1954 London, England

Vivien Donald

1938

London, England

Interviewed on January 18, 2021

By Arthur Donald

My first film experience is a brief, vivid memory and yet the name of the film escapes me. I just remember this fleeting scene in the movie. I must have been a child, a little girl of maybe only eight. I watched the film with my mother and her friend, perhaps I had just tagged along on their outing. My grandmother died of cancer around that time, and my mother just fell apart after that. So we must have watched the film together before that tragedy occurred. 

I remember this scene of a woman being ill in bed, and then another villainous woman, who was obviously going to – not necessarily kill her – but neglect her so that she died, comes into the room. I just remember this feeling of menace between the sick woman in bed and the tall woman with her hair swept up. This was in black-and-white of course, and that is honestly all that I remember of that first film memory. I do remember that as a very young child I was affected by that scene of the two women in the film. I sometimes think, when they have old films on the television, maybe one day I’ll be watching and see this scene again and know what happens next and whether the sick woman in the bed died. It definitely wasn’t a silent film though – I don’t remember watching many of them. I may have watched it at my aunt and uncle’s cinema, actually, in Banbury, England. They were friends with Deborah Carr, an actress at that time. They ran one of the first, successful silent cinemas in England which eventually transitioned into sound films. 

I watched more films when I moved to London as a young girl in 1945. When I began work I remember going to see newsreels quite often. There were cinemas in Leicester Square, and I used to go there in my lunch hours. I was older then, so enjoyed sitting there and watching the newsreels play in the cinemas. I think I just went in to watch the news… wasn’t watching many films during my lunch hours!

I also remember going to the cinema when I first went out with your grandfather, John. It was some sort of horror movie, I think about zombies. I was a young woman, possibly eighteen. I was absolutely petrified. I was sitting there with my knees shaking. Since I was on a date with John, I didn’t dare let on that I was so frightened. It was at the time when there were a lot of zombie films around. So that would have been around 1956. 

If I think back to the first film I remember, both the plot and name of, it would be Brigadoon. It came out in 1954, and starred Gene Kelly and Van Johnson. I remember it was set in Scotland, and focused on the town of Brigadoon in the highlands. I remember there being a stage show version too, which I went to as well. 

I remember going to see Brigadoon on the King’s Road in Chelsea. I believe it was a Gaumont Palace cinema (pictured above). It was a very small, dark theatre. I remember sitting there, about half-way down the cinema on the right-hand side. Visually, the men were wearing kilts and the whole mood was very lively. There were lovely colours, the scenes having been expertly crafted. The whole film was centered on this “fantasy” village. The modern-day people had suddenly broken into this old fashioned village with old fashioned people. It was almost like a dream. 

There were songs in the film, scenes where the crowd of men and women all burst into song together. I remember both the film and stage version being similar, both had these magnificent musical numbers. 

That was the same Gaumont cinema in Chelsea where I would later go to see a lot of marvelous black-and-white Italian films, mainly in 1956 and 57. I remember some of those Italian films I saw there had the likes of Italian actors Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Magnani, who was the most amazing actress. They were all black-and-white films, and truly brilliant. I think the cinema may still even be there, but I haven’t been back for decades.