Old world of cinema halls and bubbling excitement

By Sim Kwang Yang - Free Malaysia Today

FEATURE The most exciting event of the week in those long gone, bad old days was going to the movies. Nowadays, there is nothing extraordinary about going to the movies any more. Every household has a DVD player and television set, and watching a movie is such a routine activity in our daily lives that we think nothing of it, and take it for granted.
Growing up in 1960s in Kuching, before all these electronic gadgets made their appearance, going to the movies at the weekend was the high point of our social and entertainment life for the entire week.

That was because going to the movies was the only entertainment at the mass level available to the people. It was the cheapest and most easily available distraction and escape from living the tedium of a stultifying life.

Film shows were cheap enough then, costing as little as 30 sen per ticket for the matinee morning film. The regular show cost a mere ringgit, if my memory serves me right.

But even such cheap entertainment was beyond our means and we poor young children used to devise all kinds of ingenious methods to attend the show free of charge.

One common practice was to wait patiently at the entrance, so that we children could ask any prospective customer to sponsor our passage at the door - the kind ‘jaga pintu’ would wave us through if we went in the movie house with a paying adult.

When we entered the cinema, we would just sit anywhere in the movie house. I attended many free movies that way.

Alternatively, there were many other ways by which we children could raise money to feed our movie habit.

During that time, castaway empty soft drink bottles and tin drums held good value for collection and sale to a ‘Botoot man’, who went around households calling out “Botoot! Botoot!” for homeowners to sell them used tins and bottles.

Coloured bottles could fetch us one sen each and an empty drum could bring in the princely sum of 10 sen.

The man bought the tin drums to cut into small tin-strips for latex to flow down and collect when hung next to a rubber tree trunk.

This ‘Botoot man’ was the most welcome visitor to our household and years later, I recall there was a touching movie on the life of such a ‘Botoot man’ with the title, ‘Jiu Kang Tang Bui Bo’.

Modern moviegoers will have little idea of what it was like to watch a film in the movie theatre in those days.

Important talking point
Those movie houses were gigantic cavernous structures capable of housing quite a few hundred moviegoers. Sitting in the dark in front of the giant screen was a most captivating experience in itself, as if you could be sucked bodily into the story of the talking picture. It was not like going to our modern cineplexes with their small screens.

One unique thing about going to the cinema in Kuching was the strength of audience participation. Members of the audience were so absorbed in the unfolding drama that they made all kinds of involuntary noises in response to what was going on, on the big screen up.

Let’s say, the villain was sneaking up behind the heroin trying to stab her in the back, while she was completely unaware of the impending danger. Inevitably, a member of the audience would shout out from the darkness of the hall, “Jaga Belakang!”

When a sad movie got really teary, all the kind-hearted ladies in the hall would be shedding tears, shaking their heads, going “tsk…tsk…” to express their sympathy for the heroine.

The greatest drawback to the enjoyment of a good movie was for somebody who had seen the movie once before to tell his friend loudly what the next scene would be like. This would draw an explosion of protests from the audience, trying to hush down the unsavoury individual.

I enjoyed many of my childhood movies that way and my favourite films were the Westerns.

I have seen the movie ‘Gunfight At OK Corral’ many times. Living in multi-racial Malaysia, I counted myself lucky to have enjoyed films in many languages, including the Malay films of P Ramlee such as ‘Bujang Lapok’, and the Chinese movies produced in large numbers from Hong Kong.

That was about the time when Japanese Samurai movies were the craze with moviegoers.

Until today I consider the great Japanese film-maker, Akira Kurosawa, a sheer genius in storytelling and I watched all of his Samurai movies, starring Toshiro Mifune, with great appreciation and satisfaction. At the same time, the Japanese put out a long series of Samurai films starring this blind swordsman.

Movies were important in our lives because they constituted an important talking point throughout the week.

We children would discuss the plot for days on end, sometimes play-acting parts of the movie with sticks in place of guns, in playing out the gunfight scenes.

Whenever we young friends met outside the movie house, we would ask one another, “Have you seen the latest John Wayne movie yet?”

Looking back, I would say the appearance of the television set signalled the end of the era of the movie houses.

Soon after coloured television came to Sarawak, the traditional movie houses died a natural death. Meanwhile, with the change of lifestyle in Kuching city, watching movies is no longer such a major preoccupation as before, as the computer has taken the central position in most Malaysian households.

For entertainment value alone, even the television is no match for the computer game.

The big wide world has changed and the movies can never recapture our imagination as in our olden, simpler days.

They now live only in the memories of us older generations of Malaysians, the many happy, exciting moments of our cinema-going days.

[This article first appeared in mysarawak.org]