching on television, in a plot likened by the poet Thom Gunn, and used by Vidal in the collected edition of both books I have, as an “Alice Through the Looking Glass” to the original novel’s “Alice in Wonderland.” This time, Myra and Myron talk of themselves as different people, each one a parasite for the other. I’m not a fan of this, but I haven’t properly read it yet either.

I fear I may have Myra Breckinridge on my back for a while, continuing to make sense of her, but I need to write about something else. Both the novel and its sequel are set out in a diary format, using a three-hundred-page ledger, as Myra’s psychiatrist advises her to keep a journal of her thoughts - in the sequel, this becomes how one person knows what the other is doing. Meanwhile, I began 2019 with a ledger of similar size, and I must be expecting something sizeable to happen to me, as I have only reached page 18 so far.

Read the books if you can, and only watch the film for Raquel Welch and John Huston.

COME OUTSIDE (SHOVE IT) [149]

Once upon a time, I thought this was a good idea.

This is the first of a two-part exploration of why the 1970 film “Myra Breckinridge” is the worst film ever made. This first part explains why I think this is the case, and what it has done to me, while the second part will explain what I am going to do about it.

It has taken me nearly ten days to even begin writing about why I think this film is so bad, and it is because I had absolutely no idea where to start, and I needed to have my own reason for thinking so. As someone with a degree in film studies, six years of writing about film online, and a film collection that would have rivalled a Blockbuster Video store, if I’m having trouble trying to write about how bad a film is, it must be pretty bad.

The simplest thing to do is describe the plot. Myra Breckinridge is a film buff who arrives in Hollywood to overturn the degeneracy and method acting that has replaced the production of the films she so loves. In fact, she states her purpose as “the destruction of the last vestigial traces of the traditional man, in order to realign the sexes, decrease the population, with the intent of increasing human happiness, and preparing humanity for its next stage” – I should also say this film is a satire. Myra’s plan is to destroy her late husband Myron’s uncle, the former Western actor Buck Loner, who runs a method acting school on land to which Myron had a claim. She also aims to emasculate one of the students, Rusty, whose idea of how a man should act is to exercise and “ball chicks,” and to launch fellow student Mary Ann into her own career, despite only attending the school to see Rusty, marry him and start a family...

Oh, and Myra is Myron, having had a sex change two years earlier. In carrying out her plan, she will have complete mastery over both sexes, because that’s how that works. Myron also appears in scenes with Myra, making Myra appear less as her own character, “whom no man will ever possess,” and more as a woman-shaped golem carrying out a male fantasy. Myron is played by real-life film critic Rex Reed, who writes to this day for “The New York Observer,” and Myron will eventually be masturbated by Myra, before eventually killing her when she outlives her use. I’m sure that some people took their impression of transgender people from this film, and it does not help that the director, on the DVD commentary, states he thinks transgender people are pathetic are deluded.  

Apart from the plot, “Myra Breckinridge” has a reputation for its incompetent production. The director and co-writer Michael Sarne, an actor and singer best known for the novelty song “Come Outside,” used stock footage of films from Classical Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe, Peter Lorre and Laurel & Hardy to act as a Greek chorus around the footage, commenting on the more modern action. However, in the hands of a director that spent days photographing a table of food, and who would leave the actors and crew waiting while he thought to himself, the stock footage would later be used to glue the plot together, leaving the unintended consequence of Laurel & Hardy being the funniest actors in the film, even when trying not to look at Rusty getting raped by Myra... yes, that happens too.

The only two redeeming features in “Myra Breckinridge” is the acting from Raquel Welch, playing Myra, and John Huston, the director of “The Maltese Falcon,” “Key Largo” and “The African Queen,” playing Buck Loner, who is referred to throughout as “Uncle Buck.” Both actors believe in their roles, and are making the most of their time. Many character and genre actors of the classical Hollywood period are also featured. However, Mae West, in her first role after twenty-seven years, playing the predatory talent agent and singer Leticia Van Allen, is camp as hell, when she needed to be louche – the tone of the whole film could be described that way.

Every film buff knows the drill: for every “Citizen Kane,” there is a “Manos: The Hands of Fate,” and for every “Vertigo,” there is a “Birdemic: Shock and Terror.” The canon of bad movie making has been explored deeply, especially online, a morbid fascination at the results of bad decision making, misplaced intentions, and pure incompetence. Every so often, a film will rise up that has the right mix of all the wrong things, and “Myra Breckinridge” has been celebrated as a disaster ever since a review in “Time” magazine began with: “’Myra Breckinridge’ is about as funny as a child molester. It is an insult to the intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye.”

The prevailing opinion about “Myra Breckinridge” has generally followed the “Time” review, even without seeing it. A DVD was released in 2005, but is now out of print – my copy was bought on eBay some time ago, and despite my owning it, I originally based my decision on the film being the worst ever made on what I already knew about it. To make sure I knew what I was talking about, I watched it in preparation for this article, and had a sleepless night.

Not many films will ever be made about a transgender film critic, and for someone like me, an actual transgender film critic, I am horrified by the portrayal of Myra Breckinridge in her own film as a front for a man with very vivid fantasies – the original book, by Gore Vidal, was not like that, although she reverts back to Myron by the end of the story. The “it was all a dream” ending only makes it worse.

This film turned from something that could be dismissed, into something I must address. Therefore, I must meet this film at its own game – I must meet Myra at her own game. Time to enter Hollywood, and sort this out myself.

(continued next time)

THIS PROGRAM IS BROUGHT TO YOU IN LIVING COLOR [148]

Nowadays, colourising black and white films are normally encountered in programmes with names like “The Second World War in Colour,” or “Hitler in Colour,” but the first time I encountered this practice was a VHS copy of a Laurel & Hardy - a version of their feature film “Way Out West,” the one where they sing “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Now I have a DVD that includes both this and the original black & white version, I will watch the original, because I am older, and know better.

Unless you were actually there as these films were being made, or if you have done exhaustive research on the production design, looking for sources that may no longer exist, your choices for how a black & white film would look in colour may as well be informed guesswork.

Regardless of the original claims made in the 1980s, when this act was prevalent, of providing films that young people were more likely to watch or, even worse, that they would have been made in colour if the option was available at the time, wilfully changing the work of someone else to make money is very circumspect. The worst example I can think of is that 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon” was colourised without the input of its director, John Huston, who was still alive at the time: when interviewed for “Entertainment Tonight” in 1986, Huston said, “I think it is a desecration, it’s an absurdity, it’s a demonstration of the will to corrupt the taste of the multitude.” If you’re going to be pissed off, do it properly.

Turner Entertainment owned many of the films that were colourised in the 1980s - Ted Turner himself stated, "The last time I checked, I owned the films that we're in the process of colourising… I can do whatever I want with them, and if they're going to be shown on television, they're going to be in colour.” Turner Entertainment would actually colourise the last reel of “Citizen Kane” as a test, mainly as a result of the outcry when Ted Turner said he was considering it – “It’s a Wonderful Life” had already been “done” by then. Thankfully taste, and probably also the estate of Orson Welles, stopped the experiment – a fragment of this was shown by the BBC in 1991, as part of the “Arena” documentary “The World of Orson Welles,” and it is a pastel-coloured nightmare.

The worst example of colourising that I have come across was a situation that left you unable to see the original film. Turner owned the original black & white “Popeye” shorts made by Max & Dave Fleischer’s studio for Paramount, and did appear to be the only cartoons I could find that were colourised, until I found out that some early Merrie Melodies cartoons were also colourised, and even some Mickey Mouse films were “done” by Disney. In the case of “Popeye,” Turner sent the films to South Korea, where the film was traced by hand, inked, and coloured. This meant the three-dimensional backgrounds used by the Fleischers were no longer seen. Even worse, the films were originally animated “on ones,” with a drawing every frame for more fluid moment, especially in the limbs of Olive Oyl – the tracing was only made on every other frame, or “on twos,” rendering the action jerky and like a flip book, the resulting twelve frames a second being right on the point where the persistence of vision in your eye turns stationary objects into moving ones. 

[This looks like a piss-take at how badly these were redrawn, but this is just one example.]

[From "A Clean Shaven Man" - I watched the remake to check this was actually true. Wow.]

Fortunately, what came out of this was a mandatory disclaimer stating the film you were watching was modified from its original version. Unbelievably, Frank Capra did sign a deal for “It’s a Wonderful Life” to be colourised, but because the film was then believed to be in the public domain, Capra’s original investment in the process was returned to him, and he joined John Huston’s side. Luckily, this all appears as ancient history now, because once I realised I was not watching “Way Out West” as originally intended, I lost all interest, and found the original version instead.

I HAVE MY BOOKS, AND MY POETRY TO PROTECT ME [147]

Books are the most subjective of objects. For all the facts they contain, for all the journeys their stories can take you, your books are your own, and your bookshelf is a reflection of yourself. To be without books is like being without music - incomprehensible.

The act of parting with a book is a sacred process – it is deliberated, decided, and is given away or sold. Throwing a book away? That’s just not something a civilised person would do, worse than burning a flag. That book could have been for someone, if it wasn’t right for you. I began this year by providing a dozen books to a lending library-type station at my father’s work – half-way through the week, half of them had already been picked up. Good luck to their readers.

When the minimalism guru Marie Kondo, in both her book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying,” and her Netflix series “Tidying Up,” recommended you should keep only thirty books as, “in the end, you are going to read very few of your books again.” When this number was repeated on BBC Radio 4’s “The News Quiz” recently, the audience surprised themselves with the seething sound they produced – a line was crossed. Kondo later clarified that thirty books was her personal preference, and not a target for everyone else, but the very thought of the subject hit a nerve.

For me, a story about burning books came to mind, even if it was the film version of Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451,” co-written and directed by François Truffaut in 1966. Bradbury had written the original novel in 1953, perturbed by the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by Joseph McCarthy, and how they could lead to the burning of books – the title is derived from the temperature at which paper should start to ignite and burn, reflecting the political climate at that time.

The novel has been subjected to censorship, over both its themes and use of swear words, leading to suppression in a few schools. The unthinking irony of an expurgated version being printed, only stopped when Bradbury was informed it had become the only version available, was not lost on the author, who considered himself to be a “preventer of the future,” instead of a predictor.

Having a film made of “Fahrenheit 451” is in itself an irony, except when it is co-written and directed by a French New Wave director that set out to challenge the staid, literary nature of films made in the 1940s and 50s. It was the film critic François Truffaut, writing about the “certain tendency in French cinema,” that turned into Truffaut the “auteur,” his artistic vision in this film expressing itself on top of Bradbury’s story base. Despite this, Truffaut was a lover of books, and this film, where bettering yourself through books is a theme, was also about bettering his craft of filmmaking.

From the startling opening title sequence, the written word is absent: after zooming pictures of TV aerials accompany the spoken opening credits, Truffaut’s camera is left free to document the insidious nature of the Firemen’s tasks in burning the books, from uncovering shelves from behind a TV screen, to setting up a brazier, to rehearsing the use of flame-throwers, and indiscriminately upturning people’s belongings in a park. This is a world where fireman Montag, the lead character, can say, “books disturb people – they make them antisocial.” When one person may be implicated, Bernard Hermann’s music takes a characteristically dramatic turn, and the screen size closes in on them, but when it is realised it is a false alarm, the techniques retreat. Truffaut also reverses the film to show one fireman putting on his fireproof clothes, as if to show how alien his job is about to become. In a couple of scenes, Montag is shown reading a wordless comic strip – images can still form an idea, but the absence of written language prevents full expression, with all possible means.

The most impactful scene is at the house of a book collector, where their entire house, contents and all, is to be burned – with the advent of fire-proof houses, firemen can only start fires. We go through the motions of the throwing of books into a pile, then being prepared to be burned. Their owner, given a count to ten to leave before the burning starts, will not leave. On “9,” she takes out a box of matches. The firemen’s leader has already said that everyone must all be alike, so they must burn all the books – the best thought is no thought. I can’t imagine a human being thinking that.

MAKIN’ FLIPPY FLOPPY, TRYIN’ TO DO MY BEST [146]

So, there I was, looking at the post-Christmas clearance shelves in WHSmith, when it stood out like a sore thumb, that had then been hit by a hammer: a pack of ten 3.5-inch floppy discs, brand new, for £1.99.

The Proustian nostalgia took over: in the days before broadband internet, and when I was studying for my degree, I would download articles from the internet, or more often only the text of a web page, then take a pile of floppy discs home and read them there. I also discovered the Pop Art painter Keith Haring at this time, and still have low-resolution GIF files of his pictures saved from sixteen to seventeen years ago. However, my first encounter with the floppy disc was as part of moving from an 8-bit computer like the Acorn Electron, requiring you to learn BASIC commands to load programmes from cassette tape, to 16-bit models like Commodore’s Amiga line where, once the disc was inserted, the computer knew what to do, and got on with it.

Since then, the nature of computing has changed again, and the achievable ability of a floppy disc, with its maximum 1.44 Mb capacity, was left behind in another decade. Incomprehensible levels of data are flung through the air for every conceivable use. Picture and sound quality for video, music, photographs and apps have dictated the everyday levels of data we expect to have in our grasp – it doesn’t take many lines of code to make an app, but the level of graphics we expect is what takes up the space. If anything is using a floppy disc today, it is something that still has a use, despite something newer being available – something like an old word processer or oscilloscope - or because it is something completely outdated that people want to keep going, much like a Commodore Amiga, or one of those Sony Mavica cameras that had a disc drive inside them.

Of course, I bought the box of discs from WHSmith. I hadn’t seen one in all this time, mainly because I didn’t think they were still being made, but someone must be buying them. I could not find any evidence online that Verbatim, the brand on the box, had made these discs since 2016, which explains why some sellers on Amazon, eBay and the like think they could get away with selling the same box for £20 or more. Other sellers list the discs on their sites as “product unavailable,” most likely not because they no longer offer them, but after having realised they still were.

Now the discs are home, what use can I make of them? Almost none. Saving any picture or sound file to a 1.44 Mb space means you have to take something away from it to make it smaller. Saving a video is a complete non-starter. I took a picture of a disc for this article, and even after cropping it, it was still 2.7 Mb – the picture quality, not just the size, would have to be sacrificed.

Making a song fit a floppy disc was a crushing experience. I chose the one song that everyone appears to like, Toto’s “Africa,” which lasts 4 minutes 55 seconds in its album version. The FLAC version I have of the song, saved from CD without any loss of information, is 34.6 Mb in size – the bitrate is variable, but reaches a maximum of 983 kilobits per second (kbps). This is as good as you are likely to hear “Africa,” without paying extra for a new high-definition master released last year. To reduce it down to an MP3 file of only 1.12 Mb, but while keeping it in stereo, and keeping the same 44.1 kHz sampling rate as the CD, that 983 kbps is reduced to only 32 kbps – the result sounds like you have been placed on hold while on a phone call to your broadband supplier. Saving music to floppy disc is achievable, but at the expense of wanting to listen to the result. In fact, the version of “Africa” I created by converting it to MP3 loses so much of the original, I may be able to claim it as a derivative work, separate from the original.

In truth, only document files can realistically fit on floppy discs – a Microsoft Word document (.docx format) takes up thirteen kilobytes before you add a single word, but you could still fit an average-sized novel before space runs out – “Les Misérables” might need a second disc. In fact, saving a document of your passwords to floppy disc might be a useful encryption tool – who else will be able to read it? Just don’t save it to a format an Amiga can read.

IF YOU’RE BLUE AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE TO GO TO [145]

My home town of Gosport, Hampshire has been in demand recently as a filming location: its 17^th Century Village attraction was used for a recent episode of “Doctor Who;” some of the science fiction horror film “It Lives,” also known as “Twenty Twenty-Four,” was filmed at the Royal Naval Submarine Museum, while the Cold War submarine HMS Alliance, based at the museum, was used in “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Reports included pictures people took of themselves with Jodie Whittaker, Sir Antony Hopkins, Mark Wahlberg, and Bumblebee...

What was not picked up in this reporting is how Gosport has no cinema. 11^th April 2019 will mark twenty years since its last cinema, the Ritz, showed its final film, “LA Confidential.” Rescue attempts came and went, and the Ritz was demolished in August 2001. I began my degree in Film Studies the following month. How can someone like me, steeped in the history of film, come from a town with no cinema. 

The Ritz had only ten years to make its mark on me. The first film I remember seeing was seen there, and it was “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” in 1988. Five years later, I joined people queuing around the block to see “Jurassic Park”, and its sequel four years later. I saw “Titanic” there with my mother’s mother, who once worked there, and had an ice cream during the intermission that had, thankfully, been preserved by the cinema – we rejoined at the scene where the ship hit the iceberg. The final film I saw there, in 1997, was “Starship Troopers,” which made very good use of the sound system, as “Independence Day” and “Batman & Robin” had previously done.

With every single visit, overtures of film soundtrack music played as you found your seat, up to when the curtain opened – the Ritz promised you a special experience every time you visited, even if your film was to be prefaced with the same animated fairground advert for Cadbury’s Chrunchie bar every time, which they just about did. The Ritz also once accidentally ran the title of their matinee and evening performances together above the front door, creating “The Fox and the Hound Die Hard With a Vengeance.”

This period of time charted the evolution of blockbuster films into “tentpole” productions, as studios banked more money, and their success, on fewer key films. The first multiplex cinema opened in the UK in 1985, supplanting the single screen picture palace found in town centres. However, the Ritz, which seated around 1,200 people in its stalls and balcony, promoted itself as the biggest single screen on the South Coast, approaching the 48-foot screen found at the Odeon Leicester Square. The cinema could have been converted into two screens, across the balcony, and a dividing wall could have made it four, but by the time that sort of thing was considered, you could already get that experience out of town.

This is all right me saying this now, but I was still only fourteen years old when I saw “Starship Troopers” – the films were big, the sound was loud, and to this day, I have never sat before a bigger screen. It is difficult for that sort of experience to not have an effect on you, and for it to be so accessible – within half an hour’s walk from my house – I have been spoiled for every cinema experience I’ve had since, with every single visit to every single multiplex having been judged against it. I may have to move closer to Leicester Square.

However, my experience at the Ritz is tempered by how it became more and more run down over time. If it was ever renovated, it was before 1982, and the red carpets were sticky. The toilets were one level below the public toilets found outside, and if a seat in the auditorium was broken, it was removed, and never replaced. Some of the remaining seats felt like the foam had to be bolstered with cardboard, because they were. Eventually, the balcony closed. For this decline to happen, there had to be a chance of replacing the cinema altogether, and indeed there was.

For me, the only cinema in Gosport has been the Ritz, but when it opened on 11^th March 1935 - with a showing of the MGM film “What Every Woman Knows” (based on the play by J.M. Barrie – yes, that one) - it was competing with three other cinemas: the Gosport Theatre in the High Street, the Olympia Picture House in Stoke Road, and the Criterion Cinema in Forton Road. All of these were opened between 1910 and 1912, when films only reached one or two reels in length, but were now shown in places with more comfortable seats than the old nickelodeons. Both the Gosport Theatre and the Olympia closed in 1938, but another new cinema, the Forum, opened just across from the Olympia in the following year. So, when the Ritz was bombed on 10^th January 1941, there was no great clamour to reopen it straight away, as audiences went elsewhere.

When the Ritz reopened in 1958, trading its original restaurant for a Cinemascope screen (but kept the bar open), the success of television, which reached the South of England in 1954, ultimately closed the Forum, making way for a car showroom and petrol station, before being demolished to make way for a supermarket. The Criterion also closed in 1968, but remains open to this day as a bingo hall. Even when it stood alone, the Ritz closed for a time between 1982 and 1985, around the point when home video caused cinema audiences in the UK to reach an all-time low, and was sold to Gosport Borough Council, which later leased it to new operators. Applications were made to the council in 1991 and 1998 to replace the building with a new five-screen multiplex – the last of these was approved, but never built. When the Ritz was demolished, the application to build there was made by another supermarket, with a Job Centre built next door.

Today, the only cinema of any sort in Gosport is “The Ritz Cinema @ St Vincent,” a volunteer-run effort based out of a sixth-form college, running fortnightly screenings of recent films. The last attempt to open a permanent cinema was a rejected 2004-05 plan to convert a slaughterhouse in a former Royal Navy yard – yes, I did type that. The Ritz cinema is an experience not really done anymore, but here is the thing with that: from the all-time low of 1984, the number of admissions to UK cinemas in 2018 are around twenty per cent more than in 1999, reaching levels not seen since the early 1970s. People want to have an experience, and it may be time for someone to build a big, red, opulent picture palace once again, and if I ever win the lottery, I know just where I’ll build mine.