Occasionally the moviegoing experience is more about what happens in the theatre while you’re watching it than it is about the actual film on the screen. And to plead my case is this memory I have from my high school days. One rainy Saturday evening my parents took me with them to go see the new Frank Sinatra-Dean Martin western comedy 4 FOR TEXAS at the Colonial Theatre in downtown Richmond, Virginia. My father was going through a phase where he liked the Rat Pack movies – he had also dragged us to see SERGEANTS 3 – and my mother didn’t mind too much since she had loved Sinatra when he was a singer with the Tommy Dorsey band. Of course, I was excited about seeing it because it featured recent Bond girl Ursula Andress – and Anita Ekberg! But more importantly, The 3 Stooges were in it! Oh yeah, and Charles Bronson too but he wasn’t the big action star yet, just a character actor. But I got distracted from the film early on.

When we first entered the theatre – and it was fairly crowded for a rainy Saturday night – there was a slight odor of bug spray. It was noticeable without being oppressive even though my parents commented on it right away. I remember we sat in a center section and put our raincoats over the seats in front of us because they weren’t taken. Not too long after the lights went down and the movie began – maybe fifteen minutes or so, I noticed something moving across my raincoat on the seat in front of me. When I looked closer in the semi-darkness, I could see it was some kind of big, black shiny insect. I told my parents to look and while I was pointing at the thing, it appeared to stand up on its hind legs. I could tell from the body shape that it was a beetle. It also had big pinchers which were straining toward the ceiling as if it wanted to climb up there.

I had never seen a beetle like this before but I didn’t get the opportunity to study it long because my father leaned forward and flicked it off the raincoat onto the floor somewhere. Great! After that, we wondered how many more of these things were crawling around on the theatre seats or scurrying around by our feet, driven insane by the insecticide. But did we complain to the management? Did we get up and leave or ask for our money back? No, we sat there and watched the rest of the movie even though I couldn’t concentrate on anything – even the widescreen assets of Andress and Ekberg. For the rest of the movie, I kept “feeling” like something was crawling up the back of my chair, headed toward my exposed neck. It was like a William Castle promotional gimmick gone horribly wrong. (Hey, he should have released some giant hissing cockroaches in theatres when he was promoting BUG). At any rate, it was a memorable evening but not because of anything that had to do with the film 4 FOR TEXAS.

I later did some research on beetles but the only species that resembled the thing I saw in the Colonial was a stag beetle and they are not commonly found here; they are prevalent in Europe. As for the Colonial which was a grand old picture palace from the 1930s, it closed along with the other popular movie houses on downtown Broad Street in the seventies (I believe) as more and more Richmond suburbanites went to shopping malls instead of patronizing the downtown businesses. I have fond memories though of the Richmond downtown movie houses – the Loews, the State, the National, the Grand and the seedy Venus Theatre on a rough block of Hull Street – and some true stories to go with them for later. (Inside photo of the Colonial Theatre below circa the 1930s).