JFK - 50th Anniversary - The Weekend at the Movies

 

 

Today we draw our attention to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but in terms of what our world was like with a view towards the movies that were playing in theaters at that time.

 

Most people who remember that awful four-day event of shock and mourning from Friday to Monday remember where they were and what they were doing, almost in detail.  Most, I suspect, were not at the movies.  Most were either at communal mourning services or firmly planted in front of their television sets watching a new era of chaos born from the weird and terrible string of events that occurred that weekend.  Television and radio took the lead and were the real chroniclers of our experience that weekend, not the movies, and perhaps the movies never would be again the forefront record of our popular history.  Radio and TV cancelled all regular programs and devoted the entire weekend to the national emergency and the protocol, newly learned for all of us, of national mourning.

 

 

We can see in these movie ads a lot of fluff, a lot of eager, daring attempts at sexual situations--which may seem somewhat sophomoric now, certainly more innocent than what was to come later. 

 

 

We look like a country that didn't take much seriously.

 

 

It was a world still of grand downtown movie palaces, such as the Loew's Poli in Springfield, Massachusetts.  It was a world where we still had plenty of drive-ins, though most would close in the northern parts of the country for the winter--and eventually for good.

 

 

This drive-in below even advertises electric heaters, which is a plus in November in New England, though exactly how that worked, I'm not sure.  I'd love to know.

 

There was still a Cinerama theater in Hartford, Connecticut at this time, a movie process and selling gimmick we should probably tackle someday.  As far as I know, there were only three Cinerama theaters in New England: including one in Boston, the other in Providence, Rhode Island.  If any reader can correct me or fill me in on more, please do.

 

 

For the most part, we see in these ads a lighthearted and superficial world that surely could not really have been. Perhaps we were blind to social strains and movements, a tense undercurrent that was there all along, unknown to us until we were forced to see.

 

 

 

 

If you remember what you were doing and who you were at that time, that weekend, I'd love to hear from you. 

 

 

The JFK anniversary is also discussed on my New England Travels blog this week.









Arcade Theater - Springfield, Mass.

This is the Arcade Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts. I think it must be 1933, you can see the marquee listing “College Humor” which was released that summer. Bing Crosby, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and our old pal Grady Sutton.

The theater was on lower State Street. The trolley ran all the way up the hill and out to the residential neighborhoods. The Springfield Armory is up that hill. George Washington established it after scouting the site himself, Dan Shays and his men attacked it, and its skilled machinists helped save the Union during the Civil War, smashed the Axis in World War II. It’s a National Park, now.

You can’t see all the ghosts that walk this street in the photo. You just see the old Fords and trolley tracks. And now, they are ghosts.

It was a “second run” theater in its day, opened for business in 1931. You can see by the ad that Maurice Chevalier got things going with “The Smiling Lieutenant” (1931). Claudette Colbert, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

According to the Cinema Treasures website, the theater accommodated over 1,000 patrons, even with no balcony. I first heard about it from family members who used to go there.

The Arcade closed in 1971, and was demolished in 1972 to make way for the Springfield Civic Center. That rather ugly cement colossus is now a renovated arena and convention center called the MassMutual Center. The Springfield Falcons hockey team play here. They need a lot of room, more than Bing Crosby or Ernst Lubitsch.

Have a look at the Cinema Treasures website not only for information on historical movie theaters, but for the comments readers contribute with their own memories.  Look up an  old theater you remember, and you may find others remember it, too.

Warner Theatre - Torrington, Connecticut

JT Lynch photo

Northwestern Connecticut is mostly rural farmland dotted by small factory villages on narrow rivers, but the glamour of Hollywood found its way here on Main Street in 1931 when the Warner Bros. Studios expanded their chain of theaters. A typically beautiful movie palace of its day, the Warner was sold by the studio in the 1950s when all the studios were forced to divest themselves of their theater circuts.

Then the 1955 Flood wreaked havoc in the area, including much damage to the theater (see this previous post on Rosalind Russell’s precarious hometown visit in Waterbury during the 1955 Flood).

The theater continued operating through its years of decline in the 1960s and 1970s, and was due for foreclosure in 1981, demolition in 1982.

JT Lynch photo

 

But the Northwest Connecticut Association for the Arts, Inc. was formed by citizens to save this theatre.

A couple of decades of fundraising and restoration, and today the Warner Theatre continues to grace Torrington as part of a performing arts center. Have a look here for a roster of events, and for more on the history of this historic theater.

Oriental Theatre - Chicago

(Photo by JT Lynch)

The Oriental Theatre in downtown Chicago now hosts live musical theatre productions, but it started out as a grand movie palace. It has a special place in the history of classic films for two other footnotes. In “Auntie Mame” (1958) the shocked faithful servant Nora brings little Patrick, fresh from Chicago, to his Auntie Mame’s custody and discovers the entryway to her apartment festooned with burning incense and a bas relief dragon on the door. She remarks, “Like the ladies’ restroom in the Oriental Theatre!”

The Oriental Theatre also gave us “Judy Garland”. It was here in 1934 on the vaudeville circuit young Judy and her sisters, then still called the Gumm Sisters, arrived to see their names on the marquee misspelled, again. This time they were called The Glum Sisters. Audiences, met with funny variations on the name, often mistook their harmony singing for a comedy act. Comedian George Jessel intervened at this moment and suggested they change their surname to “Garland”.

The Oriental, with its Asian-themed décor, was an opulent menagerie of large seahorses and goddesses under a domed ceiling. It was built in 1926, replacing the doomed Iroquois Theatre (later Colonial), which had suffered the tragic 1903 fire in which several hundred lives were lost.

(Photo by JT Lynch)

The timeline for the Oriental follows a similar pattern of other great downtown movie palaces -- its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and then a decline in the 1970s. It was closed in 1981 and left vacant until the early 1990s when plans were underway to restore the theater. It reopened in 1998. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is now called The Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre. For more on the Oriental, have a look here.


Notes:
"Life Story of Judy Garland" article by Carlton Cheney, syndicated in The Milwuakee Journal, September 26, 1940.

"A Garland of Roses for Judy" article by Hedda Hopper, syndcated in The Pittsburgh Press, December 17, 1944.

Luft, Lorna. Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (Pocket Books, NY, 1998), p. 25.

The Chicago Theatre

The Chicago Theatre, so grand and magnificent a building it was dubbed “the Wonder Theatre of the World” at its opening in 1921. The first of its kind, it became a prototype for a generation of “movie palace” theater construction. It stands today as a reminder of that era of remarkably beautiful buildings.

French Baroque, the theater features murals, a replica of the Arc de Triomphe sculpted on its State Street side. The grand lobby, five stories high, is modeled after the Royal Chapel at Versailles. The grand staircase is reminiscent of the Paris Opera House. One wonders if anything on stage could be half so diverting as the venue?

Movies were the order of the day, and “The Sign on the Door” was the debut flicker with Norma Talmadge on October 26, 1921, accompanied by a 50-piece orchestra in the pit, and a thundering Wurlitzer pipe organ.

A showcase not just for movies, live entertainment shared the auditorium with bands such as Duke Ellington’s and Benny Goodman’s.

Then, as we have noted with so many of these theater histories, the 1970s came. Then the 1980s. They brought disuse, decay, but this theater managed to escape the third D - demolition. The Chicago Theatre was restored and reopened in 1986. Frank Sinatra performed at the gala reopening, and the future for this theater finally seemed as bright as its past.

For more on the Chicago Theatre, including detail and photos on its spectacular interior, have a look at this website.

New Book on the World Theatre - Kearney, Nebraska

“Kearney’s World Theatre” by Keith Terry, is like that long, familiar walk down the carpeted aisle, the descending incline of a movie theatre from the back of the house to the orchestra seats. You look all around at the grand old movie temple, and anticipation builds to claim your seat. Then the magic. Even if you have never been to the World Theatre in Kearney, Nebraska, you’ve got a stake in this theater and this book.

An “Images of America” book recently published by Arcadia Publishing, this treasure trove of photos with captions takes us on the timeline from the theater’s opening in November 1927, through its heyday of the 1930s until 2008, when it closed.

But that was not the end of the story. In 2009, community efforts began to restore and reopen the World Theatre, fundraising which continues today. This book is part of those efforts, to raise awareness of the cultural significance of this theater, and to aid in the fundraising. Half of the author’s royalties will be donated to the restoration of the World Theatre.

The author, Keith Terry, is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of two other books on Nebraska history.

We’ve discussed many classic movie theaters on this blog, and sometimes we are lucky to find one that’s in the process of being revitalized. This time, however, we actually get a chance to help out ourselves in a very simple way. Please have a look at “Kearney’s World Theatre” by Keith Terry on the Arcadia website here, and consider purchasing a copy. The pages of photos, memories, posters and memorabilia, though centered on a small theater in a town in Nebraska, on another level is about everything readers of this blog love about old movies and preserving them.

Posters for a Clara Bow movie. The time a person dressed as The Tin Man standing out front to advertise “The Wizard of Oz” (which didn’t need much help, as it pulled in such big crowds the movie was held over).

The ushers and the live acts, the war bond drives. The theater ghost (every good theater has one). The ever-changing marquee. Most of the photos and the memories were supplied by the patrons, so there is an intimacy in the book that you feel from looking at a family photo album. It’s their theater, but the memories and experiences are universal and were shared by a few generations of millions of other Americans.

Then the demise of a theater, and an era. Now, the rebirth. Claim your seat as the curtain draws open.

“Kearney’s World Theatre” by Keith Terry is available online here from Arcadia Publishing.

(Disclosure: A copy of “Kearney’s World Theatre” by Keith Terry was supplied to me for purposes of reviewing on this blog.)

Vaudeville Hangs On in 1943

The Death of Vaudeville gets mentioned from time to time in movies of the 1930s, but here in Holyoke, Massachusetts (and not a few other places) in 1943, vaudeville hung on as a supplement to the movies. The war brought round the clock working shifts and a round the clock demand for entertainment.

Here at the New Holyoke Theater we have six “headline” acts: Rex Webber, “a vocal allusion”; Senna and Dean in a skit; comedian Ted Leary; dancers Gavin and Astor; acrobats the Winnie Dolly Trio; and singer Joe Martini, three shows a day.

As you can see, they were an addendum on the bill to the film “Johnny Eager” with Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. In this ad, the movie seems almost like an afterthought. Tommy Reynolds and his Orchestra also appeared, at jacked-up wartime prices of 55 cents and 25 cents for kids.

The Biograph Theater - Chicago

The Victory Gardens (Biograph) Theater in Chicago has a unique history and owes as much of its longevity to real-life as to reel-life circumstances.

Probably most notable of which, is this is the site where gangster John Dillinger was killed by FBI agents in 1934.

Designed in 1914, this neighborhood movie house, typical in the extravagant design of the day, is now on the Register of Historic Places. It enjoyed a decades-long history as a movie theater, even during the 1960s and 1970s when many such movie palaces were falling into disuse or the wrecking ball. There was a period of transformation into a modern movie multiplex with the interior gutted under various owners.

The Biograph became the Victory Gardens in 2006 and found new life as a live stage theater. It’s traditional-looking marquee you see in the photo above is actually the result of another movie, “Public Enemy No. 1” (2009), which used the site in location shooting and restored the marquee for that purpose.

That movie is, of course, about the infamous John Dillinger, whose bank robbing exploits in the 1920s and early 1930s made him a Depression-era celebrity of sorts. He came to the Biograph on July 22, 1934 to see a movie -- “Manhattan Melodrama” (1934) with Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. We discussed that movie here. Wonder what he thought of the film?

The suspicious figure in the pinstripe suit is, I believe, neither John Dillinger nor FBI agent Melvin Purvis.  Her fedora was crushed by a passing "L" train.   

Have a look at the new Victory Gardens Biograph website here.

Palace Theatre - Manchester, New Hampshire

The Palace Theatre of Manchester, New Hampshire was modeled after the Palace in New York City, and like that famous theater, brought vaudeville to eager audiences from its 1915 opening to about 1930, when “the talkies” replaced vaudeville as the most popular entertainment.

An elegant theater in a grand age of theater construction, the Palace boasted “air conditioning” when fans blew over large blocks of ice placed under the stage. Some of the performers who played that stage were Bob Hope, The Marx Brothers, Harry Houdini, Red Skelton, and Jimmy Durante, as well as the resident stock company The Palace Players.

Then movie era lasted until the early 1960s, and after that as with many theaters of that era, the decline began. At one point, X-rated films were shown. Then, closed to the public. In the early 1970s, the community took action, and renovations were made. The Palace opened again for live theater.

Have a look here at the website, and this season’s schedule. It takes a village to save a theater, and sometimes it really happens.

Victory Theatre - Holyoke, Mass. - A Tour Before Renovation.

This time not off topic, but certainly off blog. Another in our series of old movie houses takes us to the Victory Theatre in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The Victory was built about 1920 and showcased both silent films and vaudeville, until the early 1930s when it switched exclusively over to sound movies.

Like so many downtown movie houses of the day, the Victory has been closed and shuttered for decades, but it has not been demolished. There has been an effort, slow moving and complicated, and of long duration, to restore this theater.

Recently, our friend Tony of “In the Valley” took a tour of the Victory on a rare open house day, and includes fascinating pictures on his blog of what the interior of a nearly 100-year-old theater looks like when it’s left alone.

A strange combination of eerie, depressing, and intriguing. You can’t quite see the future possibilities of greatness for this house, but neither do you have quite a grasp on what the past might have been. It is stuck in a kind of limbo. It is in filthy disrepair, from the balcony to the stage, to whatever lurks under the stage. But, the architecture, of a grandeur we no longer see in our utilitarian theaters, shows a tantalizing peek at what has been.

Have a look here at the tour of the Victory Theatre at “In the Valley.”

"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.