Eight Horsemen of the Apocalypse

It must have been in 1921 or 1922 that I saw my first Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at Anderson’s Mattapan Theater in the Dorchester suburb of Boston—and I saw it free. Old Man Anderson was, in Maugham’s Edwardian phrase, a downy bird. Whenever his Mattapan started a new serial, he would let us all in after school to a showing of the first installment and throw in a feature for good measure. Attendance at any serial premiere from our Fifth Grade of the Edmund P. Tileston School was 97 1/2 per cent (the 21/2 per cent being Charles Brown, the only well-behaved boy in Grade V, who always obeyed his mother and came right home after school). After that suspense-ridden installment the rest of us were hooked. For the next nineteen Saturday afternoons we were Anderson’s captives on the gum-encrusted wooden seats of the Mattapan, munching jellybeans and howling our approval or disapproval until the reel ended almost unendurably with the trussed heroine about to be tossed from a cliff, fried in a volcano, drowned by the tide, or sliced up by the Twentieth Century Limited. And then—Continued Next Week!

The Mattapan was like a huge shoebox lined with pebbled tin sheeting. At one end was the projection booth, at the other the screen. To the left of the screen, near the gas Exit light, Miss Forsythe sat at the upright piano. For those who are not aware of it, the original function of music at the cinema was to distract as soothingly as possible from the whirr of the projector. Miss Forsythe, who on Sundays played the hymns for the Methodist Sunday school, thumped her best. Old Man Anderson didn’t care what she played so long as it was loud.

FR

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Francis Russell

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It must have been in 1921 or 1922 that I saw my first Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at Anderson’s Mattapan Theater in the Dorchester suburb of Boston—and I saw it free. Old Man Anderson was, in Maugham’s Edwardian phrase, a downy bird. Whenever his Mattapan started a new serial, he would let us all in after school to a showing of the first installment and throw in a feature for good measure. Attendance at any serial premiere from our Fifth Grade of the Edmund P. Tileston School was 97 1/2 per cent (the 21/2 per cent being Charles Brown, the only well-behaved boy in Grade V, who always obeyed his mother and came right home after school). After that suspense-ridden installment the rest of us were hooked. For the next nineteen Saturday afternoons we were Anderson’s captives on the gum-encrusted wooden seats of the Mattapan, munching jellybeans and howling our approval or disapproval until the reel ended almost unendurably with the trussed heroine about to be tossed from a cliff, fried in a volcano, drowned by the tide, or sliced up by the Twentieth Century Limited. And then—Continued Next Week!

The Mattapan was like a huge shoebox lined with pebbled tin sheeting. At one end was the projection booth, at the other the screen. To the left of the screen, near the gas Exit light, Miss Forsythe sat at the upright piano. For those who are not aware of it, the original function of music at the cinema was to distract as soothingly as possible from the whirr of the projector. Miss Forsythe, who on Sundays played the hymns for the Methodist Sunday school, thumped her best. Old Man Anderson didn’t care what she played so long as it was loud.