55th Street Playhouse
154 55th Street,
New York,
NY
10022
154 55th Street,
New York,
NY
10022
7 people
favorited this theater
This was a tiny cinema of some reputation that for decades showed first run art house features and special programs.
Contributed by
Gerald A. DeLuca
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Recent comments (view all 88 comments)
Does anyone know what year the theater closed? Thanks.
On this November 6th in 1932, the Europa Theatre was in its final two days of “Louise, Queen of Prussia.” Arriving next was the eagerly-awaited American premiere engagement of G. W. Pabst’s “Kameradschaft” (“Comradeship”), which had already won critical acclaim and artistic prizes in Europe and England.
Just found this thread. I thought the cinema was larger than this, I guess memory doesn’t serve me well. 16MM was very noisy here, you could hear the projector clattering away from above. What I remember most about this place in the 80’s were the dark washrooms. One or two 6 watt orange bulbs illuminated the whole room which always freaked me out.
My dad worked at DuArt and he’d take me to work on a given Saturday and park me at the 55th St. Playhouse. I remember they had marathons of UPA cartoons and the first Chaplin’s I’d ever seen. This must have been when he reissued compilations of his early shorts in the early 50s. I just remember being disappointed at first because I thought they were going to be Charlie Chase films, an artist I became very familiar with because parts of his films were used as filler in Howdy Doody. I sat through the marathons twice. I have seen the Chaplin’s many times since then but the UPA cartoons are never revived, perhaps because of the crappy Mr. Magoo cartoons that were made for TV.
The 55th Street Playhouse is mentioned in this recent obituary of Cyrus Harvey: View link
What an interesting life he seems to have led. Here’s the lead paragraph of the Times obituary:
Cyrus I. Harvey, a quirky entrepreneur who created two significant brands in disparate fields â€" Janus Films, a distributor of movies by international directors like Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, and Crabtree & Evelyn, the purveyor of aromatic soaps and botanicals â€" died Thursday in Dayville, Conn. He was 85 and lived in Woodstock, Conn.
And hee’s the mention of the Brattle theater and 55th Street Playhouse:
Janus Films, founded in 1956, grew from his part ownership of the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass., which he and a partner, the actor Bryant Haliday, had transformed from a live-theater venue to a movie house that showed the art films Mr. Harvey had grown to love as a Fulbright scholar in Paris.
“Instead of spending two years at the Sorbonne, he spent two years at the cinémathèque,†his wife said.
Mr. Harvey and Mr. Haliday showed Janus films at the Brattle and at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York. They had named the company for a Roman god usually depicted with two heads facing in different directions.
Harvey appears to have been an extraordinary individual with an acute sense of how to mold opinion and develop trends. Janus Films had a remarkable collection. Is the company still active? If so, who are the current owners?
Janus is still active, though not to the degree it was once. It is currently the major U.S. distributor of the films of Charlie Chaplin.
Its classic releases are handled by Criterion on DVD.
Address should be changed to 154 West 55th Street. The Google map has the theatre located on 55th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, when it was actually located between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.
The Google Maps street view of the current site, however, is correct. I “dragged” it there myself, though it took about 15 minutes to get across town!