RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31124, 29 July 1966, Page 22

RANDOM REMINDER

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT

Because modern science has not yet provided us with the ways and means of being in two places at one and the same time, we were unable to attend the film session at the Port Chalmers theatre which began at midnight on Friday, July 15 and finisbat 7 a.m. on Saturday, July 16, some eight hours before the kick-off in the first Rugby test at Dunedin. But there is a test match to be played in Christchurch later on, and our curiosity may be satisfied then, if some enterprising cinema manager decides to stage the same sort of session. The Port Chalmers price was 10s, for all night, take it or leave it. The intriguing feature of the arrangement was that there was

transport to and from Dunedin, and the probability was that the whole lot of cinema patrons descended on the city en masse around about 7.30 p.m. It would seem, without being too imaginative, a somewhat macabre spectacle. After all, put yourself in one of those cinema seats. You had a very distinctive fi ve o’clock shadow at five o’clock. By midnight, when you sat down to view the first of the excellent supports, you looked rather like a coconut. At 7 a.m., when you came blearily out to greet the dawn, you resembled an escaped convict, out for a week in the buah. And so did all the others around you. What is more W k U . W be fee,,n « « little below par. Maybe there were three feature films. But if they averaged

about 100 minutes In length, that only accounts for five hours of the seven. There must have been a lot of shorts, lots of intervals, lots of cups of the coffee they said was provided. It can not have been really comfortable with the love scenes spoiled by the heavy snoring of patrons who looked as if they were in the waiting room of a refugee caiqp. It was a place, that cinema, for the footballing homeless, and the mob scene at the end would surely have frightened the lives out of anyone who chanced upon the surging wave of scrufflnew. It would have done beautifully for a strike action sequence, or something like "Fury,” for one of those all-night movies put on to keep people off ths streets.