You’re the aspiring actor Clive Owen, it’s the mid-Eighties, and you are out to impress your girlfriend and fellow RADA graduate Sarah-Jane Fenton. So where do you take her? Drinking in Soho? Eating in Knightsbridge? Dancing in Hoxton? Why, you go to the Electric Palace cinema in Harwich, northeast Essex, of course.

Fenton is from the area, and the cinema, one of the oldest in the UK, has an impossibly romantic old world charm. You can’t go wrong. There’s just one snag – the management won’t let you in. “There weren’t enough people in the cinema for a showing,” explains cinema director Colin Crawford. “So Clive asked them what was the minimum they needed, they said six, and he paid for six tickets and they let him in.”

Today Owen, who has since become a movie megastar and indeed married Fenton, is some-thing of a fixture at the Electric Palace – he is the cinema’s official patron, unofficial fund-raiser and impromptu speaker. “He sometimes comes in unannounced,” says Crawford. “He just says, ‘Do you want me to introduce the film?’ When Casablanca was on, he came in and spoke about it. And he gave us a preview screening of Elizabeth: The Golden Age to raise money for the building.”

The cinema itself, opened in 1911, is the pride of Harwich town, a tiny colony of quietude that boasts more than 200 listed buildings and is located on the thin peninsula between the Stour and the Orwell rivers. The building, modestly white on the outside and lushly velvety red on the inside, is according to Owen, “an important and vital asset to the local area, and one of the most charming cinemas in the country.”

Not just the most charming, but also one of the first purpose-built cinemas in the country, adds Crawford, who fell for the Electric Palace in the mid-Seventies when, after lapsing into disrepair, it was saved from demolition by a group of local cinephiles. And if it’s not the very oldest cinema in the country, it’s certainly in the top five. It’s hard to verify, explains Crawford, because a slew of cinemas were built after the 1909 Cinematograph Act was passed – which decreed that projection booths had to be built away from auditoria (the film reels were highly flammable, which would often lead to fires and fatalities). “The Electric cinema on Portobello Road in London is five months older,” he says. “But we say that we’re the oldest surviving ‘least altered’ cinema.”

Being a seaside cinema is also a boon, says Crawford. First, since Harwich is on a peninsula you can boast a captive local audience (the nearest alternative cinema is more than 20 miles away). Second, movies with oceanic themes, such as Master and Commander, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Perfect Storm, are eminently suited to the environment. “A lot of people are employed in the ports and shipping,” says Crawford. “So a good seafaring film does well here.” Even better is that during a hot summer heat-wave the Harwich Electric Palace needs only to open the front doors to draw in crisp North Sea air to cool the building down.

Most important of all, however, is the cultural function of the cinema. In an age of ugly plastic multiplexes that process ticket-buyers with production-line brutality, and in an era when the internet, home cinema and gaming are competing with cinemas for entertainment revenue, places such as the Harwich Electric Palace are gold dust. With their one- screening-a-night policy, their lavish interiors and community atmosphere, they reinforce the notion that film isn’t just a product to be thoughtlessly consumed. It’s an event that has roots stretching back to 1911. It’s an act of communication. It’s a work of art. “When people are sitting elbow to elbow in our cinema they feel like they’re having a night out,” says Crawford. “We’re allowing them to make an evening of it. We are returning film to where it belongs.”

www.electricpalace.com

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