Loews Cheri
50 Dalton Street,
Boston,
MA
02115
50 Dalton Street,
Boston,
MA
02115
11 people
favorited this theater
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When in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s I used to go to the Cheri frequently, less so after that. I lived in Providence, where films generally used to open much later than in Boston. Sometimes, with friends or alone, I would make the rounds of movie theatres, from the West End to the Exeter Street, the Paris to the Brattle. One strong memory I have from April of 1970 was taking a small group of high school seniors, students of Italian, to see “Fellini Satyricon” at the Cheri 3. Given the subject matter of the film and the fact that this was a Catholic school I taught in, I could have been fired.
The Cheri was converted from a triplex to a quad in 1989 and formally became such in November of that year (notably enough, the same week the Berlin Wall fell). Business (and the quality of its bookings) fell off as soon as the Fenway opened in June of 2000, subsisting mostly from that point on Paramount releases, other random major-studio offerings, a handful of genre flicks, and scattered move-overs from other Boston moviehouses.
The day the Loews Boston Common opened in late June of 2001, the Cheri became a discount house with a $5 admission policy. The ticket price was soon slashed to $3 but, by then, the Cheri’s fate was sealed and what had been the most popular place to catch a flick in the city closed its doors for good the following October, with ‘Hardball’, ‘Hearts in Atlantis’, ‘Memento’, and ‘The Score’ being its final offerings. (Just to list a handful of films I caught there over the years: ‘Back to School’, ‘The Breakfast Club’, ‘The Quick and the Dead’, ‘GoldenEye’, ‘Copycat’, ‘Titanic’, ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’, ‘Shrek’, and far, far, too many more to list.)
As of May 1996 (after the closing of the 57), the only theatres in Boston proper were the Cheri, the Nickelodeon, and the Copley Place.
The Cheri got the potential blockbusters and the Nickelodeon got the art films. If the film was neither, it was rammed (literally) into the Copley Place.
I saw both Independence Day and Chain Reaction here. Both times the auditorium (don’t remember which except it was one of the larger ones) was packed. Independence Day might have even been a late-night showing. I thought it was a cute little theater and I miss it.
Boston may be a small city but it deserves more than two mundane multiplexes.