Loew's Capitol Theatre

First I must apologize for my multiple posts…the system was not responding and gave me no indication that it actually accepted my posts.

Thanks for the feedback Warren. Dolly told me, as you stated, that her band was indeed filled with men but as they got drafted or volunteered she eventually ended up with an all girl ensemble. Sign of the times! She very much wanted to get into movies but the greed of her agent prevented it….he diverted any overtures from Hollywood out of fear of losing her as a client! What a bum, he prevented a far larger audience from knowing of her talent. Water under the bridge now. Back to our irregular programming.

Warren, you speak of all girl orchestras…do you know anything of Dolly Dawn and her Dawn Patrol? She was a family friend and (supposedly) had the first true all girl band and played many a nightclub and larger movie house. She told me of many times sharing the bill with the 3 Stooges etc and playing non-sensical card games backstage between shows….but I don’t recall what theaters. Sorry for taking this thread off on a tangent. Any info much appreciated.

Warren, you speak of all girl orchestras…do you know anything of Dolly Dawn and her Dawn Patrol? She was a family friend and (supposedly) had the first true all girl band and played many a nightclub and larger movie house. She told me of many times sharing the bill with the 3 Stooges etc and playing non-sensical card games backstage between shows….but I don’t recall what theaters. Sorry for taking this thread off on a tangent. Any info much appreciated.

An impressive show, Eugene. Though I was living in NYC at the time, I don’t recall having heard about it. By that time, of course, the Cinerama proscenium had covered up the orginal stage where the great shows took place. I don’t know whether any of those performers had every played at the Capitol before — possibly Hope and maybe King did. In the late ‘40s, Hope, Lewis, and King certainly appeared in stage shows at the Paramount, which always attracted the biggest, most popular names. The Capitol usually offered something offbeat and perhaps more sophisticated.

Sophistication notwithstanding, the stage show at the Capitol that I remember most was headlined by Arthur Godfrey. It opened in February ’49 and accompanied MGM’s “The Bribe” with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner. Oddly, despite my gargantuan memory of films in that period, I can’t recall a single frame from that picture, except for the impression of some dark and shadowy furtive movements. But the stage show was the main attraction anyway. Godfrey brought on a bunch of his talent-scouted newcomers, introducing each with his gravelly-voiced and slightly cynical, “Well, well, well, isn’t that just wonderful now.” At age seven, I naively believed that the show was being broadcast directly to radio, since at the time Godfrey hosted a popular daily morning CBS show that featured song-and-music routines by winners of his Monday night “Talent Scouts” (remember Julius La Rosa? Holly Ukulani?). It of course wasn’t a direct broadcast, but in that pre-television era, it provided us with images that we then transferred to our home listening experiences.

Another stage show I remember opened in June ’49, accompanying “Neptune’s Daughter” with Esther Williams (“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” struck me as unaccountably risqué, but I couldn’t imagine what the star might do to warm up with Riccardo Montalban; and Red Skelton struck me as funnier in any event). The evident feature of the stage show was a tuneful singing trio whose bee-bop style must have been the rage, but whose name escapes me now. What I recall more vividly was the comedian Jerry Lester, a precursor of the zany Ernie Kovacs and less-zany Red Buttons. Lester alternately bounced around the stage like a manic-but-less-impressive Jerry Lewis, and he then stopped for monologues that would descend to the maudlin, like a crude avatar of Steve Allen. As it happened a few years later, he preceded Allen on early-television late-night talk shows with an original format cooked up to feature him and the curvaceous Dagmar, called “Jerry Lester’s Bean-Bag Club.” One of my aunts owned a TV, and at her house, I’d beg to stay up late to glimpse the comic I remembered from the Capitol.

A third memorable stage show accompanied the ’49 Christmas presentation of “Adam’s Rib,” which I saw as a consolatory turn-away from the long lines for “On the Town” at RCMH. Hardly a consolation prize, the film was great, and the stage show offered a pitch-perfect match. It featured Eddy Duchin and his Orchestra, with some impressive finger-work at the piano in classical-sounding pieces (Chopin?) that drew the attention of even this mass-pop-culture-bred kid. I sensed that something larger that what I knew was happening. And I liked it even better than the flashy acrobat act that was more obviously but pleasantly designed for my boyish tastes. The name “Eddy Duchin” meant nothing to me at the time, but years later I recovered the memory when scrolling through microfilmed back issues of the NY Times from the period.

There’s a surprisingly poetic note about the use of the name “Moses” in “Ten Commandments”, as mentioned in the commentary track of the DVD. DeMille made sure that each character got to repeat the name “Moses” three times at one point in the film, usually a crucial one. Each character said it and with a different intent and tone. So early in the film we have mom calling kid Moses three times with motherly love; Pharoh repeating it three times with his dying breath — and I THINK Anne Baxter’s 3-play may have been in the classic scene mentioned above (that would certainly add silliness to the line!). It’s an unexprectdly subtle and sincere touch to such a lovably overblown film.

Yes— “Stromboli”! The newspaper ads were terrific, but the only person I knoew who saw it was one of my aunts, and she panned it: “It was …awful.”

Warren I have for a long time wondered why Happened was such a disappointment at the Hall. It seems like it would have been such a sensation yet it only ran a mediocre week. Gable appearing live a the Capitol explains everything. Also Carrie and Bovary seem like they should have been at the Hall.

And CC if you are such a fan of old movies(I personally find most movies after ‘70 unwatchable though I did like Groundhog Day) why are you making suggestions of the Hall showing films like Pulp Fiction to bring in the crowds?(Only teasing, I enjoy your posts a lot and want you to get out to the Loews Jersey the first weekend of March. You will be happily stunned.)

Warren — Yes, “accompanied by short subjects.” When the Capitol again dropped stage shows in ‘51, newspaper ads (at first) emphasized that “short subjects” would pick up the slack; and so they did: the live organ interlude accompanied by a bouncing-ball sing-along, “The Capitol News” (remember the specially designed theater-header with the US Capitol Building radiating electricity?), a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a live-action short (or two), and coming attractions with a report from MGM about works-in-progress, in that order and each segment punctuated by a closing and opening of the rippling lime-green traveller curtain.

Bill Huelbig: RE: Baxter’s immortal line: THAT’S THE ONE! A few years ago I sat down to watch it with my Jewish wife (I only mention her being Jewish because she kind of took the movie a tad seriously).

It had been quite a few years since I saw it and I nearly fell on the floor laughing over the badly delivered dialogue and THAT one really got to me. Baxter virtually huffs and puffs her way through the whole movie. Her performance is like one giant breath. Unbelievable stuff. I’m laughing as I’m typing. I just LOVE that line! And how much you wanna bet it wasn’t in the Bible like that.

I remember The Closing of the Capitol being talked about on NBC’s Today Show in September 1968, but I was too young to attend. By the way, CConnolly, was the Anne Baxter “Ten Commandments” line you mentioned, “Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn splendid adorable fool”? There were so many, but that one came to mind first. During one long-ago annual TV showing, my brother kept track of how many times the name “Moses” was spoken in the film. It ran into the hundreds.

Hi, everyone.

I’m very excited to be a part of this wonderful webiste and was wondering if anyone here attended, what was billed as, The Closing of the Capitol on Monday, September 16, 1968 at 8PM? I did, and I guess I could use that date and time as the begining of my awareness of the precarious state the grand old movie theaters would soon find themselves in across the nation and around the globe.

I am a huge Jennifer Jones fan, I just bought the DVD of “Ruby Gentry” and love how they mention “poor Ruby’s from the wrong side of the tracks”. Anyone know where that opened on Broadway?