Fine Arts Theatre
80 Norway Street,
Boston,
MA
02115
80 Norway Street,
Boston,
MA
02115
2 people
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I lived for two years on Edgerly Road near it’s intersection with Norway and never knew there was once a theatre there. Is where the Morville House is today where it once was?
Wow – funny to see this place discussed. I saw my first “grown-up film here when my parents took me to see Pasolini’s GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW, around 1967.
Yes, Robert, it was a memorable place…one where a good deal of my “cinematic education” took place. It was a pleasing auditorium with an old-fashioned small-legit-theatre look to it. The only minus for me was that they never bothered to add a wider screen suitable for CinemaScope pictures. Instead, whenever showing a CinemaScope picture the image would appear “letterboxed” as a thin ribbon within the old standard dimensions, since they had no additional physical screen width. The screen must have dated to the early fifties and perhaps earler. But at least they respected the aspect ratio that way, although they would have had plenty of room for a wider installation to accomodate all formats.
This sounds like it was a great place.
The address for the Fine Arts was 20 Norway Street. It was located in the old Loew’s State building on Massachusetts Avenue, just a hop up the street from Symphony Hall. Program for March 3, 1962: the Russian A SUMMER TO REMEMBER (about a young Russian boy) paired with the BP-sponsored featurette GIUSEPPINA (about a young Italian girl.)
Their programming was even better than the Brattle in Cambridge at the time (1960s) because you generally got double bills for one low admission, whereas the Brattle then showed only a single film at 7:30 and 9:30. This is where I first saw Visconti’s WHITE NIGHTS, with Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell, which was hardly shown anywhere else. I brought two friends to see UMBERTO D and THE BICYCLE THIEF on a double bill. They kept running to the concession stand to buy snacks and soften the neo-realist misery. They showed lots of French new wave and classics like GRAND ILLUSION with RULES OF THE GAME, Ingmar Bergman films, Bogart and Cagney series. Truly a great place.