Never Say Never Again

PLUS 2 ALL NEW BLOCKBUSTERS!!!

I was a junior at The Philadelphia College of Art when I took this. I had loaded up my trusty, Sears-branded SLR with color film rather than the Pan-X I had used for the Photo Elective in the previous year. I was probably carrying the camera around in order to shoot reference photos for use in illustrations rather than rely on the picked over books and vertical files at the school’s library.

The shot above may have seemed to be a waste after I had the film processed, but at the time, it was a big deal. Woo-hoo, Connery is 007 AGAIN! The planets had aligned, and all would be right in the universe once more! BOND was BACK! Sadly, it didn’t set the world on fire. It was an enjoyable movie, but it was a knockoff of Thunderball. It lacked The John Barry music, Ken Adam’s art direction and Monty Norman’s theme. It was probably successful, but it felt like a made-for-TV Bond with the real guy starring in it for some reason.

I never did see Eddie and the Cruisers although I suffered the soundtrack’s heavy rotation on radio at the time and throughout the years, and I always thought Risky Business was one of the most overrated movies of all time.

Now I’m glad I took and rediscovered the shots for reasons having nothing to do with what was on the marquee. The strip of movie theaters lining Chestnut Street are sadly all gone outside of The Prince at Broad and Chestnut which occasionally shows films. This shot is a window on a lost time at the very beginning of the home video revolution and long before services such as Netflix were even dreamt of!