Dr Crippen, Mr Scrooge, Jekyll and Hyde: the Cinema Ruskin film club is back with more black and white movie classics

A strange bedside manner: Donald Pleasence starring as Dr Crippen

Bella Bartock, our tireless arts correspondent, now in her ninth decade but still dipping her nib in vitriol, was visiting Inside Croydon Towers the other day. Amid all her usual grumbles, about her heart burn, her haemorrhoids and bunions, she registered a different complaint.

“Surely, I can’t be the only one who regrets the absence from our television screens… ” she said, in that slightly quaint, high-born Austro-Hungarian accent of hers, “… of the Sunday afternoon matinee? Especially on these dark, dank English winter afternoons of yours…

“Instead of being able to enjoy glorious old Ealing comedies and John Wayne Westerns, all we seem to have served up now after our Sunday lunch are dreadful repeats of that spiv, Simon Cowell, or yet more self-congratulatory natural history programmes, in which the BBC cameraman tells us how clever he’s been to film the sex life of the bonobos. It does nothing for my reflux.”

And with that, Bella flounced out the Poor Door, which we have had specially constructed in our luxuriously appointed iconic office block just in case #WadGate Fisher or Tony Soprano visit.

But we suspect that Bella will be at the front of the queue at Cinema Ruskin on Saturday evening, and not just to get to the Ruskin House subsidised bar when doors open at 7pm.

The epitome of Tory “values”: Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

Because in Cinema Ruskin’s latest season of movies, compiled by Mike Carter, there’s a whole raft (not, though, George Raft) of old classics, starting this Saturday with Dr Crippen, starring a particularly creepy Donald Pleasence. There was once a rumour that Bella Bartock was actually the fiendish doctor’s young lover, but no one has ever dared ask.

The monthly movie programme is particularly Christmassy on Saturday, December 20, with another screening – by special request – of Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

And on January 17, movie buffs will be taken back more than 80 years, for a showing of Frederic March in the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide.

Admission for all the screenings is a mere £2, which will again get Bella all nostalgic.

Ruskin House is at 23 Coombe Road, Croydon, CR0 1BD. Contact Mike Carter for further information – 01959 576271

Coming to Croydon

• David Lean Cinema, Paths of Glory, Nov 11
• Albert Einstein – Relativity Speaking, Spread Eagle, Nov 12-15
• David Lean Cinema, Ida, Nov 13
• Oval Tavern Folk Club, Nov 14
• South Croydon business breakfast, Nov 15
• Wandle Park community garden work day, Nov 16
• Streatham-Croydon women’s rugby training, Frant Road, Nov 16
• NCT Croydon Christmas Fair, St Mark’s Purley, Nov 16
• Personal safety training for volunteers, Nov 17
• David Lean Cinema, Effie Gray, Nov 20
• Norwood Society Talk: Lambeth’s Archives, Nov 20
• Choose Your Own Documentary, Spread Eagle Theatre, Nov 21-22
• David Lean Cinema, Lilting, Nov 22
• Streatham-Croydon women’s rugby training, Frant Road, Nov 23
• David Lean Cinema, Wakolda, Nov 27
• The Last Sense of Sudden, Spread Eagle Theatre, Nov 27-29
• Ghost Stories for Christmas, Spread Eagle Theatre, Dec 3
• Fog Horn Funnies, Spread Eagle Theatre, Dec 6
• Coulsdon Yulefest, Dec 6-7
• Oval Tavern Folk Club, Dec 7
• South Croydon business breakfast, Dec 13
• South Croydon business breakfast, Jan 24

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  Inside Croydon: Croydon’s only independent news source, based in the heart of the borough: 407,847 page views (Jan-Jun 2014) If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, a residents’ or business association or local event, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com