Cinemateca Portuguesa, located on Rua Barata Salgueiro in the centre of Lisbon, is a wonderful place for cinephiles.

Great posters and marvellous black and white stills from the 1940s adorn the foyer walls: Bogart in All Through the Night, Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World!, Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, Spencer Tracy in Edward, My Son, Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, René Clair’s I Married a Witch, and Basil Rathbone, definitely the best Sherlock Holmes, here in Errol Flynn’s 1938 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Cinemateca has a single screen and what glorious seats! Even better than the ones at 7ᵃ Arte, these Cinemateca seats recline in decadent luxury.

I’m half-expecting an usher to approach garbed in a toga, dangling a bunch of grapes before me.

A fine old polished piano stands to the left of the stage complete with two pairs of brass candlesticks to allow the pianist to read the music in a darkened auditorium.

There is no allocated seating, which means that I am free to sit wherever I want.

The ticket price is a very reasonable 175 escudos, roughly eighty pence in British money.

An arty, black-clad crowd of forty or so is present at today’s showing.

Today’s film is The Window, a 1949 RKO production directed by Ted Tetzlaff.

It stars Bobby Driscoll as young Tommy, a boy whose imagination causes him to cry wolf one time too many; Barbara Hale as Mary Woodry; Arthur Kennedy as Ed Woodry, Tommy’s exasperated parents; Paul Stewart as Joe Kellerson; and Ruth Roman as Jean Kellerson. The Kellersons are the villains of the piece.

Tommy, excellently played by Bobby Driscoll, is a compulsive teller of tales.

He tells his pals that he and his family are going to leave New York for a ranch out west, that they are going to kill whoever they need to in order to make it safe there, and so on and so on.

This is one story too many for his parents, who subsequently refuse to believe him when he claims to have witnessed a murder committed by the Kellersons, the couple living upstairs.

The Kellersons are outwardly respectable, but in reality a seedy pair.

The plot revolves around the refusal of the police and Tommy’s parents to believe him, and also the efforts of the Kellersons to make Tommy have an ‘accident’ so there will no longer be a witness to their crime.

‘The Window’ is a terrific thriller.

Music is used brilliantly, building up to nerve-wracking crescendos interspersed with heavy, ominous silences which in turn are broken out of with considerable virtuosity.

Manuel Cintra Ferreira’s Cinemateca notes use a very apt Portuguese adjective to describe the mood of this film: ‘hitchcockiano’.

Bobby Driscoll steals the show as Tommy, but he gets classy support from Barbara Hale as his mother. She radiates goodness, even though her patience is tried beyond its limit by Tommy’s antics. It’s a nicely understated performance from Hale.

Arthur Kennedy as Tommy’s father is also an admirable figure, despite the hint of whimsy in the earnest moral lessons he imparts to his over-imaginative son.

Ruth Roman plays Jean Kellerson as a dishevelled but not yet desperado individual. She is not as evil as her husband Joe is.

As Joe, Paul Stewart oozes unredeemable malice. They make a great, disturbing couple.

‘The Window’ first showed in Portugal in 1950.

It then reappeared in 1965.

It’s back now in 1991.

If it recurs with similar frequency and if I’m in Lisbon in 2011, I’ll happily take the opportunity to watch it again.

After the film I drift out of Cinemateca down Avenida da Liberdade to the beautiful funicular that ascends Calçada da Glória.

Built by General Electric in 1904, this wonderful old funicular takes me up to the edge of Bairro Alto.

On the other side of the street stands the Port Wine Institute, which shares a building with the Portuguese Cinema Institute.

I’m now sipping exquisite twenty year old port, meio seco and aloirado, in the refined ambience of the Port Wine Institute bar.

There are wooden beams across the ceilings, and exposed brick walls. Low-slung, comfortable armchairs and stools are set around dark glass tables. A fifteen-foot long bar counter has eight stools lined up along it, with an array of tempting port bottles in the background.

Subtle illumination is provided by lamps of various shapes and sizes strategically placed around the two-level drinking area. Two intricately patterned lampshades are placed at ground level near where I am sitting. Their light throws an almost stained glass window effect onto the walls.

A taciturn waiter in black trousers, white shirt and maroon waistcoat drifts discreetly around the room.

What a great place to wind up after a film.

Related Posts: ‘Vertigo’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA); ‘Strangers On A Train’, The Phoenix, East Finchley, London

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Ghostly mist is swirling through the streets of Cacilhas this February morning.

I decide to check out some local haunts before crossing the river into town for another Saturday triple bill of Cecil B. DeMille films.

I start my wander on Rua Cândido dos Reis, where I drop into an anonymous bar opposite the offices of the Centro de Cultura Libertária. Here I have a bica and a glass of aguardente, the local firewater. It costs 130 escudos, about fifty pence. A couple of weeks ago Pedro told me that a coffee with firewater in the morning makes you feel great all the rest of the day. After a couple of sips here I believe him.

Malcolm Lowry would have loved this little bar, its walls stacked high with row upon row of gin, brandy and wine bottles, its plain tables and chairs, green painted walls and vaulted ceilings.

The barman, out of sight, is busy stacking clinking bottles behind the counter.

Apart from me there is only one other customer in the bar, though ‘customer’ is maybe not the right word as that person is an ancient man seated in a corner by the window. He’s not drinking anything. He’s just sitting there with a weary expression, leaning his elbow on the table to prop up his face. He has just exchanged a few words across the empty bar with the barman. He is more like a piece of furniture than a customer, as inanimate as the bottles on the wall.

The next bar that I find myself in, down by the bus station, is even more Lowry-esque.

It feels like this bar has materialized from the pages of Under the Volcano. Delighted to have found such a place, I order a beer. The bar doesn’t seem to have a name. A plaque on a wall says 14, S.C. Abel Pereira da Fonseca. Painted tiles on its facade depict dangling bunches of ripe grapes. There is a thirty-yard long U-shaped bar counter and a vaulted ceiling like in a monastery. Flaking cream paint, immobile ceiling fans, and a downbeat clientele complete the scene. What an irresistible drinking hole.

There are two bartenders. The younger one is probably around twenty years old. The older one is middle-aged and looks like he might be the owner.

The older bartender is resting his huge pot belly on a sink behind the counter. His blue check shirt strains to contain the bulging mass.

In a gloomy corner behind me a destitute diner is sucking spaghetti straight off the plate, not bothering to use cutlery.

The older barman has noticed me scribbling.

He points out to me, in a none too friendly tone, that I am writing with my left hand.

Why am I not writing with my right hand, he demands to know.

“I can’t write with my right hand!” I explain to him with a grin designed to defuse his bewilderment.

But he’s not satisfied.

He persists in pointing out that I should be writing with my right hand.

Fortunately, someone standing next to me at the bar intervenes to say that I write with my left hand and that some people are different.

The barman grunts and goes to serve another customer.

My next port of call is a wonderful little bar next to Afilador restaurant down on Cacilhas waterfront.

After the coffee, aguardente and beer I am feeling great.

Foghorns are blaring on the bright orange ferries plying the Lisbon crossing.

I love these long bar counters where you perch on a raised stool and drink whilst floating off the floor.

A wizened little man is trying to sell me a lottery ticket.

Behind the bar it seems to be a husband and wife doing the work. They probably come from the north of Portugal as there is a Porto F.C. team calendar hanging on the wall.

Their young son scurries about aimlessly.

Someone who seems to be grandma sits lifelessly on a small wooden chair.

Grandma examines me when I come in, decides I am harmless, and turns her empty gaze towards the open door.

The fog outside shows no sign of lifting.

I’m sitting at the far end of the bar counter, on the last stool. Three feet below to my left, a large black anchor is resting on the floor. On the wall behind me are a lifebelt, two old wooden oars, a beautiful old gas lamp in a green iron case, three brass portholes, six framed paintings of women fishsellers, and finally, extraordinarily, the cabin and steering wheel of a boat. Stuck on the wall.

Two men at a table at the other end of the bar are having a heated discussion about tomorrow’s big match, the game between Benfica and Sporting, which I have got a ticket for.

I have to try hard not to laugh as the barman-cum-waiter gallops up the stairs carrying two plates of bacalhau. On the top step he trips up and the salted cod goes flying onto the floor. But he sees the funny side of this slapstick incident. He comes scuttling back down the stairs with a sheepish grin on his face and explains to his wife what happened. She smiles hugely, letting him know that it’s not a problem.

Well fuelled for the rest of the day, I head over to Cinemateca for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1929 film, The Godless Girl.

After the first five minutes my impression is that this film is loathsome, with its reactionary misogynist patronizing tone.

But by the end of the film I feel that I have just seen a flawed masterpiece.

The story, and Cecil B. DeMille’s movies tell a story like few others can, revolves around the initial conflict and eventual love between Bob Hathaway (Tom Keene) and Judy Craig (Lina Basquette).

He is a squeaky clean Christian boy, the strong male, the dressed-in-white hero, leader of the students’ union, who decides to combat carmenesque Judy, the godless girl of the title. Judy is the ringleader of the Godless Society who are responsible for distributing atheist leaflets around the school.

What is offensive about all this is the simplistic distinction between good and bad, male and female, believer and atheist.

However, it takes only a few more minutes of the film for some powerful nuances to dissipate the initial facile stereotyping.

The Godless Society leaflets have some sharp lines, and the intertitles, at first glibly patronizing towards the atheists, gradually soften their puritanical tone.

The film’s first piece of visual brilliance occurs in a scene where the true-believer students led by Bob invade and disrupt a meeting of the Godless Society.

In the ensuing melee the students spill out from the top-floor room. As ever with DeMille, the mass mayhem is marvellously orchestrated.

Tragedy strikes when a female student, one of the atheists, gets forced through the balustrade and falls several floors to her death.

The scene is strikingly filmed.

We see the girl from below free-falling towards us, her face contorted with fear, arms and legs flailing.

Then there is a cut to a plunging shot of the girl plummeting to her death, the camera dropping like the girl straight down past the silent horrified faces of the other students who are standing on the stairs, breaking off their fight to watch her fall.

She doesn’t die immediately because her dying seconds offer the chance of a thematic moment, a pondering of religion versus atheism.

Cradled in Judy’s arms, the dying girl beseeches Judy to tell her that this isn’t really the end, that there must be something more.

The dying girl’s face is seen in angelic glowing soft-focus close-up.

Cut to Judy, not in close-up, not soft focus, thus appearing by contrast hard and devoid of affection.

Judy can offer no consolation to her dying friend.

Enter a kindly policeman, a solid father-figure kind of character, who gently grasps the dying girl’s hand and reassures her that yes, there is something more, intimating that she will be welcomed in heaven.

The girl beams radiantly, leans back and expires.

Bob and Judy are judged responsible for the girl’s death and both are sentenced to reformatory. The boys’ reformatory is particularly brutal, governed by a sadistic slob of a head guard who beats one inmate unconscious. The head guard also assaults Bob.

The girls’ reformatory is little better and the intertitles make it clear that the film makers strongly disapprove of the way that those institutions are run.

Eventually Bob and Judy manage to escape, enjoying a few hours of blissful freedom in the idyllic rural setting of a deserted farm.

Sunlight illuminates the blossom in which Bob and Judy frolic.

Inevitably, reality soon intrudes, in the form of the brutal and stupid head guard and other guards whose dogs track down the two young lovers. Bob and Judy are carted back to their respective reformatories.

There follows a superb scene, the burning down of the hated reformatories.

The fire starts by accident.

The problem for Judy is that when the fire breaks out she is handcuffed to a railing in a solitary confinement cell and cannot escape.

The special effects – the crashing walls and masonry, the raging flames and billowing smoke – are all as exciting as the effects in ‘Backdraft’, even though this Cecil B. DeMille film was made seven decades before ‘Backdraft’.

After a dodgy start, ‘The Godless Girl’ turns out to be an impressive, memorable film.

Today’s second film is The Golden Bed, a 1925 effort hailed by a couple of critics as Cecil B. DeMille’s melodrama masterpiece.

But it’s a disappointment.

The film is an uninspired reworking of the lamentable but regular Cecil B. DeMille theme of a good honest man brought down by a frivolous irresponsible cold-hearted beautiful woman.

It’s all a bit predictable and unengaging.

A handful of imaginative moments fail to wrench the film from its gentle tedium.

The cast do what they can and the performance of Rod La Rocque as Admah Holtz, self-made man, successful hard-working entrepreneur, is the best thing in an otherwise feeble film.

He is ‘Candy Man’, whose naivety and generosity are exploited by Flora Lee Peake (Lillian Rich), daughter of an aristocratic family that has fallen on hard times.

Flora Lee marries Admah for his money.

She then spends all his money on gowns and parties and other indulgences that lead to his imprisonment for the debt and embezzlement which she has led him into.

The pinnacle of Flora Lee’s wastefulness is the throwing of the ‘Candy Ball’, a monstrously extravagant society party where everything is made of candy.

There is everything from candy roses to candy neo-classical pillars, a candy Parthenon right there in the grounds of the old Peake family mansion.

The expense of this Candy Ball is what finally ruins Admah.

In case we haven’t got the message of a good man being the victim of a scheming woman, we are treated to a Lorelei scene with the shipwrecked sailor vainly trying to climb out of the raging river and up the rock on which the siren is preening herself. Apart from that, nothing to report on this forgettable film.

Much better is the third of today’s Cecil B. DeMille movies, his extraordinary The King of Kings, from 1927.

No matter how epic or extravagant the historical theme, there is always some humour in DeMille’s treatments.

In one scene in ‘The King of Kings’ we see Roman soldiers trying to catch a coin-bearing fish like the one that the disciple Peter caught.

They reel in a fish but it has no coin in its mouth, so one of the Roman soldiers shakes it to see if it rattles before chucking it in disgust back into the sea.

Then there is the crown of thorns.

In the best “here’s one I prepared earlier” tradition, a crown of thorns is produced by someone who accidentally pricks himself on a thorn, which gives him the idea to crown Christ with it. When the camera cuts back to this ham-fisted individual, he has miraculously made a perfect crown.

The Last Supper scene is beautiful, with its wonderful composition and lighting.

Throughout the film, Jesus (H.B. Warner) glows and Peter (Ernest Torrence) overacts terribly.

Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) betrays in another excellent dimly lit scene in which High Priest Caiaphas (Rudolph Schildkraut) counts out the thirty pieces of gleaming silver.

The powers of darkness score a temporary victory by securing Judas’ betrayal of Jesus.

Another good scene is the one where Jesus drives the seven deadly sins out of Mary (Dorothy Cumming), each sin personified by a leering temptation figure.

This showing of ‘The King of Kings’ features live musical accompaniment by Mário Laginha on piano.

His playing during the storm scene that follows Christ’s death on the cross is superb, perfectly complementing the visual drama and amplifying the portentous elemental onslaught of God’s wrath.

Brilliant chaos rages across the screen.

The earth is rent asunder, earthquakes and landslides engulf the panicky throng, bolts of lightning illuminate Jesus’ lifeless body up on the cross and, truly horrifically, Judas’ body hangs from the tree where he committed suicide, unable to bear the guilt of having caused Christ’s crucifixion.

A tempestuous gale wreaks havoc over the whole scene, a quintessential Cecil B. DeMille spectacular.

Related Post: ‘Prophecy’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)

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