
Got off to a dodgy start a couple of days ago with my tiny, three-student advanced English class.
To my opening gambit of “What did you do today before you came to this lesson?”, the answers were:
“I was sick all day and I didn’t get out of bed till half an hour ago.”
“I had to take my brother to the hospital. He is very sick, he has cancer.”
“I went to the doctor and on my arm he found a growth that he will have to cut off.”
Not the most upbeat opening I’ve ever had to a lesson.
In situations like that, you just have to press on with the lesson until the gloomy opening fades.
On a more positive note, I got paid last night.
That happy event led to a binge on the wine at Bate Popo in Costa da Caparica, followed by a couple of beers at Paradise bar.
Today a wonderful bowl of soup at Pic-Nic café restaurant on Rossio has revived me in time to enjoy Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee and others in a showing of Treasure Island at Cine Camões in Bairro Alto.
Cine Camões is located just off Rua do Alecrim.
Its entrance is under a large sign for Underwood Cash & Carry.
Inside the cinema a dozen shabbily dressed men are loitering by the bar.
There are no women here at all.
The posters on the wall are an eclectic mix. Old prints of Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward share wall space with Emmanuelle and others of that ilk.
This cinema used to be a theatre. It looks like it has fallen on hard times.
Thankfully, just before 2.15 p.m. when ‘Treasure Island’ is due to start, a couple appear, followed by three female pensioners and a mother with two kids.
The presence of these latecomers dissipates the unpleasant voyeuristic atmosphere that had until now pervaded the bar area.
The ticket is very cheap, 180 escudos for the balcão area. Up here about eighty brown leather seats give a good view of a decent-sized screen.
‘Treasure Island’ is a well made, enjoyable, tongue-in-cheek film.
As Long John Silver, Charlton Heston spares no piratical cliché. Timbers shiver, bottles of rum are summoned with yo-ho-ho’s, and the obligatory parrot on his shoulder squawks about small denomination coinage.
The cast seem to be loving it all, hamming it up most entertainingly.
Sitting behind me in the audience are a couple of coughing and belching Oliver Reeds in addition to the real one playing Captain Billy Bones up on the screen.
Another spectator near me in the balcão area guffaws when Jim Hawkins’ terrorized mother kicks Reed’s prostrate body to see if he is dead.
It’s lowbrow stuff for sure but surprisingly beautifully filmed at times, with gorgeous deep blue seas for the pirate’s boat to drift in, atmospheric and elegant onshore town locations and taverns for the press-ganging of the boat’s crew, and hints of menace and evil that save the whole affair from degenerating into a facile parody.
Taking it with the requisite pinch of salt, I enjoy this gallivanting 1990 version of ‘Treasure Island’.
I’m unable to read the final credits because at the end of the film everyone leaps up out of their seats and bolts for the exits, a distinctive habit amongst Portuguese filmgoers.
Afterwards I take a ride down Rua da Bica de Duarte Belo on the tiny yellow funicular.
It descends past old faded houses with green balconies.
Twice, I accidentally stand on a small metal bar set in the floor of the funicular, which makes the bar clang like a bell.
This Ascensor da Bica passes a handful of cheap eating places at the top of the hill, descending between fine old street lamps with intricate iron grillwork.
I like this tranquil part of old Lisbon.
At the end of the funicular ride, a couple of doors down from the terminus I drop into a cheap restaurant for a bitoque, a steak with a fried egg on top. Most of the walls in this restaurant are lined with four-deep rows of port, whisky and Madeira bottles.
Someone who looks like Jean Cocteau sits down at a neighbouring table.
I finish my bitoque and walk along Rua de São Paulo.
Opposite the restaurant Popular da Bica there stands a beautifully tiled chemist’s called Ultramina. This well preserved old chemist’s is graced with paintings of various medicinal plants and herbs, such as polygala, chamomilla, menthe aquatic, and borrago officinalis.
I have never known a city that brims with as much style and elegance in its streets, shops, bars and cafés.
Related Post: ‘A Cool Fish’, Broadway Cinematheque MOMA (BC MOMA), Beijing, China; ‘Ao Fim da Noite’, Amoreiras and ‘Zandalee’, Cinema Nimas, Lisbon