Your New Leicester Square

There can be no doubt that Leicester Square needed a make over. Despite being the go to location for just about every major UK film premiere, and despite being dominated by the art deco splendour of the Odeon cinema, the square itself was run down, scruffy and down right seedy. Now, there is not too much wrong with seedy,  it does tend to go hand in hand with areas of entertainment like the Square, but the powers that be obviously decided that something needed to be done and in December 2010 work commenced on a complete revamp.

As Dylan Thomas once said “time passes”, and I found myself wandering and wondering thorough the square. Wandering because that’s what I do and wondering, not for the first time, if it would ever be finished. The hoardings declared “Your New Leicester Square, Opening April 2012“. I’m no expert but given that there were only four days of showery April remaining and a considerable amount of work still ongoing , that date seemed a little optimistic.

Finally, three weeks into May, it has happened. The hoardings are down and no doubt the crowds, encouraged by the warm weather, are already filling the space, leaving their litter and scrawling their names on the freshly hewn granite but hey, that’s life.

I haven’t yet seen the finished product, but I suspect that when I do I’m going to find it just a little too clinical but not to worry, it’ll soon gain the patina of the masses and will eventually reacquire that touch of seediness that it really needs to become London’s premiere entertainment district. Enjoy!

 All photographs, except the banner and the Odeon, predate December 2010. 

Peeping Tom

There has been a great deal of fuss recently about the film Peeping Tom, mostly centred around the fact that its new release has been championed by Martin Scorsese. As I had only ever seen it on TV, I thought it would be a good idea to see it on a bigger screen, so I went to see it at Screen 5 of the Empire, Leicester Sq.

In a theatre of only 51 seats, I probably had the best. In the middle of the back row (there were only 5 rows!) with an aisle in front of me, so no heads to get in the way. The seats reclined backwards and were very comfortable. Initially, I thought it was going to be fairly empty but the punters spilled in during Pearl & Dean and in the end there were only a couple of empty seats. It was, however, at £12.95, vastly overpriced.

Despite being so small, the relative size of the screen and the seating positions meant that it was actually very similar to watching on a "proper" big screen.

It was pretty much as I remembered it. Very period, very stylised, even comic bookish (in fact it has the look of a graphic novel but from a time before such a thing existed, let alone a time when the cinema industry relies so heavily on them as source material!) and is somewhat overacted by modern standards. The colour process was extraordinary, adding to the overall sense of discomfort.

The film itself is an interesting idea, deeply flawed by the fact that this was a clearly unbalanced young man who insisted on drawing attention to himself by whipping out his cine camera at the most inappropriate moments It took most of the film before anyone noticed either of these things! Also, he had already moved far beyond being a peeping tom by the beginning of the film and had become what I suppose you could call a homicidal voyeur, but, then again, that wouldn’t have made such a snappy title!

The German accent of Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is unexplained and inexplicable as he grew up in the same house in which he eventually died and the sheer naivety of Helen Stevens (Anna Massey) would be unacceptable were it not for the fact that in the real world there are something like 150 British Women engaged to men on Death Row in the US! All other cast members played their parts with varying degrees of subtlety, but none of them played the parts with too much! Moira Shearer just looked great!

Extremely controversial in its day and resulting in the end of director Michael Powell’s, previously illustrious, career. It remains an interesting, though uncomfortable, film.

It was certainly worth seeing on the big screen during this 50th anniversary season.