1945 Bombay, India

Patricia Mistry
1933
Bombay, India
Interviewed on 01/29/18
by Firoz Mistry

The first movie I saw? Darling, I can’t possibly remember which was the first movie I saw. I do remember the cinema though. I must have been about 11 or 12 years old. I had gone with my family. It was the Metro cinema in Bombay. You know the one that still stands right by your high school. At this point India was on the verge of gaining independence from the British( Bombay had been one of the chief headquarters in India for the British Raj. )Therefore, Bombay as a city was always influenced to a greater extent by Western thought and ideology. My father had moved back from Ireland, just after I was born. He found going to the cinema as a way to connect, through watching Hollywood and Western films.

The theatres were similar in terms of set up as they were now. The Metro theatre in Bombay was one of the first cinemas in India. The seats were covered in red upholstery, and were rather grand according to me. The cinema was a family activity. We would go every Sunday to watch a different film. My father would always drive us there and we would eat ‘Kulfi’ before entering the theatre (Ice cream in India, made from condensed milk and certain other ingredients). As I grew slightly older I would visit the cinema with my older sister and her friends. The cinema became more of a social affair.

I remember this one time we had gone to this absolutely dilapidated cinema in Pune (city close to Bombay). I was accompanying my older sister and two of her friends. We were going to see a Bollywood movie called ‘Do Bhai’, (two brothers.) It was quite funny darling because both my sister and I speak very bad Hindi and so we couldn’t really understand much. Bollywood movies were already very popular by this time. We thought that maybe we could pass some time by getting some snacks from the concession stand. There was no concession stand at the cinema. The building was in terrible condition. The both of us decided we would walk down the street to see if we could find anything to eat. We ended up buying corn on the cob from a man near by. We snuck back into the cinema and ended up making quite a mess inside.

Have you seen the Charlie Chaplin movie, the one where he gives a famous speech at the end?

The Great Dictator?

Yes, that was it. The Great Dictator. It was one of the first films I saw. Ohh darling it was amazing to see Charlie Chaplin acting in two different roles in the film. Till today I remember the barber standing on the stage and reciting that speech. It was an amazing moment to watch you know? The barber was timid and worried to go onto a stage and speak, and the dictator had this aggression and confidence. It was interesting to see the characters collide.

Films were still rather new and always got a lot of interesting reactions from the audiences. The audiences used to be bewildered when they would see Charlie Chaplin playing the two different roles. The make up and effects still confused them at this point of time. There was a sort of excitement in the room that just about anything could happen on screen. For that period of time that excitement seeped from just on the screen to a hope that anything could happen to us in the audience.