Jonathan Melville: Just forget about the recession and go to the movies

Published on Friday 3 April 2009 09:45

A LOOK at what's on at Edinburgh cinemas over the coming week.

HAVE you been to the movies recently? As the UK slumps further into recession, the gloom of news programmes and the plethora of 'shiny floor' shows such as Strictly Come Ice Dancing increasingly trying viewers' patience, cinema attendance is on the rise. Cineworld recently announced that takings are up more than six per cent in 2008/2009.

Seeking solace in the plush seats of your local cinema, while the world outside becomes increasingly stressful, isn't a new phenomenon.

During America's Great Depression of the 1930s, the public, tired of high unemployment, low profits and falling confidence in banks, needed an escape.

They turned out in their droves to the cinema for an evening's cheap entertainment, main feature films padded out with cartoons, newsreels and shorter secondary films, or B-movies, to extend run times.

B-movies were generally the product of an area of Hollywood known as Poverty Row, where budgets were low and production standards even lower.

Here, cowboys brushed shoulders with femme fatales and fedora-wearing gangsters as studios churned out Westerns and film noirs that would thrill and entertain the masses for a fraction of the cost to cinema managers than their big budget siblings.

Arriving near the tail-end of the B-movie boom was Gun Crazy (1950), re-released at the Filmhouse from today and part of a double bill with Kiss Me Deadly (1955) at the Cameo on April 19.

John Dall and Peggy Cummins star as a husband and wife Bart and Annie who go on a crime spree while armed to the teeth with, you guessed it, guns – as the poster of the time screamed: 'Thrill Crazy, Kill Crazy, Gun Crazy!'

Fast-paced and featuring an audacious one-take bank-heist scene that has been much discussed over the years, Gun Crazy depicts a bleak future for the USA, centring on a couple with no desire to conform to the ethics of society.

Described as 'one of the best American films ever made' by Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant', Gun Crazy has punched far above its weight in terms of its cinematic posterity.

While modern audiences flock to see Marley and Me, take this opportunity to glimpse what past generations were rewarded with in times of economic hardship and wonder if we're not being short-changed in more ways than one.

If you enjoy Gun Crazy, a new range of film noirs started to appear on DVD this week, beginning with Trapped (1949), Quicksand (1950) and Woman on the Run (1950). While the prints used appear to be low quality public domain copies, the films themselves are intriguing, with Quicksand's tagline almost worth the price of the DVD: 'For $20 – and a girl who wanted mink – he's plunging into Quicksand!' Priceless.

Staying in the past, the Filmhouse are showing 1962's Stanley Kubrick-directed Lolita from today until Sunday. Starring James Mason and Peter Sellers, the controversial film tells of a man's unhealthy obsession with a young girl that ends in murder.

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