From the Everyman to The 39 Steps

39 Steps to Drazin’s! I haven’t yet written about The 39 Steps, but I think of my life as having been more the other way around. It was through living in Hampstead that I discovered films in an enticing way that encouraged me to continue to look at them – and later write about them – through most of the years that have followed.

An early film-going memory is of standing under the awning (long ago removed) of the Everyman Cinema. It claimed to be “opposite Hampstead tube station”, but actually it was situated in Holly Bush Vale on the other side of Heath Street from Louis’s Hungarian patisserie, a good hundred steps down the road.

Its walls were whitewashed then, so that I feel a strange sense of dislocation whenever I visit Hampstead today to see the bottle-green of the present-day building, the old entrance walled up as if the place I knew had been put in a mausoleum. Even more disorientating for me is to look inside. The flip-up seats, long gone, have been replaced by giant luxury armchairs, each with a table, which make today’s Everyman look more like a viewing-room for endlessly snacking movie executives than a cinema.

I can’t remember what was the first film I saw in that earlier Everyman, but two possible contenders – shown about 1970 – would have been Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box and the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Perhaps they were even on the same bill one magical night close to Christmas when I stood in a long queue outside watching the gently falling snow, anxious that we wouldn’t get in but then all the more pleased when we did.

What I liked about that Everyman was its purity. It was more like going to Film Chapel than escaping from reality in a Picture Palace. The seats were a little uncomfortable, but in a good way that kept you awake to focus on the film. Above one’s head was that splendid vaulted wooden ceiling.  Between screenings you could chat in the foyer, which doubled up as an art gallery. Although confectionery was available, it was basic. No ice-cream lady with a tray. Just Paynes’ Poppets in a cardboard box, which you bought with your ticket on the way in.

In my time (the 1970s, just stretching into the 1980s), the posters that advertised the films were printed with black ink on yellow. No nonsense. Just  a bare statement of the coming attraction, which miraculously often did live up to the words Ars gratia Artis.

Each week was split between a four-day double-bill and a three-day one, although the poster that I have today as a memento on my wall, unusually, has squeezed three bills into the week. Perhaps, it marked the early transition into 1980s extravagance, when suddenly the policy seemed to be to show as many different films as possible.

That long-ago time of the yellow posters was when I felt most at home. The clock of my most treasured memories would stop once it disappeared, the switch away corresponding in my mind with some decisive change in the wider culture. Ever since then, my tendency – encouraged by my subsequent profession – has been to look into the past.

With its promise of a flashback, the phrase  “forty years ago” has an irresistible ring for me. “How do you know what sort of a fellow I was when I was as young as you were forty years ago?” says Clive Candy in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. And probably it was in the Everyman – more than forty years ago – that I saw the film for the first time.

Between school and university I even briefly had a job at the cinema selling tickets.  I would often chat to the manager, Dennis Lloyd, about the war. A soldier with the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, he shared vivid memories of what it was like to be rescued from Dunkirk.

But while Dennis Lloyd made it back to England, I was fated soon to head in the opposite direction. I fell in love with the French usherette, Aline, and eloped to Paris. It was an unexpected coup de foudre that made me only all the more fond of the Everyman. I was sorry to leave it behind, but – of all towns – my love of movies was certainly going to be safe in Paris.

Today, when I try to recall the spirit of the Everyman I grew up with, I struggle to find it in the new Everyman, which has been scaled up into a nationwide chain and feels more like an excuse to eat and drink than a cinema. I recognize it still, though, in several cinemas in Paris, perhaps most of all at 4 rue Christine in the Latin Quarter.

While the Christine cinema is only about fifty years old, it was built in the old home of Louis XIV’s doctor and effortlessly suggests an ancient film-going tradition.

Elle et Lui was playing on the particular night that this photograph was taken, but there was a whiff too of the Everyman, and an affair to remember.

Addendum: Friday 8 May 2026

A good place to explore the Everyman’s history is the website everymancinemahistory.co.uk. As the Everyman has now expanded to nearly fifty cinemas around the United Kingdom, I was amused to read, on the site’s home page, this 1937 quote from the cinema’s founder, Jim Fairfax-Jones: “There may be 250 Odeons but there is only one Everyman.”

There was only one Everyman. You can buy the name, but you cannot scale up why it mattered. And there was only one Penultimate Picture Palace. I was sorry to read yesterday that it was at risk of closing down. It was where I saw films when I returned to England after that first trip to Paris: it was late September and time to be back at school. When it came to seeing films in Oxford, that school was unquestionably the Penultimate Picture Palace. Now the building is painted white and called the Ultimate Picture Palace. Then it was black, with a sculpture of the Jazz Singer above the entrance. Delightfully rackety, with a patch on the screen that you had to make an effort of will to imagine wasn’t there, it was the perfect place to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which it might easily have inspired.