Tony Andrews (Warradale)
In the Xmas holidays of 1950-51, when I was eight years old, we travelled the 150 miles to Adelaide from Gulnare in the Mid-North to take up residence in our brand-new house at Warradale Park. Living at Warradale Park at the time was in many ways just like still being in the country. Our house was one of three Trust homes in a row and opposite an older red brick house, but there were very few other houses in the rectangle bounded by Morphett Road, Sturt Road, Brighton Road, and the train line until you got near to Brighton Road itself. There were Trust homes going up around us, but they were scattered about and only gradually filled the streets.
In 1952 the Warradale Picture Theatre opened in the Warradale Institute, a fifteen-minute walk from home. The Bughouse was furnished with wooden chairs for the neighbourhood kids attending the Saturday matinees, and for which I paid my eleven pence to the proprietor, projectionist, and purveyor of interval-time lollies. I asked why the tickets weren’t a shilling, and I was told that if they were a shilling they would then have to be taxed.
I sat jammed in one of the middle seats, far from the rowdy older boys up the back, who provided their own soundtrack to the action up on the screen. When things got too loud the proprietor would stop the film and make an appeal from the front of the hall; this had at best a temporary effect. Love scenes interrupting the action in Roy Rogers or Tarzan were invariably met with a hail of lolly papers at the screen. Dean Martin’s singing during a Martin and Lewis film was inaudible. At the interval, the proprietor would open the door to the room behind the screen where a table was set up with lollies. Here I bought musk lolly sticks, hard and chewy White Knights, Fantales with the potted biographies of film stars on the lolly paper – too good to throw at the screen – liquorice straps to be dissected thin strip by thin strip, anything guaranteed to attack the enamel of the teeth. The children crowded round the table, and it was necessary to jump and shout to get the attention of the proprietor.
Over time I saw the early Marx Brothers films at the Bughouse, and I grew to delight in the anarchy of Harpo, his horn blowing and his overcoat with its bottomless pockets; but his harp solos always produced the inevitable hail of lolly papers. The Bughouse showed a main feature, never very current, sometimes twenty years old, and a B-movie which was shown before the interval, formulaic, only about an hour long, and often more entertaining to my undeveloped taste than the main flick. Many of these were war films, made with the planes, ships, jeeps and other paraphernalia left over from the war, which was still very recent, and interspersed, not very convincingly, but thrillingly, with live footage from the war. I particularly liked the aerial shots, great convoys of aeroplanes, and nothing was more exciting than the shots of planes spiralling down with smoke pouring from their engines, hitting the ground with an explosion or the sea with a great splash, though nothing like the CGI effects of today, and none the worse for that; and the thrill was not lessened by the appearance of the same shots over and over again in many different films. A perennial topic for discussion for us children, born during the war, was ‘who did we hate most, the Germans or the Japs?’, and various points of view would be earnestly put forward, influenced no doubt by whatever had been the latest low-budget war movie.
There was always a serial: The Scarlet Horseman, although his cloak could have been any colour as most films were in black-and-white; Roy Rogers – guitar playing and singing (lolly papers – Dale, love interest, lolly papers – and the very odd fact that he not only rode a horse like any other cowboy such as Hopalong Cassidy, but he also drove a pick-up, further confusing my meagre grasp of history; Rocketman with his rocket pack strapped to his back, who conveniently always took off at an angle from behind a car or any other object able to hide the mechanism that propelled him the few yards off-screen on his wire, and who was next seen flying horizontally past the back-projection of clouds, only to land later with a half stumble as if he had jumped into the frame, as indeed he had; The Cisco Kid, and so on.
The serial finished each week with the hero falling from a train to his likely death, or otherwise being seriously imperilled, but next week he would be seen not to have fallen after all, but to be clinging to the side of the train/wagon/plane in direct contradiction to what we had seen with our own eyes only the week before, and which we remembered. And yet I loved them, and I loved the cartoons, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse. Two or three times a year they showed Twenty Cartoons, an irresistible delight eagerly looked forward to. I soon became aware that they all had, more or less, the same plot, and those twenty cartoons were like twenty servings of cake, and not as satisfying as the normal three-course Saturday show, but by the time the next Twenty Cartoon promise came along I was just as keen for another helping of the indigestible fare.