Regal Cinema, Quetta: The Old Turkey Buzzard

Sonay ki Talaash starring "Gary Gory Pack" and Omar Sharif

(Dedication: In the memory of my late uncles Samad Ali, Muhammad Hussain Mamo, Sadiq Ali and Sikander Ali, all of whom were great movie lovers and dedicated patrons of Regal Cinema Quetta in particular)

Quetta now has its own brand new multiplex cinema, the Weplex Pak Forces, equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, including top of the range Dolby Digital Acoustics System 7.1. It is said that this multiplex boasts one of the largest curved screens, if not the largest, in the entire country. Shopping malls are popping up everywhere in the city, many of them equipped with multi-screen theatres showing the latest on offer from Hollywood, Bollywood and Lollywood. Just last year, one of the oldest cinemas on Toghi Road where we used to live, Delight Cinema, was demolished to make way for a brand new, multi-storied shopping mall. But it is not the new multiplex theatre or the iconic Delight Cinema of Quetta that is the focus of this blog; here, I will focus on an equally, if not more, historical landmark of the city, the king of cinemas in Quetta: Regal Cinema.

It must have been one of those lazy, late afternoons in the autumn of early 1970s when the skies of Quetta turn into magnificent blue and the shadows grow longer and longer with each passing day as the crisp and dry breeze brush against the skin. My late uncle, Sadiq Ali, was getting ready as I watched him run his comb through his oil and water soaked hair followed by the fingers of his other hand, trim his moustache in the style of the day and wash and wipe his face in front of the old corridor sink. Looking sideways at me, he said, “Ready?”. “Yes”, I replied. And so, we stepped out of the house to meet up with his waiting friends outside. There were Ishaq, Faqir, Arbab, and if my memory is not failing me, Sgt. Idrees and some other friends, too. It was movie night. And movies, especially English "cowboy" movies (westerns), almost always meant going to the famous Regal Cinema.

Regal Cinema was behind the main Jinnah Road, at the corner of Shahra e Adalat---I think that is what the street was called then---across the street from Hotel Metropole and in front of the old taxi stand. The adjacent intersection on Jinnah Road was called Regal Chowk, named after the cinema. I am not sure if it was an official designation or not, but that was how it was known by the Quetta waal. The cinema was one of the old-style, single screen movie houses with differentially priced seating and separate areas for families and the ladies. The stall tickets were the cheapest, right in front of the screen which usually put a strain on the neck because of continuously looking up at the screen and where sometimes benches were also placed, while the gallery seats (enclosures for families and the ladies) were pricey. This was way before the shopping mall housed multiplexes with airplane style business class luxury seats and high quality, high-definition (HD ) visuals and sound. No popcorns or ice-bars were sold then, but steaming hot chai, peanuts, shinay, paan, pakora and samosa usually hawked by boys inside the main theatre hall during the interval.  In summers, there were cold drinks—cola, soda pop or simply bothal, as they were called. The choice was limited to Coca Cola, 7-UP, Fanta and sometimes the local brand Apple Sidra, my favorite. The drinks, served in thick glass bottles and not in aluminum cans, were sold by hawkers who did not hawk their goods by the usual hollering, but who used to announce their presence inside the theatre hall by making a rattling sound with their metal lid openers against the bottles they carried in front of them in the sling supported wooden crates. Nowadays, like everything else, cinemas have also become “egalitarian” with uniformly priced tickets and with no gender segregation. Progress, taraqqee!

The cinemas in Quetta were grouped, or hierarchized one might say, according to the movies they showed. While Imdad Cinema showed both quality Urdu and English movies, Regal was exclusively English. Rahat, Prince and Ismat Cinemas were mostly for Pakistani Urdu movies and Delight and Paradise were the bastions of Pushto and Punjabi movies with huge, colorful wall posters carrying the pictures of such perennial stars as Badar Munir, Musarrat Shaheen, Sultan Rahi, Mustafa Qureshi, Ali Ejaz, Anjuman and Mumtaz. The plot-less, cheap production Pushto, and often Punjabi movies, too, were almost always house-full shows, mainly because they showed a lot of sexually suggestive scenes, like song and dance scenes in pouring rain in which the heroine would wear a white or a light colored dress! The hoi polloi loved those movies. What else was there to entertain them? No VCRs and no Internet then. This is why I have used the word hierarchized above: people with a more refined taste or artistic sensibility and the education and learning that went with it, or it implied, would usually prefer to be entertained at Regal Cinema or Imdad Cinema.

It was a totally different time then, and like everything else that carried the ethos of that era----some of which I have explored in my previous blog posts (Here and Here)----going to the movies was not just for killing time, or for time-pass; it was not just a mere visual and auditory feast, but a holistic, existential experience, meaning that the movies were savored and consumed with all of one’s senses and faculties; like good food, the movies too---and the movies were always good!---would leave a pleasant after taste in one’s being, long  after the watching experience. Going to the movies was, above all, a social event, even a periodic religious one I would say, like some eagerly awaited pilgrimage to a sacred site.

And so it was on that autumn evening for my uncle Sadiq and his buddies---and for me. The movie that we were going to watch on that day was one that would remain etched in my memory forever. In a sense, it would become part of the historical legacy of Regal Cinema; it would define an era, an entire generation of cinema goers in Quetta, in the same way that years later the Bollywood blockbuster Sholay (starring Amitabh Bachan, Amjad Khan, Heema Mailini and Dharmendra) would define another era, the age of the VCR and the VHS video tape. It was a “cowboy” movie, a western movie, titled MacKenna’s Gold, or Sonay ki Talaash in Urdu. Starring “Gary Gory Pack” (Gregory Peck), Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas (of TV series Kojak fame), Eli Wallach, Julie Newmar and Camilla Sparv, the movie’s plot revolved around the main characters, all bickering and fighting with each other while looking for a hidden trove of gold and the Indians or the Apaches (the “Jungalees”) trying to prevent them from accessing the treasure buried on their sacred land. The movie starts with a Jose Feliciano title song called “Old turkey buzzard” that shows the big winged North American scavenger flying over the beautifully cinematographed barren lands down below (Utah valley? Arizona?). For many years after the movie was first shown at Regal Cinema, that particular “buzzard” song would be sung with many different accents and tonal variations by movie lovers of the “cowboy” variety which was the most popular genre of Hollywood movies then.

Gary Cooper in The High Noon

Regal Cinema had the honor of showing such great movies as The High Noon (starring Gary Cooper), Shane (Alan Ladd), The Drumbeat (Alan Ladd), Guns of Navarone ("Gary Gory Pack", Anthony Quinn, David Niven) The Great Escape (Steve  McQueen), The Magnificent Seven (Yul Brynner and Charles Bronson) and The Dirty Dozen (starting the great Charles Bronson). Before the rise of action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood in the 1980s, there were the gun slingers John Wayne, Gary Cooper, “Gary Gory Pack”, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Charles Bronson. The last, “Char-luss Braansun”, was especially loved by the fans, so much so that his large sized posters and locally drawn portraits could be seen on the back hood of many an auto-rickshaw and on trucks, too, in Quetta city.

"Char-luss Braansun" aka Charles Bronson

Charles Bronson may have been an actor of B-Grade movies in Hollywood, but he surely was the hero of heroes in Quetta of the 70s and the 80s.

Regal is no more. I am not sure about the exact year, but my guess is that it was torn down in the early 1990s. On its site now sits a huge concrete and glass block with offices and shops inside, I believe. I have not been inside the building but from outside it’s a sad, dull looking structure, like a gravestone to the buried corpse of the iconic Regal Cinema, the Old Turkey Buzzard of Quetta. 

For more, click: Quetta, City of Karezes

St. Francis' Grammar High, Uncle Marx

Hussainabad, the place, the people and their values

The Rental Libraries of Quetta

The Battle of the Kawasakis

On Simplicity

Loss of symbolism

On Bandagi

                                                 Old Turkey Buzzard (Mackenna's Gold, YouTube)

Dervaish's Quetta Youtube Channel (Click)