French Connection
French Connection
In 1972, two Colombo boys cut classes to watch The French Connection at the Savoy, discovering not just cinema magic, but friendship and dreams that lingered.
Everybody in college talked about the new movie, running to packed audiences in the Savoy cinema. It had the best car chase ever. On the back page of the English daily, The Daily News, in its classified section, there was a striking poster for The French Connection.
Quintus and Denzil saw the ad in the Daily News while sipping tea in the college canteen, and decided they must see it. They collected Rs. 2.50 each and headed to the Savoy on a day their classes ended early.
They took the 154 CTB bus from Borella and got off at Wellawatte, in front of the Savoy cinema.
The Savoy stood like a palace on Galle Road, its white façade glowing against the tropical dusk. Coloured bulbs flickered around the marquee, announcing in bold English letters: THE FRENCH CONNECTION. Beneath the title, Gene Hackman scowled from the poster, revolver in hand, trench coat flapping in the wind.
For boys in Colombo, the Savoy was not just a cinema — it was a world. A balcony ticket meant red-cushioned seats and a view of the giant screen; the stalls meant sticky floors and only the whirring of ceiling fans. But if you paid for the dress circle, then called ODC, you felt the bliss of air conditioning — a true luxury in 1972. Wherever you sat, it was still the place to dream.
That Thursday afternoon in 1972, both boys, barely seventeen, stood in the ticket queue, coins warm in their fists. The man at the counter, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, tore the stubs with the bored efficiency of someone who had done this for twenty years. Behind them, a lad whined to his friend for roasted kadala; ahead, two office clerks in short-sleeved shirts argued about whether the seats would be “house full.”
At the entrance, an usher in a white tunic snapped their tickets in half and waved them through. The foyer was a carnival — vendors hawked roasted peanuts in little paper cones, orange barley water in glass bottles, and the unmistakable delight of fish buns. Denzil bought a cone of kadala; Quintus clutched his barley water as though it were champagne.
Inside, the air was heavy with incense from the foyer, cigarette smoke from impatient men, and the faint mustiness of curtains that had hung since the 1950s. The air conditioning hummed steadily — without the squeaks of ceiling fans — stirring the heat but never quite conquering it. The boys scrambled up the wooden stairs, clutching their treasures, and found two seats in the dress circle.
When the house lights dimmed and the curtains drew apart, the chatter dissolved into expectant silence. The screen filled with New York — grey, cold, utterly foreign. For Quintus and Denzil, who had never been beyond Ceylon, it was like peering into another planet.
And then — the chase. A screech of tyres, a train clattering on elevated tracks, Popeye Doyle racing below. The boys forgot their peanuts, their barley water, even the soft squeak of the air conditioning above them.
“Did you see that?” Denzil whispered, almost leaping from his seat.
“Shhh!” Quintus hissed, though his own fingers dug into the armrest. His heart was hammering to the rhythm of screeching brakes and blaring horns.
By the time the credits rolled, the boys had been transported far from Galle Road. When they stepped out, Colombo felt smaller, more familiar — the buses at the Wellawatte junction, the Austin A40s and Austin Cambridges plying the roads, the smell of frying isso vadai, the salty air drifting from the sea. Yet the neon letters of the Savoy glowed like a piece of New York itself.
“I’m going to be a detective one day, like Gene Hackman,” Denzil declared, kicking a stone along the pavement as they headed home.
“And I’ll be your driver,” said Quintus, grinning like a racing driver, swinging his satchel. “But only if you promise not to shoot anyone.”
They both laughed, two boys walking under Colombo’s streetlamps, their heads still full of sirens and subways.
Reflection
Now, looking back after fifty-three years, that afternoon feels almost unbelievable. The boys of that day are still here — Denzil in Sydney and Quintus in Colombo — scattered by time and circumstance, the Savoy itself no longer the palace it once was. But I remember it as clearly as if I were still there: the glow of the marquee, the smell of kadala, the thrill of seeing another world unfurl on the giant screen.
And I see, too, what I could not have known then: that it was not really about Gene Hackman or car chases or New York. It was about discovery — of how a story can lift you out of your own life and place you, for two hours, in another. And it was about friendship, and how easily the dreams of youth were spoken on a Colombo pavement.
It is true what they say: the smallest journeys, the smallest nights, remain with us the longest.
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