Paul Fitzpatrick: July 2024

Going to the movies used to be so easy, you rolled up, bought a ticket, sat wherever you wanted and a nice lady would come into the auditorium during the intermission to serve up choc ices and a refreshing carton of Kia-ora orange juice.

The average cost of a cinema ticket in 1974 was less than 50p and for that you got two full feature length movies with a 15 minute intermission.  

I’m pretty sure every movie I saw in the 70s had a support feature so I’m guessing double bill’s were phased out sometime in the 80s, probably around the time that multiplex cinemas came into vogue and grand old cinemas were being transformed into blocks of flats.

Some of my earliest memories are of going to the cinema with my family and I remember spending a magical afternoon as a 6 year old transfixed to the screen as a double bill of ‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ played out, which set a very high bar.

When the cinemas got it right you couldn’t beat a double bill and I was always intrigued at how they paired movies together.

A lot of times it made sense, a Bruce Lee kung-fu combo, a Travolta brace, or sequels paired together like the ‘Planet of the Apes’ or ‘Rocky’ franchises.

They were ideal bedfellows, logical pairings, but there were other instances where a bit of imagination had been applied to expertly curate the features, for example if you liked Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ there’s a good chance you were going to appreciate ‘Airplane’ and if you were a fan of Alan Parker’s ‘Midnight Express” you’d probably rate Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’.

On the other hand I remember some really bizarre combos that didn’t make sense at all, like ‘The Odd Couple’ a Neil Simon comedy being paired with ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ a psychological horror that paved the way for ‘The Exorcist’.
Similarly, I’m not sure many Mel Brooks fans who went to see ‘Blazing Saddles’ would find much to laugh about in ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’.

I think the clue in both these cases is that the movies were produced and distributed by the same studios and they really didn’t care about your tastes.

Well matched or not, the reality was that a lot of supporting features were B movies made purposely by the studio at a low cost to support the main event.
It was often a case of movie Russian roulette, as you often had no idea how good or terrible the support feature was going to be, but every now and then you’d come across a gem.

For me that diamond in the rough was Roger Corman’s ‘The Raven’.

Corman was the master of the B Movie and his version of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ remains a favourite. Made in 1963 with a young Jack Nicholson in an early role and featuring horror legends Karloff, Price & Lorre, it’s hilarious, one of the few gothic-comedy horrors that actually work, alongside ‘Young Frankenstein’ of course.

I can’t remember what hollywood blockbuster ‘The Raven’ was actually paired with, I just remember it being a lot more entertaining than the main feature.

In terms of genres, horror movies and exploitation movies always offered up popular double bills, especially for late night showings when the majority of the audience had been to the pub, weren’t ready to go home yet, and the atmosphere resembled a football match.

Nowadays you’re lucky to get any change from £20 for a cinema ticket and a tub of cardboard popcorn and instead of supporting features we are subjected to 30 minutes of adverts with a couple of PG trailers thrown in.

Like attended fuel pumps and space hoppers I’m afraid cinema double bills are a thing of the past, multiplex’s want to show a main feature 5 or 6 times a day and to be fair I’m not sure today’s audiences have the attention span to sit through two feature length movies.