. . . YOU CAN ROLL IT AGAIN THERE, JACK!
Geoff Rose
Going to the cinema is one of the pleasures of city living, a chance to escape from the reality of life to the celluloid world of the silver screen, but to some people it has become a way of life, a way of making your living at a job which gives you and thousands of others pleasure, I’m talking of the man who shows the film from his perch high up at the back of the cinema, in the projection room. For the greater part of 35 years, Jack Parle has been showing films in cinemas in Kilkenny, and in that time he has seen more changes in cinema than most of us can even remember, starting off as an Apprentice Projectionist, for which he served 5 years, and working steadily to his present position as Manager/Projectionist with a staff of 5 people, although he remembers a time when the staff compliment was as high as 12, this was during the war years, when cinema was in one of it’s greatest periods.
Talking to Jackie in his office above the Savoy, a cinema he has been with since around 1954, having previously worked in the Regent for 6 years, one is immediately impressed by his wide knowledge and obvious love for his job, and he spoke at length about the early era of Cinema, when characters like “Boston Blackie, Private Eye” and Buck Jones ruled the screen and the imaginations of the cinema going public. The serial or ‘follier upper’ was the most popular form of cinema of the time, and serials like Flash Gordon with Buster Crabbe, now enjoying another lease of life on R.T.E. television, as well as ‘The Black Coin,’ and in the late 1940’s ‘Gang Buster’ had every one wondering ‘Whodunnit’ right up to the last reel of film. An interesting piece of history was revealed to me by Jack, who said that the site of the present V.G. store in Parliament St. was the home of cinema in the late 1920’s, and was run by the pioneering Stallard family, before they moved up to Patrick St.
As regards modern cinema, Jack feels that there has been great strides, both in presentation and sound of film in the last 20 years, and as an example of a film that has stood the test of time both in terms of quality and technical expertise Jack cites “Gone with the Wind” as the outstanding film, and is possibly one of his own personal favourites, along with “Keys of the Kingdom” a 1944 film, starring Gregory Peck, as a 19th century Scottish priest in China.
It seems the day of the Childrens Matinee have all but vanished, due mainly to the economics of showing a film, and the increasing overheads, although they used to show matinees on Saturdays and Sundays, but these have been discontinued since the mid sixties. The trend now is towards late-night cinema, and the Savoy has been showing films of the calibre of “The Graduate” and “All the Presidents Men” and “Papillon” this past few months,-and the idea has clicked with the public, even though it means working very unsocial hours for the staff. The popular idea that the projectionist also acts as Censor when it comes to, the running time of films or he cuts out the pieces of film that don’t meet with his approval, is simply not true, and Jack went to great lengths to explain to me the method by which the film gets to the screen, and there is no way that it can be tampered with. Like all occupations there is a humorous side to his work, and a story concerning the Marx brothers film ‘The Big Store’ is a case in point. It seems that Jack received an urgent phone call from the distributor of the film telling him that as the film had an under 18 certificate would he mind having a look at the film and see the reason for this, so Jack duly ran the film, and all he could see was a pin-up on a calendar, lasting all of a few seconds! It seems that the film when originally shown in the 1930’s had caused the censor to issue it with an u-18 cert, and the stamp had remained with in the intervening years! How times have changed!
In his free time Jack likes to sink the black on the snooker table, and his proficiency with the cue is well known in Kilkenny, he sees the future of cinema going as being as healthy, as it has always been, although there was a slight fall-off in ‘houses’ in the mid-sixties, but with increased leisure time at their disposal,, people are returning to the cinema, and the pleasures of their childhood, up there on the giant screen, riding the plains with their cowboy heroes, or getting the woman at the end of a modern thriller, as they munch their way through another bag of potato crisps.