Last night we finally went to the Electric Palace at Harwich. The Electric Palace is one the UK's oldest remaining purpose built cinemas, and is Grade II* listed. It first opened in 1911, closed again in 1956, and reopened in 1981, four years before we moved to the area, so it shows a sad lack of organisation on our part that we didn't get round to visiting until 2013.
It is now run as a community cinema. They show current releases, a few weeks after you could have seen them in a mainstream cinema, and put on jazz concerts. I meant to go eighteen months ago to see The Deep Blue Sea, thinking that Terence Davies' painstakingly evoked period charms of a love triangle between an upright but dull judge, a dashing but flaky fighter pilot, and a beautiful but bored wife would benefit from the baroque surroundings. However, by the time I got round to looking at the Electric Palace website I found that The Deep Blue Sea had been on about two months previously.
This time I thought Behind the Candelabra would fit the bill nicely, and was so fired up not to miss the film that I rang several days beforehand to ask whether it was possible to buy tickets in advance. The man (volunteer) who answered the telephone sounded slightly nonplussed. There was no facility for advance ticket sales, but he really did not think that would be necessary. I did know that it was a members-only film club? I said that I was aware of that, and thought it was possible to buy temporary membership for a pound. He agreed that was so, and advised me to arrive a little early, say at seven, to give time to sort it out.
We duly arrived at seven for the half past seven screening, to find the metal grille across the front of the cinema firmly shut, and two people ahead of us in the queue. They were joined by two more people who were obviously with them, and then several others, at which point we discovered that by local convention the queue at The Electric Palace went the other way down the pavement, and we were not in it. The gates remained shut, and the Systems Administrator asked hopefully if we had time to nip down the road for a pint in The Alma. I said not, because we had to sort out the temporary membership.
At ten past seven the gates opened. It took a long time for the woman (volunteer) to process the queue, partly because she seemed to know everybody in it, and was updating them on her operation, and how she had been checked out and did not have deep vein thrombosis. Which was nice for her. The woman ahead of us in the queue caused further delays by contradicting everything her companion said about their ticket purchase. It turned out that she had not understood that her friend's membership had lapsed and that the the friend was trying to renew it as well as pay for their tickets. We got to the front of the queue, and I asked for two tickets and temporary membership. The volunteer said without blinking that that would be fourteen pounds, and gave me two tickets. So much for arriving early to sort out the temporary membership. I thought at least they would go through the motions and take names and addresses.
The inside of the Electric Palace is amazing, well worth driving to Harwich for and then spending fifteen minutes standing on the pavement and paying out fourteen pounds, when we could have got Behind The Candelabra quite soon on LoveFilm. I don't know if it strictly counts as Art Nouveau, or if you would say it was a very late flowering of the Baroque, but there is lots and lots of swirly plasterwork painted in quite a lot of different colours. The seats are covered in red velvet, and generously broad, with ample leg room. At the front is a little booth with advertising drinks and ice creams in a pleasingly mid-twentieth century font. It was not nearly full. Most locals sat near the back, and I wondered whether they knew something about the screen or the acoustics that we didn't. The SA said we could sit at the back and have a snog, but we opted for a row about half way down, which we had almost entirely to ourselves.
I'd forgotten that you get trailers at the cinema. We sat through twenty minutes of advertisements for cars, advertisements for alcoholic drinks (an unfortunate combination, surely), an advertisement urging us to be more dog (I still don't have a clue what that was about), a trailer for an animated film called Epic about a forest threatened with destruction which I will certainly not be watching, a trailer for Joss Whedon's black and white version of Much Ado About Nothing filmed in his own house when he had a week off, which looked rather good (Kermode and Mayo liked that one in their Film Review), and a trailer for a new channel 4 drama called Southcliffe which looked very violent and depressing, but fortunately I seemed to have got all the key plot points after seeing the trailer so there is no need to watch it.
Behind the Candelabra is a very good film. Kermode and Mayo chose it as their film of the week, and quoted another critic as saying that Michael Douglas gave the performance of his life. I haven't seen enough of Michael Douglas' films to judge that, though by a curious twist one of the last three films we've seen in a cinema was also one of his. That was Falling Down, released in 1993, which shows how often we go. Behind the Candelabra is about the affair between the ageing Liberace and a young man called Scott Thorson. Hollywood wouldn't touch the gay theme, and it ended up being made by HBO, which adds weight to the theory that Hollywood has lost its way, and the innovative work in the States is increasingly being done on television (The Sopranos, anyone?). Behind the Candelabra is deeply engaging as a story of human relationships, and the destructive powers of drugs, with some brilliant comic moments thrown in. About the only female characters in it are Liberace's mother, Scott Thorson's foster mother, and a housemaid, but you completely forget that it is a gay movie. You just believe in the characters. Or at least, I did. Rotten Tomatoes give it 94 per cent, meaning that so did a lot of other people.
The audience was almost impeccably behaved. There was a tiny amount of sweet packet rustling for the first five minutes, and then complete silence, until a particularly key moment ten minutes before the end of the film, when somebody's phone rang. The culprit, a woman at the end of our row, knew she'd done wrong, because she was out of there before the credits had fairly started rolling. Otherwise I'd have given her a crash course in the Wittertainment Code of Conduct while we queued for the exit. I'd remembered to turn my phone off, even though I have it set to vibrate only. It's not that difficult.
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