The lavish remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” the one with Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian, finally bobbed its way to The Ritz Theater in downtown Marianna in the early 1960s. Most of my family went to see it at a matinee, which included previews, a Warner Bros. cartoon and all 178 minutes of “Mutiny.” We’re talking about one lengthy voyage.
At the time I saw “Mutiny,” I was in the middle of dropping out of a series of kindergartens, so my schedule was, shall we say, fluid. Afterwards, we stood in front of The Ritz at dusk comparing our favorite parts.
My brother Robert liked the film’s depiction of the keelhaul torture (figures). Another brother thought the fire aboard The Bounty was boss. A friend of my brother’s went on about the gorgeous Tahitian women. Then I got asked to name my favorite portion of the entertainment. “The cartoon,” I said. An opinionated film fan was born at The Ritz, which became my portal into a hodgepodge of movie history.
The fourth wall disappears
In the first grade, I begged my mother to let me tag along with my older brothers to The Ritz to see a special post-school screening of the horror-comedy “Monsters Crash the Pajama Party.” My mother consented if only my annoyed brother Robert agreed to keep tabs on me. Fine. He sat me at the end of the row by the aisle.
“Monsters” started with interviews of the filmmakers who were all dressed as gorillas. The audience laughed at the gorilla costumes, but they creeped me out. The movie followed college kids spending the night in a haunted house where a Mad Doctor (is there any other kind in horror movies?) performed surgery on female abductees. The Wolf Man, Igor the Hunchback and other assorted monsters served as assistants.
At one point, the college girls escaped so The Mad Doctor turned to us, the audience, for his next surgery candidate. The monsters ran off-camera, disappeared from the screen and then reappeared in the flesh flooding out from The Ritz’s exit doorways by the screen. The fourth wall disappeared. My tiny mind exploded.
As the gruesome creatures hauled a young woman from the audience (an obvious plant, in retrospect) and back onto the screen, Igor snuck up and grabbed me by the shoulder. I lost it and took off running with Robert in close pursuit. At the time, I think I planned to run to the island of Cuba. Robert tackled me two blocks from The Ritz and held me in a phone booth while he rang my mom. Robert got extra angry when the cigar-chomping manager charged him a second fee for re-entry.
My mother asked what went wrong at the screening?
“That thing touched me.” I replied.
Feeding time at The Ritz
When the oddball Hal Ashby comedy “Harold and Maude,” about a May-December romance between a suicide-faking young man and a concentration-camp survivor, came to The Ritz in 1972, Dr. Richard Schulz went to its final showing on Thursday night. He had the place to himself. The cult classic confused audiences on its original run.
Later, the stoic doctor said, “That was the best movie I have ever seen.”
Then he added, “I also fed some of my popcorn to the biggest rat I have ever seen.”
The Ritz may have been a palace in its pre-TV heyday, but it had become rundown by the time I became a regular in the ‘70s. The Ratz, as we called it. Seats were missing. If an armrest came with a working seat, say a small prayer. The floor remained as sticky as flypaper.
But the movies. Oh, they were all over the map. “Cotton Comes to Harlem” one week, “Patton” the next. Hammer and other horror flicks such as “The Witchfinder General” every Saturday afternoon. Learning that Shakespeare’s plays are violent and bloody good fun in “Theatre of Blood.” Disney fare. “The Gore Gore Girls” and “Corpse Grinders” at the late show. Spaghetti Westerns galore. Car-chase films such as “Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Vanishing Point,” “The French Connection” and “The Getaway.”
Obscure selections such as “Trog,” “Brotherhood of Satan” (with character actor Strother Martin as the lead) and “The Green Slime.” Godzilla pics. Vomit bag gimmicks. Hollywood hits such as “Midnight Cowboy,” “The Godfather,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Dirty Harry.”
Some titles were treated with respect: “Walking Tall,” “Love Story,” the annual return of “Cool Hand Luke.” The packed audience stood up with fists in the air at the end of “Billy Jack.”
I never will forget the night my father took the family to see “Deliverance” at The Ritz on opening night because he said, “it’s a movie about canoeing.” Pretty sure he had not read the James Dickey novel it was based on. My brothers and I still refer to “Deliverance” as “Tuning Ned Beatty.”
An end in flames
One early March morning in 1977, The Ritz went up in a blaze.
The firefighters had to wait until all the panicking rats ran out the now-open front doors before they could get near the burning theater. By dawn’s early light, The Ritz was a total loss. A smoldering cinematic hole was left in my life.
The last movie I watched at The Ritz before it burned to the ground was the multiple Oscar-winning “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Chief Bromden ran free at the end. At least the tattered Ritz went out on a bittersweet positive note.
Mark Hinson is a former senior writer at The Tallahassee Democrat, He can be reached at mark.hinson59@gmailcom