Canadian Graffiti: they found it at the movies
What film critic Pauline Kael meant when she said, in the title of her famous book, “I Lost It At The Movies,” was, of course, that she found it there.
And so did the Blain kids. They found it at the movies, more specifically, at Hamilton’s historic Westdale Theatre, where four of them worked in the 1960s and early 1970s.
As ushers and box office ticket takers, sometimes filling in at the candy counter, stocking popcorn, sometimes putting letters on the marquee, guiding people to their seats with flashlights, streaming them into smoking or non-smoking sections.
“I watched ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’” remembers Leo Blain, “nineteen times.”
What was the “it” they found? Employment, of course. But more. At once a sense of place and an escape from place; community; laughter; tears; terror (“Wait Until Dark”); awe. What do any of us find as we lose ourselves in movies? Kathleen Ross as Etta Place on the handlebars of a bicycle, Newman and Redford rushing out into a hail of bullets? The images that won’t ever let us go. Pick those that do it for you.
Someone else found “it” at the movies, just a few weeks ago. The people who are renovating and rescuing the Westdale discovered something, as they ripped through walls and recesses; something almost, well, archeological, though I don’t mean to make the Blains sound that old because some of them are younger than I am.
It was graffiti. A marking scrawled in black magic marker on a hidden stockroom wall in the basement — “Joseph Blain, usher, ’68-’72.” Someone took a picture. It got onto social media. It didn’t take long for it to get back to the Blains.
Joseph, who lives in Montreal, his hair maybe a little whiter now than it was when he tagged the wall, laughs to tell it.
“That’s the only ‘daring’ thing I ever did; it was my ‘Kilroy was here’ moment.” he says as we sit in The Second Cup, with brothers Leo and Vince and sister Maura, reminiscing.
“I can’t believe Joe was the one (to do graffiti),” says his older brother Vince, the eldest of the four and the first to get work at the Westdale (they lived just around the corner).
“He (Joseph) was the scholarship kid.” He studied at McGill University. He speaks several languages and owns a translation company that does work all over the world. Joseph once translated for Pope John Paul II on his visit to Canada.
Vince, retired head of English with the Halton Catholic board, was a little more the mischievous type and you can still see it in those playful Irish eyes and the tenaciously red hair.
“There was a Hungarian projectionist, a free thinker, and he showed me how to program the music between features,” Vince recalls. “One day Ken Davies (the manager then, fondly remembered) said, ‘What is that?’”
It was “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which Vince had put on, a contrast to the Mantovani that Ken usually went with.
“Those were fabulous times, with fabulous movies,” says sister Maura, an editor who now lives in Ottawa. “Bonnie and Clyde.” “Bullitt,” with its famous car chase, Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Lion In Winter,” Alan Arkin, in “Wait Until Dark.”
Richard Burton in “The Taming of the Shrew.”
And here Vince, with his robust tenor, bursts out into “Where is the life I once led ...”
The Westdale Theatre Blains were just the half of it, the younger four of eight children (also Bart, Agnes, Mary Patricia and Joanne) of single mother Betty Sullivan Blain, an amazing woman featured in the Spec in 1972 when she graduated from McMaster with a degree in social work.
Leo, who went into the insurance business, reminds everyone at the table how they’d sneak Maura into the shows. She worked the box office, so she didn’t get to see the films the way her brothers did.
On her 16th birthday, a wonderful surprise. “Vince,” she says, “put ‘Happy Birthday, Maura’ up on the marquee.”
Here’s to those old lights shining once again. We have too much “it” to lose, and find, for them not to.