I'm toying with the notion of eating a peach...
Partner and I were watching An Old Movie the other day.
Talking it over later, I remarked that I had first seen Old Movie in question in the second-run/revival cinema in my hometown, and that we had gone in at a relatively late point in the narrative and had - as was the custom in those days - sat sitting there, through the ads and the trailers and for all I know a second feature or at least a cartoon or a short, to see the whole thing through again.
Which is, my dearios, undoubtedly one of those things that dates one and must be entirely weird and mysterious not only to the present generation but, actually, to several generations before, because I think it must have been round about the 70s that instead of buying your ticket and marching into the cinema and finding a seat that suited you, and sitting there until, well, you felt like leaving or the National Anthem played to indicate time to go home, you bought a ticket for a particular timed showing of a particular film, and even a particular seat in the 'screen' as they have come to be known.
A corollary of this is, that one was aware of How It All Came Out before one had seen the beginning, which to this spoiler-averse generation must be horror of horrors?
It is an interesting phenomenon that, at a time when it is almost impossible to avoid spoilers without completely eschewing social media, Fear of Being Spoilt has reached such a level. I do not remember this being Such A Thing in my youth. Okay, there were certain movies - or maybe it was just Psycho? - which had posters in the lobby beseeching patrons not to disclose the twist to their friends. But on the whole, if it was out there, it was out there.
And of course if you missed a movie, or an episode of a tv series, that was it, unless it came up at a second-run cinema, or the thing was repeated. You had to ask your friends who had seen it to convey what you had missed.
Or (depending on your age at the time) you might glean some idea from kids playing it in the school playground.
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