Andy was not a movie-goer. His routine was to walk to the Beaufort Mechanics Institute library and borrow a good book, perhaps an Agatha Christie mystery, and bring it home to read in his favourite armchair. This quiet escape into a book had become a habit when he served in India, and had helped sustain him as a Prisoner of War in Germany.
So it was quite unusual when Andy decided to go to the pictures. It was 1959 and he wanted to see ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’.
The movie was showing at the Regent Theatre in Ballarat.
Travelling from Beaufort to see the movie took a bit of organising. Andy telephoned his grandson Robert in Ballarat and asked him to make the arrangements. As well as the seat reservations at the Regent, Robert needed to book tickets for the Beaufort-Ballarat train.
Robert took the train to Beaufort, stayed overnight at the Duncan home, then travelled back to Ballarat with his grandfather.
Their seats were in the dress circle, near the front and on the aisle, so that Andy could get up and move about, if need be. The film was over two and a half hours long, and Andy had not been in a cinema for at least twenty years.
It is a gripping war story of outstanding personal courage, and undoubtedly one of the outstanding films of the past year.
It is however, emotionally exhausting, reviving after more than a decade of peace the stark realities of jungle warfare.
Extract from The Canberra Times, 5 February 1958
Andy seemed a little shaken when he left the theatre. Perhaps it was partly because his first Technicolor cinema experience was overwhelming, but the film must have brought his own Prisoner of War memories to the surface.
He did not say much, except to admire Alec Guiness’ portrayal of the British colonel. This character, an officer who refuses to allow his officers to work even though it means solitary confinement and punishment, must have resonated with Andy, who had refused to work for the Germans in 1918.
Sources
1958 ‘Gripping Realism In Fine Columbia Film’, The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 – 1995), 5 February, p. 3. [ONLINE] Available at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article91257015 [Accessed 5 Jun 2016].
1958 ‘New Film Releases’, The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), 26 March, p. 82.[ONLINE] Available at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article51597723 [Accessed 5 Jun 2016].
Featured image: 1959 ‘Advertising’, Western Herald (Bourke, NSW : 1887 – 1970), 3 April, p. 9. Newspaper article found in Trove and reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article103994632 [Accessed 5 Jun 2016].
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