Lyme is said to be the smallest town in the country to have a cinema. It's the Regent, a rather fine example of Art Deco style—the mouldings of the wall around the proscenium look like a kind of melted-down Baroque.

PICTURE: proscenium ]

Once the Marine Theatre was used as a cinema, but it began to lose business when films were shown in Axminster's Guildhall, so a Lyme entrepreneur commissioned this building by a well-known cinema architect. It was opened in October 1937 by mayor Will Emmett, a man with a limp, and the first film shown, whether by coincidence or not, was "The Limping Man". On October 12, 2007, the cinema management invited all and sundry in for drinks and food in the upstairs lounge, followed by a fireworks display from the roof, followed by speeches on the cinema's history, followed by that wonderfully complicated and jauntily acted thriller, "The Limping Man".

But the movie playing now is of a different sort, one that you can barely understand: something about the sound system, combined with the choppy action and muttered dialogue and invasive music, puts most of it below the level of intelligibility. You emerge—and it is night.

PICTURE: sodium ]

Broad Street is silent. The soft orange of sodium lamps renders the old town more magical than the extravagantly fictitious world of the movie.

You are tempted rightward down the illuminated street.