1939 Kilrush, Ireland

Joseph Keyes
b. 1933
Kilrush/Limerick, Ireland
Interviewed on January 27, 2019
by Emma Keyes

I have an idea that the first one would have been some kind of religious thing. “From the Cradle to the Cross” That was about all Ireland had at the time. [Actually “From the Manger to the Cross.”] I was probably six to eight. What I remember about it could be held in an egg spoon. Essentially it was the life of Jesus to death. Birth in the manger and he died in the cross. It probably put on by the nuns because it was a holy movie. And the fact that it was already twenty-five years old didn’t make much of a difference. If it was shown, it was shown in the local picture house. But the nuns may have supplied—the movies came in reels at the time—and the nuns had probably brought it in to give it to the local cinema to show. They would not have been able to show it to at the convent or anywhere else. Everything happened at the picture house. We didn’t have a movie theater. We had a picture house. You could get into the gallery for six pennies, into the pit for four pennies. There were picture houses you could get into for a jam jar or two.

And then we had one…there were cowboys and Indians. They were big. We tended to get them quite frequently. I do remember a movie. There were two actors…Fuzzy Brown and Johnny MacKnight. They were the actors in it. Bang bang. The cowboys and Indians. The Indians were the bad guys. I was probably about ten at the time.

Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. That was probably 1944 or 1945. Bing Crosby was a Catholic priest in the movie. It probably was movie of the year in 44 or 45. The thing I remember most about it was there was a man in Limerick who had never been in the movies. And it was going over big in Ireland because it was a Catholic priest and so it had a cheer squad. So his family told him to go see it. So he went to the Savoy Cinema—it was the most comfortable one in the town—he went in at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and he didn’t show for his supper that night. He came home at 10 o’clock. His family asked him how it was and he said “It was good but very long” He sat through four sessions of it.

I remember “Great Expectations,” the Dickens one. I fell in love for the first time in my life. Jean Simmons was acting in it. She was a teen actress and she was gorgeous or at least I thought she was. I think it was very effective cinematography and that was the opening bit of it [the bogland]. The wildness and the openness of the scene. I don’t remember much more than that. But the first time you fell in love.

You tended to go with a friend or friends. You didn’t go with a girl. You went with a buddy or a few buddies. You walked. You walked everywhere then. During WWII, there were no cars on the road for all intents and purposes except a few special people. The local doctor and priest were permitted to have cars. The local football team would go in a long car drawn by two horses. We used to play hurling on the road and maybe once every ten minutes a car would come through. You could play the street games there were so few cars around. So you walked everywhere. I do remember in the late forties probably when I first went to a dance—I was staying with an aunt of mine in Dublin—and after the dance I walked six or seven miles from where the dance was to her house. That wasn’t unusual.

No concessions. No. No. The picture house in the town where I was born had probably been a warehouse where they stored flour or something and then they put in a balcony and they put seats in. A sellout crowd probably would be two or three hundred people. It wasn’t a particularly big place. If you want to know something about what cinemas were like, my brother in law was not a smoker, but when he was going to the movies, he bought ten cigarettes. You watched the movies through a blue fog of cigarette smoke. And that’s not an exaggeration. It was a place where people went to relax. People who didn’t smoke outside, it was like being at a party. Sometimes they’d cheer on the cowboys and sometimes they’d cheer on the Indians

The picture house in Kilrush didn’t have a name. It was just the picture house. There was just one so it didn’t need a name. I’m fairly certain that the one in Kilrush did not have ushers, but most of the ones in Limerick had ushers who had a torch who would lead you to your seat and shine the light on any canoodling. We went to Limerick when I was twelve. The cinema was very popular. By and large it was the only center of entertainment. In Limerick, I would say you had at least ten cinemas so you had a choice there. In Kilrush you had to take what was offered. In Limerick, some of them were bug-infested.

The Savoy was the best cinema. It was part of a national change. You had a Savoy in Dublin, Cork, etc. But you did have an organ, so before the movie started, there was an organist who played contemporary tunes and they would shine lights on us. If the movie was going to be How Greeen Was My Valley, you would have a green light shining on the organ. It was a distinct social event. There were certainly people who went multiple times a week, especially younger people. Courting couples. You might go get a cup of coffee after.

There really was a huge difference between going to see a movie in Limerick, a town of forty or fifty thousand, and Kilrush, a town of three thousand. You had a well-organized cinema business in Limerick. In Kilrush, you were lucky to have the picture house.