The story of going to Films in Pune started in a shed. in the 1910s. This was Napier Cinemaconsidered the first theater in the city. In the era of silent cinema, this makeshift space in Poona Cantonment would transport paying audiences to other worlds, demonstrating the lasting power of cinema.
The book Mehera-Meher: A Divine Romance by David Fenster mentions American films shown in Napier, and among them was The Broken Coin (1915), an adventure mystery series directed by Francis Ford.
“Every week there was a new episode, but eventually they got tired because the story went on forever without a conclusion,” Fenster mentions in the book. Surrounding the cinema were landmarks, such as a fountain and a kiosk where The Napier Cinema Band would be playing.
Mustansir Dalvi, architect and professor of architecture, in a blog post, A Cinema House in Poona, “with time and increasing popularity, the Napier was remodeled in 1919 or so into a fairly well-structured neoclassical building, with a timber frame and a stone pediment, dotted with a baroque front.”
“The Napier was very popular and was mentioned in several accounts of Poona at that time. A peculiar feature was the screening of (what we today call) serials, shorts of endless stories that attracted the masses to the theater on a weekly basis,” writes Dalvi.
He was introduced to cinema in his childhood in Pune. But by then, Napier was no longer called that. In 1931 it was transformed into a West End cinema. Even in the new building, which bore the name West End, twice on the facade: on the balustrade of the second floor balcony and once on the vertical mast at the top of the building, you could see the gable and the wooden staircase of the old theater. The venue had a low boundary wall, with posters of the shows displayed prominently.
“While the West End was not an Art Deco building, the new front, which had a cantilevered porch, false arches and vertical ornaments along its sides, conformed to the fashion of the time. The West End displays some flattened proto-Deco ornaments, sloping chajjas and Palladian symmetry. This can be seen in the projecting porch supported on concrete supports,” says Dalvi.
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He says that in the late 1960s and early 1980s, cinemas were showing films of dubious merit from around the world, such as the American production Ssssssssnake, whose slogan was “Once this movie sinks its fangs into you, you’ll never be the same”, and 3 Fantastic Supermans of Italy, which is campy and, according to some critics, has acquired cult status.
“I, in particular, remember being taken to watch Lost in the South African Desert as a school outing when I was in Class II or III. It was a terribly traumatic choice for us considering the terrible things that happened to the boy in the film, including having a poisonous snake spit in his eye, after surviving a plane crash,” writes Dalvi.
The West End was demolished in the 1980s, ending an era of movie-going in Pune.
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