Last night I caught the 78 tram from Church Street about a block away from my flat in Highett Street, down Chapel Street to the beautiful old Astor Theatre in Windsor. This is truly one of the most special and rare old cinema buildings in Australia. It is a perfectly preserved Art Deco treasure that somehow survived the 1970s and '80s wrecking balls that fell other grand old cinema buildings, and somehow its glorious auditorium survived the indignity of being subdivided into a mini-multiplex of two or three cinemas. It remains a single screen cinema and walking into its lobby is like stepping back in time. But the Astor is no relic, it is a popular arthouse cinema showing revivals of classic and interesting recent films. Last night was a double feature of Roman Polanski's first English language films, Repulsion starring Catherine Denevue and Cul-de-Sac starring Donald Pleasence and Catherine Denevue's ill-fated younger sister (I forget her name, but she died a year or so after the film was made; she was one of several female stars that Polanski apparently clashed with during the making of a movie, with the most infamous of course being Faye Dunaway in Chinatown; perhaps the tension worked though, because Catherine Denevue's sister in Cul-de-Sac and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown both deliver very effective performances). I'd never seen either of these films and enjoyed them both. Cul-de-Sac is a bit bizarre and darkly funny. Repulsion is basically a case study of a mental breakdown, and found Denevue's performance to be very good.
When I was leaving I was surprised to see a cat in the foyer. Someone told me later the cat lives in the theatre.
