Napoleon

The Napoleon — wow. I spent many happy hours there as a boy. It’s one of the first things I remember from the day I arrived in France in September 1961. “Swiss Family Robinson” was playing, a movie I’d just seen in the States, with what seemed like a huge painted cut-out of the family above the marquee. I might have been one of the people in line in the newspaper clipping about the James Dean festival. The Napoleon had festivals all the time on different themes: Humphrey Bogart films, Hammer horror movies, John Ford festivals, etc…Paris was the greatest movie town I’ve ever seen. There were hundreds of theaters large and small showing first-run and vintage movies. Many of the films most of my generation saw on TV I saw for the first time on the big screen in Paris.