In Celebration of Royal Cinemas: The Odyssey and More

As former Town Manager Joseph Waltz once claimed, Main Street and the larger downtown are the Front Royal gem.

I do not think I would be far off the mark in claiming that for many people in this community, the downtown businesses represent an emotional connection. I can conjure an emotional connection right now by thinking about my nieces, thirteen and ten, whom I took to C&C Frozen Treats when they visited from Florida earlier this month. It was a hot day, and Willy Huck’s Italian ice was exactly what we needed. But to make a memory like that would have been impossible without that downtown business. I wager that a host of happy collective memories, like the one I now share with Samantha and Annabelle, are attached to every downtown business.

When I saw The Odyssey at Royal Cinemas on July 24th, and it will be playing for a few more weeks, I felt that emotional connection in a peculiar way. It is indeed the small-town theater that has been there for me my entire life. I can walk to it from my home. I can remember when COVID-19 shut it down, during a time in Hollywood when most offerings were sequels to sequels. But sitting there on Thursday with a few people who may have been strangers but were nevertheless locals like me, I mentally noted that none of us were wearing masks, and the movie being run was fresh. Thank God Rick Novak did not give up.

“My dad is coming back,” Telemachus declares confidently in the film. For anyone who may have read Homer’s epic in high school or college, this statement will still produce a thrill, even though the ending is a foregone conclusion. I know I am part of a community of people who, during the epidemic and after the fire that recently shut the theater down again for a while, thought, “Royal Cinemas is coming back.” In a worthy sequel that played there throughout June, The Devil Wears Prada 2, the famously acidic Miranda Priestly, newly transformed into someone capable of kindness, says something truly wise: “We are designed to let each other down.”

I sometimes wonder about the god other people worship, but the messiah I follow has a built-in mechanism to overcome the letdown. And I do not think the cold relief on a hot day, or the encouragement received from an excellent film, is beyond his notice. And perhaps we have not entirely escaped the persecutor, who delights in obstructing the path and making good people feel responsible for situations beyond their control. That is the letdown. But a small-town theater that has been through hell and is now turning a corner, at the same moment that the world seems to be turning a corner, is cause for celebration.