Friday Night at the Movies

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Even back in 1970 Beirut was a very sophisticated city. However, if you looked hard, you could find parts of the city that were still unspoiled. One such place was Le Baron cinema.

Sue, our friend Dereck and I used to go Le Baron every Friday night. One reason for this was that no other expatriates ever went there and so we were guaranteed an authentic Lebanese experience. Another reason was that they always showed two good, full-length action films, usually a war film and a western. It was there that I first saw such classics as “Sabata: the man with gunsight eyes comes to kill”.

One endearing feature of Le Baron was that most of the seats were broken. Some were missing seat cushions, others were missing armrests. So our first task every week was to find three seats together that were largely intact. We would then reach over to other seats, pull off any pieces we needed and add them to our seats.

All the films were in English but they had Arabic and French subtitles. As the other patrons didn’t speak English, they relied on the subtitles and naturally felt free to talk over the soundtrack. So we three had to fall back on reading the French subtitles. We were usually able to follow the main gist of the films, although we would get confused when the translations were a little off-track: for example, when “God” was translated as “chien” (dog).

One of the great things about Le Baron was there was always lots of audience participation. When a western was showing, the spectators would boo the villains and cheer the heroes, and we would boo and cheer along with them. When it was an American war film, things would turn upside down and everyone would boo the American military and cheer the German or Japanese soldiers. Some of the patrons near us would turn around to check that we, too, were booing and cheering appropriately. We never disappointed them.

The very best thing about the cinema, though, was related to smoking. This was banned in all cinemas in Beirut but more or less everyone who went to Le Baron smoked, and smoked a lot: From our usual seats near the back, we could look towards the screen and see the red tips of scores of cigarettes in front of us. Not surprisingly, the police knew about this and they felt obliged to enforce the smoking ban. So at some point every Friday evening a police officer would enter the cinema and walk down the aisle, shouting at everyone to put their cigarettes out. The red tips blinked out row by row as he passed, and by the time he reached the screen nobody was smoking. Then he would walk back up the aisle. And as soon as he passed each row, everyone in that row would immediately light up again. By the time the officer reached the back of the cinema, everything was back to normal and we were watching the film over a sea of glowing red tips.

I miss Le Baron.

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