The Picture House (By Oliver Farry

By Oliver Farry

The Irish revolutionary and theorist of guerrilla warfare Michael Collins was probably being a bit harsh on Irish villages and small towns when he described them as ‘hideous medleys of contemptible dwellings and mean shops and squalid public houses’ but it’s true that, having arrived late to the game of urbanisation, they have long lacked an architectural and aesthetic cohesiveness. We are mostly absent of the quaint tidy villages that are common across the Irish Sea and on many parts of the continent. A few historic buildings aside – usually a church built in the wake of Catholic Emancipation in the 19th century – Ireland’s smaller urban settlements are largely devoid of interesting architecture. Some of that has changed in the more prosperous recent past but not hugely – the built environment in smaller towns is overwhelmingly cheap and functional.

In the mid-twentieth century there reigned a brief exception to this reality, one that would bestow a patina of glamour on some of the most unexceptional towns of the country. These were the cinemas. Picture palaces, many of them designed by major architectural figures such as Michael Scott (The Ritz in Athlone) and John McBride Neill (The Tonic in Bangor, County Down), sprouted up in towns as one-horse as those in the Westerns that many of them screened. Peripatetic entrepreneurs had first brought films to rural Ireland, screening them in parish halls but when purpose-built cinemas arrived, they were flagships for the modernity that was beginning to elbow its way into the Irish provinces. The cinemas would be a physical embodiment of the new, sitting in town centres like expensive shiny baubles, like the great big Cadillacs brought back from the States by local lads done well.

My home town, Ballymote in County Sligo, got its own picture house in 1947. It wasn’t the first one in town – a Longford man named Denis Conroy had been showing films in the old Hibernian Hall since the early thirties and screenings continued there right up to the week the new cinema opened. This cinema, located opposite the fair green, where Pearse Road and Teeling Street peel off from one another, was as different from the old liner docked at the confluence of two of Ballymote’s four streets. Designed in a subdued small-town variant of Art Deco, the cinema was in the main, a cavernous hangar, like most purpose-built cinemas of the day. Had it not been given any ornament, it might have had no more charm than the covered handball alley that was later built on the other side of the fair green, and which resounded with the sharp pops of rubber handballs every summer evening of my childhood.

But the anonymous architect (I have been unable to find out his or her name, either from people old enough to recall the opening, or from contemporary newspaper reports or even architectural registers – only the contractors, McManus Bros. of Roscrea, are mentioned) turned what was effectively a big shed into a gliding vessel that, no matter what way you looked at it, always seemed to be going somewhere. Set in front of the main structure consisting of two boxes was a triangular-sectioned portico, the hypotenuse of which stretched almost the whole length of the site, broadening the front elevation like a fairground mirror. Two asymmetrical curving brick walls funnelled punters into the lobby through elegant French doors. It was a remarkable exercise of trompe l’oeil, generating a greater impression of space by leaving most of it outside the building. The Abbey Cinema was hitting the ground at a different speed to everything around it, a go-faster stripe in a town that was in no hurry to get anywhere.

Or at least that’s how I imagine it looked to people on its opening. By the time I came along, it was already of the past. Irrevocably closed, doomed by the movies’ decline, to me it was a part of pre-history. When I was growing up, the cinema was an immovable hulk unused for anything but storage. Its portico was somewhere to shelter from the weather if caught short on the way home, or for the more brazen teenagers to smoke after school in flagrant view of the whole town. It definitely closed its doors in 1975, the year of my birth, but since Halloween 1971, when the last film was screened, it had been home mostly only to bingo nights and the odd variety performance.

The Abbey Cinema opened for business on the 26th of February 1948. Described by the Sligo Champion as ‘Ballymote’s new bijou cinema’, the Abbey was ‘constructed on ambitious lines….[and] can boast of many features found in the bigger and better-known city picture houses’. Like many fine things it ran over-budget before it was even built and cost £25,000. The first film to be screened was the 1947 film noir The Homestretch, an early Technicolor production, starring Cornell Wilde and Maureen O’Hara (upon the cinema’s reopening 55 years later, O’Hara promised to attend a screening if management succeeded in sourcing a print of the film, a promise she was presumably confident she would not have to fulfil). Like most small town or neighbourhoods cinemas of the time, it operated as a repertory, playing films that had already had their runs in the cities or in Sligo town’s two cinemas, the Gaiety and the Savoy. The other two films shown in the opening week are better remembered: Orson Welles’ Nazi-hunting drama The Stranger and The Wizard of Oz, almost a decade old then but perhaps still unseen by many.

The films the Abbey showed throughout its initial 23-year history were a similar mix of the canonical and the now-forgotten. For every Bad Day at Blackrock, Brigadoon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,

there was My Brother Talks to Horses (early Fred Zinnemann, 1947, starring Peter Lawford), Faithful in My Fashion (1946, starring Donna Reed) or the 1968 Herman’s Hermits vehicle Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter. Looking through old copies of the Champion in Sligo Library, one title caught my eye in an old ad from 1956, Cattle Queen of Montana, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. For a moment I thought I had seen the film but realised I remembered it from featuring on a cinema marquee in Back to the Future when Marty McFly lands in 1955 (it would be another two years before the film would make it all the way to Ballymote). The films projected represent an almost complete Hollywood hegemony. Even British films, apart from a couple of David Lean epics and Hammer Horrors, rarely got a sniff of the Ballymote boxoffice. Any Irish films that existed in those days did so thanks only to the largesse of Hollywood and, more specifically, the sentimental caprices of two Johns, Ford and Huston. In Ballymote, as elsewhere in Ireland, movies meant America.

Unfortunately the timing wasn’t the best. Cinema going was already on the wane in the western world and the Abbey never really got into a moneymaking groove. Bartley Cryan, a local auctioneer and shopkeeper who ran it on behalf of the committee that owned it, did so more out of love than anything else. Towards the end of its time, the cinema was programming fewer and fewer films whose original release dates began to recede further and further back into the past. For its last six months in 1971, only one screening a week, on a Sunday night, was put on. The final film played in late October that year, the 1966 adaptation of Beau Geste starring Telly Savalas and a pre-Airplane! Leslie Nielsen. My parents, who would not marry till the following year, went to the Abbey for the last time in the spring of 1971 to see James Stewart in Andrew V. McLaglen’s Shenandoah.

It is generally accepted that television killed off the cinemas, at least until exhibitors began to get wise and divided their picture houses into multiple auditoriums to allow more screenings. The arrival of television in Ireland in 1962 didn’t help the Abbey but there were other factors at play and this is evident from the sea of advertisements that, by 1971, had begun to engulf the Abbey’s listings in the Sligo Champion. Sligo and its environs were now awash with large pubs and music venues. Young people had begun drinking more than their parents (as late as 1968, half of Irish adults were teetotal and owning a pub licence was far from being a money-spinner) and there were not yet drink-driving laws so much as drink-driving recommendations, to be laughed off by anyone who felt they knew their own limits. The Silver Slipper Ballroom and the Baymount Hotel in Strandhill, The Mountain Inn in Coolaney, The Mayflower in Drumshanbo and dozens of other venues provided fresh outlets for young courting couples to meet in dimly lit rooms unbothered by the disappointing gaze of the local clergy. The movies, not yet reinvigorated by the New Hollywood, must have seemed like children’s entertainment in comparison.

Then, a few years ago, the movies unexpectedly came back to the Abbey. Ballymote Enterprise Centre managed to convince Sligo County Council to go along with a €500,000 plan to restore and redevelop the cinema. After several years of wranglingby-committee, work went ahead on the restoration and the cinema was reopened in June 2012. I didn’t get an opportunity to visit it until Christmas that year when, not for the first time, I paid money to see something I had no interest in watching (Taken 2) just to see the inside of a cinema. The restoration was both inspired and sensitive, with only minor structural changes. The green terrazzo bordering the lobby floor and staircases was gleaming once again, the cream, black and vermillion colour scheme on the walls was preserved, the old cast-iron and teak folding seats were freshly upholstered and the carpet smelled of cinema. I’d have liked if the Abbey retained its old name but it was decided to baptise it The Art Deco instead. It slightly over-egged the connection, in my opinion, but venues have been called far worse.

The Art Deco re-emerged in a world that was different in many ways to the one the Abbey Cinema inhabited. Gone is the original projector, now housed as an artefact at Sligo Folk Park in Riverstown, to be replaced by a digital one. Stepping into the projection room is, I have to admit, a mildly deflating experience – there is no longer a porthole looking into the auditorium and the material, however more efficient, is no more impressive than a high-end home entertainment centre. Still, it makes the sourcing and selection of films a lot easier, and the cinema is particularly popular for children’s birthday parties on account of this. Curlicues of smoke no longer flutter in the beams of the projector either, though a bar now occupies the mezzanine, which makes it that bit easier to attract punters. There have also been scurrilous murmurs that the old seats are creaking under the weight of a more ample population, a couple of stone heavier than their grandparents were.

But some social realities remain the same and running a cinema in