Bourdon is adept at finding great shots and creating very dramatic sequences. It tells little stories, one melding into the next; nothing at all like Lipsett’s work, I realize, which tended towards the abstract.

When I started at McGill, I was shocked to see that my 4 years of high school French in Boston had given me a better knowledge of the language than most English Quebecers I met at McGill and in the west end. I understood why Rene Lesvesque and the PQ felt the way they did, although I disagreed with their solution: independence. The unilingualists have fled to Toronto or Calgary. Hopefully the current language detente will last and spread. While some of the PQ tactics were harsh and unfair to anglos, the status quo if the sixties had to end.

Dunns a Great Place to Eat after a Movie on Ste. Catherine St. ( Still Two Way. )

Horse Meat was still available in Butcher Shops on Wellington and elsewhere.

Filling and Cheap Meals at Tavernes at Noon.

Great Radio Stations, too!, CKVL, CJMS, CFCF, CJAD, CKGM and CFOX still in the Future.

CBFT 2 then CBMT 6 for TV.

Polio kept us Indoors in the Summer when it was so hot.

Rappers have Supplemented Wrappers at what was once Steinbergs.

Great to see on Film what was once taken for Granted.

Glad I was there for parts of it.

Many Changes.

That said, as long as a clerk can switch to French, who cares what language you start off with. I mean, I often walk into a store and say Hi, Bonjour, in the same breath.

Jasmin, I wonder if you would have wanted to have lived in that Montreal. There’d be a level of bilingualism — heck, English unilingualism — you might not appreciate.”

Indeed. To quote Joel Garreau from his Québec chapter in The Nine Nations of North America:

“Every Quebecois has his share of stories. The most pointed, perhaps, are the ones about Anglo bosses demanding that their underlings “speak white.” Separatist Parti Quebecois founder, Rene Levesque, once referred to his English opponents as his “white Rhodesians.” There are those who have been spat on or beaten up for speaking French in their own land. There are the jobs denied and school doors closed even to English-speakers with a French accent. There’s the chic Quebecoise refused service in a restaurant or boutique in the heart of her home town of Montreal for not speaking English.”

So much has changed in a generation. I’ve only been here a few years, but it’s obvious.

I’m glad for the shift to French first, even as I struggle to learn the language, and the different and perhaps greater cosmopolitanism that has developed since (especially among those under 40), though it seems it will take another generation or so for the success of La Survivance to really sink in psychologically for the separatists, so they finally feel secure in a multilingual city and stop imagining the imminent disappearance of French every time they run into some ignoramus shop clerk in Westmount who forgets to speak French first.

Top comedians and singers would dine at Miss Montreal, a place near de la Savane. Ruby Foos, Bill Wong’s, The Stagecoach, these were happening places. They were hard to get into. When we dined at Bill Wong’s buffet, I had to wear a tie.

It was cool to be downtown, too. At night, Saint Catherine Street had life, much more than now, where the street seems given over to surly youths after the shops close. The main strip was alive with neon (why haven’t more cities tried to retain classic neon!)

That said, English Montreal had a profile, indeed, a swagger that rubbed a lot of francophones the wrong way.

Jasmin, I wonder if you would have wanted to have lived in that Montreal. There’d be a level of bilingualism — heck, English unilingualism — you might not appreciate.

It would be interesting to contrast this free-wheeling look back at Montreal through the eyes of Luc Bourdon with Bill Weintraub’s doc, The Rise and Fall of English Montreal, a more dour NFB doc with a different take on Montreal’s golden era.