CINÉMA MacMahon, a small movie house next to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, is assuredly a place of many a legend. Its living history is Pierre Rissient, today 74 and still dynamically involved in what has proven to be a lifelong philosophy: it’s not enough to like a film; you have to like it for the right reasons.

Rissient says the MacMahon lore took off in 1953 when he and some of his friends had the temerity to barge into the office of Emile Villion, the cinema’s owner, and tell him that he was not doing his job well.

Understandably, Villion was irked at the insolent intrusion by a bunch of teenagers who were trying to tell him, in short, how to run his business. But he was also conscious of the fact that after many years of hard work he was far from reaching his target.

He had acquired the 137-seat theatre and had turned it into a cinema house specialising in Hollywood films, hoping to capitalise on the presence of American tourists and the GIs based in Paris just after the war; and it was not working.

“That is because you don’t know how to choose the movies,” the youthful gang led by Rissient told him: “Try, for a start, Nicolas Ray’s 1949 work They Live by Night with Farley Granger in the lead.”

Granger had by that time turned into a major star following Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 classic Strangers on a Train. Villion had no idea what the boys were talking about; he nevertheless got hold of the movie and was delighted to see the unending queues representing a new genre of cinema fans. After that success the teenagers became a regular presence in Villion’s office. Half embarrassed, half amused, he would listen to their enthusiastic babble. The Big Sky (Howard Hawks/1952) with Kirk Douglas, then Ruby Gentry (King Vidor/1952) with Charlton Heston and Jennifer Jones followed suit and the MacMahon’s owner by this time was totally converted to a new cinematic faith preached by the young oracles. He started making a profit, besides.

“So far we had worked on the star-power formula. Our next stratagem was to bring Villion to accept the fact that the modern cinema fan was sensitive to the name of the director. We suggested The Reckless Moment, a 1949 film by Max Ophuls.

“This time he was totally nonplussed. “Who is Max Ophuls? Nobody has heard of him! You boys have decided to ruin me!” But he finally gave in. The experiment was such a great success that the director’s name at the top of MacMahon’s façade became a ritual thenceforward. Ophuls was soon followed by Joseph Losey (The Prowler with Van Heflin/1951) and Otto Preminger (The Whirlpool with Richard Conte, Jose Ferrer and Gene Tierney/1949).

“Unbeknownst to us, another phenomenon was quietly shaping up on the other side of the Seine. The Left Bank intellectuals had started taking notice of what was happening at the Arc de Triomphe; when they learned who was behind all this, we were christened ‘The MacMahonians’.

“After this recognition, Villion gladly accepted our suggestion of putting up the sign of the ‘Four Aces’ at the entrance to the basement projection hall: four playing cards bearing the portraits of Joseph Losey, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Raoul Walsh.”

Actually the ‘MacMahonian’ crusade lasted less than five years and once the boys’ schooldays were over they branched off into different careers, save for Pierre Rissient who remains today a respected name at the Cannes film festival where he is known to have fought against odds in order to introduce Clint Eastwood, Sydney Pollock, Oliver Stone, Jane Campion, John Boorman and Quentin Tarantino, only to name a few.

Emile Villion, the man who had unwittingly and reluctantly launched Pierre Rissient’s career, died in 1968. Though the cinema house has changed hands many times, the MacMahonian spirit remains intact and classics from Hollywood’s golden age are a permanent fare; it is a taboo to project a movie in any kind of dubbed version.

The current owners of Cinéma MacMahon are lucky to have a man like Bruno Vincent working for them for the past 17 years now. In his 40s Bruno is thoroughly dedicated to the crusade led by Rissient and his gang more than a generation ahead of him.

Following the death of Jean Simmons earlier this year, Bruno hastily arranged for three of her most representative movies, Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks/1960), Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick/1960) and of course Angel Face (Otto Preminger/1952) with Robert Mitchum playing the male lead. When Tony Curtis died, Bruno interrupted his vacation in central France to get hold of The Boston Strangler and Some Like it Hot, two films that best represent Curtis.

Talking about Cinéma MacMahon’s future, Bruno gets wistful: “You see the number of people, young and old alike, who come here? That’s so touching! Even after the show is over they hang around, arguing and sharing comments. But modern technology will kill all this.

“The process has already started of people getting an incredible list of movies on their computer screens; a few mouse clicks will settle the matter of choosing a film and of paying the distributer directly through the Internet; and voilà! You get whatever you want on your home cinema screen. No need to go to the MacMahon anymore!”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

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