The Bug House
John Braine
NO-ONE EVER uses the little cinemas official name, a
Greek-French hybrid suggesting racecourses and leopard-
skin seats. It was opened some forty years ago as the
Bug House, and the Bug House it will remain to the
natives.
It has none of the trimmings of the big-circuit cinemas
no neon signs, no glossy stills from the current film, no
huge foyer with ankle-deep carpeting, no coloured
photographs of the stars. Its size and prices of admission
(sevenpence and tenpence, half-price for children) permit
only the irreducible minimum: a poster in dropsical
display faces a century out of date, a timetable of
features over the paybox, and a tiny lobby opening
directly on to the street. Through the door of the
auditorium float out scraps of dialogue: You cant do
this to me, Watch out Tex, that gun is loaded, I am the Hooded
Terror, and, gaspingly, through blood in the throat,
The treasures in the And then theres the whine of of being the only person left alive in the whole world.
bullets again or the dull matter-of-fact thud of bombs
or the hysterical scream of sirens or the high-pitched
violin which means that Something Is Coming Out of
Space. There are softer sounds toothe quivering sweet-
ness of Tin Pan Alley music with its suggestion of an
enormous emptiness in the background, like blancmange
eaten in the Gobi Desert, and the husky voices that say
I love you, Baby and I shouldnt have done that, and, sooner
or later. This thing is bigger than both of us. One feels an
eavesdropper, theres something sad and Noah-naked
about these sounds from the darkness.
But inside it isnt sad. Theres a smell as scruffy and
cheerful as the children who fill the placeorange,
chocolate, horsehair, tobacco, and the ghost of geraniums
from the accumulation of disinfectant with which an
old man in a shabby uniform, a long-service private in
the glittering army of commissionaries, deluges the
theatre at the interval. The old man has long ago given
up the attempt to keep the children in order; they yell
greetings to one another, climb over the seats, run up
and down the aisle at breakneck speed, and make an
extraordinary number of visits to the Gents and the
Ladies. The cinema might have been designed for
them; its open-back seats are so narrow and closely-
spaced that a normal adult sits with his knees either up
to his chin or pressing into the person in front, his elbows
digging into his neighbours. And each row of seats is
Elegy for a provincial cinema
bolted together, so that when the children sway back-
wards and forwards together (Hiyo Silver!) everyone
moves with them. Whether you like it or not, youre
part of the audience at the Bug House.
The children come for sociability, for the raw material
of their games, for bright words to decorate their con-
versation, even to have the future make promises to
thema house with a swimming-pool, a private
aeroplane, a girl like Jane Russell. The old, who are,
together with the children, the backbone of the audience,
come for oblivion, gulping it down like strong tea.
Theyre past the age for games and they know just what
the futures promises are worth. Theyre quite content
in the warm and noisy darkness, giving their feet and
worries a rest; and for those who live alone, theres even
the illusion of a sort of family life, the rowdy innocence
of the children around them chasing away the feeling
The Bug House offers something else, though. It
reduces films to their essentials, it knocks off their veneer.
It not only underlines the impact of a first-rate film, it
brings out the startling excellences scattered throughout
the mediocre. Films seen there stick in the memory for
years, the inward eye prizes details like the policemans
cape dripping with rain in the stuffy parlour, the grace-
ful clumsiness and slow speed of a giraffe, the bearded
soldier screaming like a fractious child under the boiling
oilone has been awarded moments of truth, instan-
taneous and exact descriptions of life and death and
geography, of the huge variousness of existence.
For its easy, in the plushy comfort of the super-
cinema, to take the film for granted, as if it grew
naturally out of the screen; we find nothing marvellous
about the shining curves of a new Bentley being impelled
by the ignition of petrol vapour. Its only when a
Model T, square, frail, antique, chugs past us, shaking
with the vehemence of its greed for movement, that we
realise that internal combustion is a technical miracle,
And perhaps its only in cinemas like the Bug House that
we capture the true flavour of the film, that, however
blase weve become about it, we can, in that atmosphere
so close to the sideshow and the nickelodeon of the in-
dustrys early days, suddenly perceive with a shock of
delight that these shadows are telling us a story, that
these pictures really move.
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