A Movie and a Serving Platter

 Company coming for Thanksgiving?  Dragging out the "good" service for eight?  Don't have a "good" service for eight?  This theater is offering "Vermillion Rose Dinnerware for the Ladies".  It's 1943, and they hadn't yet started calling these "dish night" items "Depression glass".

Jane Withers is on the bill in "Johnny Doughboy" with Henry Wilcoxon and William Demarest, with "Let's Have Fun" with Margaret Lindsay and John Beal as the second feature. 

Better get down there and get your free butter dish.  Or, maybe it's a serving platter this week.  In six months, you'll have that service for eight.

For more on Depression Glass, have a look at this previous post.

The Majestic Theater - Massachusetts

The Majestic Theater in West Springfield, Massachusetts thrives not through nostalgia, but through adaptation. Once a neighborhood second-run movie house, the Majestic is now one of the best places in western Massachusetts to see live theatre.

Because of the coincidental overlapping of blog subjects, this post will be featured on all three of my blogs this week precisely because it conveniently (for me) dovetails the purposes of discussion of old movies (Another Old Movie Blog), New England history (New England Travels) and theater in New England (Tragedy and Comedy in New England).


At the informative Cinema Treasures site, the Majestic is noted as opening in the 1920s. The ads here are for second-run films in the 1940s when the Majestic continued to be a popular neighborhood movie house. The top ad for “Brewster’s Millions” on a double bill with “Alias Billy the Kid” is from April 1946. Note how though the war has ended, we are still encouraged to buy war bonds.


The ad for “Good Morning Judge” and “Gorilla Man” is from October 1943. Note the “vermillion rose dinnerware for the ladies” at the top. For our past discussion on Depression glass and movie “dish night” please see this post from February 2008.

The third ad features Gary Cooper in “The Westerner”, along with “The Mummy’s Hand” and a “The Adventures of Red Ryder” short. This is from January 1941

The Majestic re-opened as the Paris Cinema in the 1960s showing foreign films, and became the Elm Cinema in the 1980s, but the mid-1990s brought its most drastic, and welcome, change. Danny Eaton, who brought his Theater Project to a new home here in West Springfield, became the founder and artistic director of a re-born Majestic Theater.

Later this month, their production of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” opens.

Nostalgia for the past is a wonderful thing, but without the vibrancy of modern purpose, we are left with little more than an entertaining scrapbook, as fun to look at but as out of date as these movie ads. We’ve seen on this blog how many old-time theaters are demolished. It is pleasing when some can be converted to modern use either as movie theaters or as small businesses.

But when they can be successfully transformed into theaters for stage plays, then the theater building becomes more than a beloved town relic. The production of stage plays involves a lot of people. People working on and off stage, people spending, people volunteering, a community that comes together when people are the engine that drives the product. People have always been the business of show business.

For more on the current season of the Majestic Theater, here is their website.

Dish Night at the Movies - Depression Glass

Depression glass was brightly colored, cheaply manufactured, with bubbles and seams and flaws in the heavy glass. The distortions and imperfections which made the glassware an inexpensive premium as an inducement to attracting patrons to movie theaters in the Great Depression, which made them so easily tossed out when replaced by more affluent families with better incomes in the 1950s. Incongruously, they are valuable collectors’ pieces today.

Also called carnival glass, these platters and cups and bowls came usually in pastel tinted colors of pink and yellow, green and blue. Manufactured from around the middle of the 1920s to the around the end of World War II, they are most commonly identified with the theater-going experience of the Great Depression. For many young and struggling families, the one-piece-at-a-time dinner set was the first dinnerware they owned. “Dish Night” was a distinctive part of the experience of going to the movies in the 1930s.

For more information on Depression glass, see this website of the National Depression Glass Association.

"Community" Theaters

Two teenage girls in the 1930s won a prize turkey in a raffle at their local movie house. They lived in a city, close to the downtown where several movie theaters were located, and the turkey was alive. They walked it home, with a piece of rope fastened to its neck like a leash, along the crowded sidewalks of the busy downtown. They were a bit mortified, but the turkey seemed to have had a pleasant time on the walk home.

Fortunately, their mother, like the turkey, was farm-raised, and knew what to do with it. It was a welcome prize in the Great Depression.

Cash raffles in movie theaters were also common, and turned out to be easier to take home than a turkey on a rope. What is called carnival glass today, or Depression glass, was also a premium theaters offered to entice patrons. Some young women acquired entire sets of dinnerware by the time they were married and put it to use. Unless they dropped it on the way home from “I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”

Blood drives, bond drives, community service programs were all common in movie theaters in the 1930s and 1940s. It might be difficult for young people to imagine today, with large cinema complexes in the suburbs and movie prices and fewer movies worth seeing which make going to the movies a sometimes thing and not an every day thing, that the movie theater was as central to community life at one time as the city hall, the corner grocery, school or even houses of worship. Theaters were the common meeting place for people of all backgrounds. That they, and the film industry which created them, should have an enormous impact on the society of the day is fascinating.

What is also interesting is that movie moguls knew that, and imposed standards, censorship codes, and war-effort films to acquiesce to the public, to mobilize it. The film industry today, despite whatever complaints or suspicions some might have about its pervasive influence over our society, cannot compare to the influential place it had in America before the 1950s. While people all over the world still look to America through its films, the American film industry today itself seems to be more and more irrelevant to most Americans.