Husband-and-wife team Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna play a newly married couple who inherit a dilapidated cinema (and its elderly, incompetent and equally dilapidated staff), and try to restore it to something like it's original glory. However they soon discover that it's not going to be as easy as perhaps they first thought. There is competition from a huge modern cinema just across the street, which is in need of a car-park. The site of the old "Bijou" would be just the thing.
This is a terrific comedy (written by Basil Dearden), and features Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles as the cinema staff, and Leslie Phillips as the Bijou owner's solicitor.
Any American, or indeed any youngster, watching this movie might be slightly bemused, and consider it all a bit implausible. I can tell them that it's not, and so can any Brit over a certain age. When this film was made, every town in the UK had a "flea-pit" (i.e. it's very own "Bijou"). In the town in which I was raised, it was called "The Select".
Events depicted in this movie happened at these cinemas on a regular basis. The films shown were usually as decrepit as the cinema itself. (In the case of the "Select" they were usually the awful B&W "horror" movies which no other theatre would show. If the film didn't break at least once, or a reel was put on the projector in time, and/or was not in the wrong order, you were there on a lucky night.) For all of us of the age, to re-watch this little memorial to the old flea-pit, is a real nostalgic blast from the past, and I defy any newcomers to the movie, not to warm to it, either from it's occasional pathos and/or it's hilarious comedy. So go on, take my advice, have a good scratch, and watch it. The film may be fiction, but what you see actually happened!
This is a terrific comedy (written by Basil Dearden), and features Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles as the cinema staff, and Leslie Phillips as the Bijou owner's solicitor.
Any American, or indeed any youngster, watching this movie might be slightly bemused, and consider it all a bit implausible. I can tell them that it's not, and so can any Brit over a certain age. When this film was made, every town in the UK had a "flea-pit" (i.e. it's very own "Bijou"). In the town in which I was raised, it was called "The Select".
Events depicted in this movie happened at these cinemas on a regular basis. The films shown were usually as decrepit as the cinema itself. (In the case of the "Select" they were usually the awful B&W "horror" movies which no other theatre would show. If the film didn't break at least once, or a reel was put on the projector in time, and/or was not in the wrong order, you were there on a lucky night.) For all of us of the age, to re-watch this little memorial to the old flea-pit, is a real nostalgic blast from the past, and I defy any newcomers to the movie, not to warm to it, either from it's occasional pathos and/or it's hilarious comedy. So go on, take my advice, have a good scratch, and watch it. The film may be fiction, but what you see actually happened!