While flicking through the channels last week I came across "The Alamo", not the John Wayne directed film from 1960 but the 2004 version directed by John Lee Hancock and produced by former child actor/blockbuster director Ron Howard.This film had slipped under my radar on it's release no doubt Ron Howard's involvement did little to fuel my curiosity,even though I am partial to the odd revisionist western!What this version did was remind me of the original. Apparently it was a labour of love for John Wayne who had ambitions back as far as the mid 50's to direct a film on the the siege of the Alamo. He managed to finance the film with the aid of United Artists Studio,some very wealthy Texans (who insisted it be shot in Texas) and his own personal fortune.
This all got me to thinking of how we get to see films nowadays compared to years ago, before video and when television did not show relatively recent films.I remember seeing the original version of "The Alamo" in the Grove cinema in Athy about 1968 or 1969.That was 8 or 9 years after its original release!
Films in those days had longer cinema life also there would have been a limited number of prints available for distribution. I think that was probably the first time I experienced the anticipation of waiting to see a film that I had looked forward to seeing for what seemed like a long time. I'm glad to say that that feeling doesn't go away.
Back in those days it would have been rare for a film to get a weekly run as I remember "The Alamo" got at that time. The weekly run would only have applied to blockbusters like "The Sound of Music","Dr Zhivago" or "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" that type of film. Most of the time there would have been 3 to 4 changes per week. This continued on to the late 80's up to the time the Grove sadly closed down. The 60's and 70's were great times for cinema goer's,you could see 8 to 10 films per week if you so wished. At that time there was an opening or support film as well as the main feature.This all stopped in the late 70's early 80's because feature films got longer and time was a factor in showing 2 whole films .We were then treated to what were a series of quite boring British short films( probably about past naval conquests) before the main feature at the time.The reason we never got to see any Irish short films those days was that they were mostly shot and distributed on 24mm film and most cinemas only had 35 mm facilities.
There is now a strong case to be made for compelling the multiplexes to show Irish shorts,it happens in some cases but not nearly enough.But don't fret your good friends at Athy Film Club will endeavour to continue it's support of Irish Short Films throughout our yearly programme.Who knows we might even get a short filmmaker to present his or her short film to us now that would be nice.
The End
Hugh Hyland
