THE BIOSCOPE
By HELEN McGREGOR
IF you're naughty, I shan't take you to the Bioscope on Friday."
Thirty-five years ago, that threat of mother's had the desired effect of immediately bludgeoning us into good behaviour. To children whose previous professional entertainment in the winter months had consisted of an occasional improving magic-lantern lecture (Biblical or temperance subjects predominated), and an even rarer visit of a thirty-third-rate touring company performing The Face at the Window or Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Bioscope was an almost un- bearably thrilling novelty. Synonymous with the word " Bioscope " was the name of Mr. D., the enterprising gentleman who rented our local Pavilion every Friday and Saturday evening from October until, I think, May, when the season proper (heraldically speaking) began.
Our family always went on the Friday, Saturday being reserved for what was known, no doubt libellously, as The Rabble. Even on the Friday, however, really respectable people withheld their patron- age. Apart from a few furtive town councillors, who were un- charitably said to have got in on free passes, an eccentric old spinster and her two snuffling pet dogs, and an English bird-of-passage family, we had the balcony to ourselves. The reason why we dared to defy Scottish small-town opinion was that father, as science master at the Grammar School, was reputed to be studying the Bioscope for scientific reasons. The children of the other teachers envied us our alibi, and now, in this the jubilee year of the invention of moving pictures, we, unlike our contemporaries, can boast of our pioneering days.
True, my memories are necessarily non-chronological and kaleidoscopic, but the " atmosphere " of those Friday nights is vivid. I remember the burring noise of the Bioscope, rather like that of a modern electric road drill. It was not until later that anybody thought of employing a pianist to thump out " Destiny " as a dis- traction. Vivid, too, is my impression of the staccato movements 3f the actors, and the scratches and flickers which created the illu- sion of constant rain. I remember the tedious waits between each reel, when the one film had to be unwound before the other could be wound on, and the constant "technical hitches." I remember the intense cold of the draughty Pavilion, the brass studs on the chairs pressing into my thighs, and the cat-calls from downstairs whenever anybody passed in front of the Bioscope operator's window and we saw on the screen the giant silhouette of Mr. D. or his manager.
I remember films in which Red Indians, having put in some eAcellent overtime with their tomahawks, celebrated their final vic- tory over the white settlers by burning- the settlement and dancing joyously round the flames. The mortality among white settlers, to judge from the Bioscope, must have been so high that it is a wonder modern America is not entirely Red Indian. I remember films in which lumbering stage-coaches were held up by Wild West Dick Turpins, and I remember being thrilled by the sight of intrepid and embarrassingly well-developed young women, in the role of Sheriff's daughter, galloping across miles of desert. Despite the maturity of their figure, they always had their hair hanging in an impressive cable down their back, and they wore daringly short skirts. The standard of cowgirl facial beauty was low. I remember films in which convicts in blinding striped uniforms escaped with almost monotonous regularity, and I remember glamorous little girls with obvious curly wigs and voluminous did-her-mother-use-So-and-So's- Washing-Powder white nightgowns, praying, dying or being kid- napped. I remember associating Wild West films with a pleasant reddish-brown colouring, and " mushy " romantic films with moon- light blue and dense shadows.
In those pioneering days we went to see the Bioscope, and we did not know until the film unrolled itself before us what kind of enter- tainment Mr. D. had provided for us on this particular Friday. In that respect we were no worse off than Mr. D. himself, who trust- ingly hired films in Glasgow and, one presumes, hoped for the best. After all, he knew that there would be no indignant letters written to the papers, because those who went to the Bioscope left their
critical spirit at home. Censorship must, I think, have been almost unknown. There was one film, called The Hands, which, in retro- spect, makes the most Horrific of modern Horrific films seem as placid as an early Shirley Temple. For years afterwards I was
terrified of the dark, waiting for the white hands of the maniac to wave themselves in front of me, an unpleasant preliminary to the actual strangling in which he delighted. At the other end of the
entertainment scale was a " comic " which deserves a new paragraph. This " comic " evoked such prolonged guffaws that the Pavilion manager, or it may have been Mr. D. himself, came out of his office
to find out why the Argyllshire audience, which usually sat in stolid silence, should be reacting to the film in this robust way. One look at the screen told him all he wished to know. He yelled to the operator to stop turning the handle, but his yells could not be heard above the full-throated roar of the Bioscope. Then, with superb presence of mind, he wrenched his bowler hat from his head and held it in front of the shaft of light until the bawdy reel had ended. There was no next reel. Mr. D. was taking no chances, and the show came to an untimely end. On the following evening there was the largest audience that there had ever been in the Pavilion for a Bioscope performance, but Mr. D. had spent the morning dashing up to Glasgow to exchange the offending film tor one guaranteed to be comparatively respectable. That Friday night was one of the few occasions when we were not at the Bioscope. A cold had kept us at home. It would have been interesting to have studied father's reactions to the film.
Father's preferences were for films dealing with a fat cook—I think they were known as the Betty films—and a comely dimpled damsel named Lilian somebody. He approved highly, too (on scientific grounds, of course) of coloured films, especially one called The Lust of Gold, or The Curse of Greed. It ended with a sunset so uproarious that a modern Technicolor producer would have grown wan with envy. We children preferred "comics," especially those in which paper-hangers worked with such unseemly speed that they would certainly have been expelled from any reputable paper-hangers' union. It must have been about that time, too, that, sandwiched between raw Westerns and custard-throwing "comics," we saw what father called " powerful " films—Pippa Passes (surely the most perfect ready-made film scenario), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Cry of the Children (effectively combining propa- ganda and pathos), and two films which father and I could hardly see because of our spate of tears—Little Boy Blue (a film transcript of Eugene Field's poem) and The Children's Home, in which "That high-born child and the beggar passed homew ird side by side, For the somethings-of-earth are narrow, but the gates of Heaven are wide."
But the days of Mr. D.'s Bioscope were numbered. Shortly before the eruption of the 1914 war some astute business men rea- lised that moving pictures had come to stay, and they built in our town a real picture-house, with red plush tip-up seats, a full-time pianist, and a performance every evening. The name Bioscope passed out of our language, and we now spoke of going to "the pictures." The odd thing was that "the pictures" were respectable, and people who would have been horrified to go to the Bioscope packed the picture-house. It was at the picture house that I saw my first "serial," featuring a side-whiskered gentleman named Francis Ford, and a damsel, Grace Cunard, in the role of "Lucille Love." Then, too, I became aware of individual actors—John Bunny (the perfect Pickwick), and the angular Flora Finch, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Drew (what a pair of dears they were), and a Frenchman called, I think, Max Linder. Then, too, I heard my first cinema vocalist—a red-nosed worthy known as Charlie, who in a husky voice avowed from the side of the stage, " Elaine, Elaine, you set my heart aflame." There were tittered murmurs that the beautiful blonde Pearl White seemed to have had an equally inflammatory effect on Charlie's nose. But we had to pay for such luxuries! The best seats at the picture house cost one shilling for adults and sixpence for children. At Mr. D's Bioscope we had rattled into the front row of the balcony for a total outlay of Is. tod.—ninepence each for father and mother and twopence each for we children. The day of the super-cinema was dawning!
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