I wonder whether your memory of a movie with Kirk Douglas was of “Ulysses,” with Sylvana Mangano and Tonyt Quinn— that would have been a great Sunrise Drive-In movie!
Yet another stage show based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” only now at RCMH and before the Capitol mounted one to escort Dietrich-von Sternberg a year later!
mjc asked for my memory of the Capitol’s presentation of “Zhivago” in ‘65-66. Here are two global impressions:
(1) About Roadshow presentations at the Capitol and elsewhere, I most remember a totally settled, seated audience in place during the entire performance. At the busy B'way palaces for conventional shows, a steady stream of patrons ascended up and descended down the aisles throughout the screening. Often it would come in waves, as diligent ushers shunted files of patrons from one aisle to the next in an effort to balance the seating throughout the auditorium. In that case, every twenty minutes or so a herd of seat-seekers would fan out down the aisle looking for optimal spaces. It could be distracting. One learned never to sit toward the center-side of the aisles on the right or left hand wings of the house for the penalty of contending with the occasional throngs arriving during the pricture. Because seats were reservced for specific performances at roadshow presentations, such interference did not occur. Everyone sat in place from beginning to end, except for the rare squirmer who became quickly conspicuous for his or her movement.
(2) I also remember the theater(s) as completely dark. Since there was no need for the dim lighting that allowed patrons to arrive or depart during the film, once the house lights went out, the palace became black as pitch. Dark scenes on the screen seemed ever so much more vivid because of this darkness, while bright scenes shone yet more brightly as light reflected from the screen bounced off the walls and silvery proscenium curtains. The famous shot in “Zhivago” of the wintertime fields bursting into springtime bloom brought the whole house from drab grey to vibrant color in a few seconds. One feature of the Capitol’s projection (and that of its mid-town peers, too) was that the sides of each frame met the screen’s masking with razor-sharp precision: no fuzzy projector gate edges and no overlap of image on top of the masks.
“Counsellor at Law” appeared on TCM last week, and the few minutes I caught of it looked quite good. I had never heard of that film or play before, and I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing some time.
Good God! My Sophia as Lara? In June ‘57 she appeared on the Capitol’s screen in “The Pride and the Passion” (I was there at the opening showing at 10 am on 28 June), in Nov. '58 with Cary Grant in “Houseboat,” in March '60 in “Heller in Pink Tights” and again in September '60 in “It Started in Naples” (am I right on those two?), but never, thanks Heavens, in “Doctor Z.”
Did this theater have a romance with Old Russia, even after “The Scarlet Empress†failed to pay off? Here’s a “program†for “Dr. Zhivago,†distributed in the form of a leaflet at the Capitol in January, 1966.
A friend had attended the premiere on 22 December, 1965, and swooned over the film. She then returned to the box office the next day and bought tickets as Christmas presents for everyone she knew. Extravagant woman! I remember that the Capitol’s presentation of the film was absolutely superb. But, then, that was all to be expected. I’ve often meant to check out the film on tv and see whether it holds up under those conditions.
What I remember most about the stage show is that during the newsreel, the orchestra pit rose abruptly to the stage level without the orchestra on it (you could see that very well from the mezzanine). When the contour curtain descended on the title-strip announcing the next attraction (accompanied by the grand organ), it remained fractionally in place and then suddenly drew upward again, revealing a fully set stage with the entire orchestra on it and ready to launch into the “Lecuona Fantasy.†The effect was stunning. I had always thought that the overture in front of the closed curtain (usually bathed in green, sometimes in red light) served the purpose of allowing stagehands to send up the screen and arrange the set, but now I realized that the stage could be ready for action in a matter of seconds, all prepared as the film portion was winding down. As I recall, RCMH staged this effect a few times in my experience. Once was with “Show Boat†in summer, 1951, when, after the newsreel ended, the orchestra rose from the pit and rolled on stage in a mamouth band wagon and played Americana tunes, more to my liking than the “classical†music it usually undertook. The rapidity of it all amazed me, but I was too young then to reflect upon the mechanics.
When I returned home, I reported to my parents that I had watched a good portion of the parade. It’s a good thing that MGM’s version of Dostoevsky didn’t include the Grand Inquisitor episode from the novel: that would have scared the hell out of me for designing such a lie.
Awww— All the Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations seem like such natural vehicles for the Paramount or the Rivoli. Your news about “Scarlet Empress” at the Capitol shatters my illusions. The stage show sounds over-the-top. Of course, major Paramount bookings at the Capitol after 1952 were commonplace: “A Place in the Sun,” “Sister Carrie,” “War and Peace,” “Vertigo,” etc.
For “La dolce vita,” I sat in the cheap seats in the second balcony and could barely see the short, elongated TotalScope screen, much less read the subtitles. I kept waiting for an emotional experience of the kind that had thrilled me in “La strada†and “Nights of Cabiria,†but it didn’t happen this time. Over three hours later, I left the theater (er, “theatreâ€) with a horrible stiff neck.
True, “Indiscreet” is exactly the sort of film that TCM lionizes. Life is short and art is long and there’s so much to see, but if the chance comes along, I might peek at it again. Both Grant and Bergman were then a lot younger than I am now, so maybe their ages won’t seem so distracting this time.
“Merry Andrew†also seemed a minor effort, despite the talent of Michael Kidd, Johnny Mercer, IAL Diamond, Baccaloni, and others associated with it. But it was a RCMH Easter show, and Danny Kaye seemed practically a member of the family (though I never met him), and my high school friends were ready for a good laugh (which hardly came with this picture), so we went to it on Good Friday afternoon while the rest of NYC bowed hushed in prayer. That was a good thing about the Easter show at RCMH: if you didn’t have a reverent bone in your body, you could always walk in on that day without encountering a line. On the other hand, look at what happened to President Lincoln when he went to Ford’s Theater on Good Friday nearly a century earlier.
I’m astonished! I have no memory of it whatsoever. My mom had worked at Best & Co. on 51 Street and Fifth in those years, and I thought I knew the area pretty well as a kid in the ‘40s and '50s. Yes, I recall seeing ads in the NYT alongside those for the Plaza and the Sutton and the Baronet and the 55th Street Playhous. But I never thought to track down the address. It’s a shock how these things creep up on you.
Whatever happened to Philippe de Broca? “Le farceur†arrived with exuberant word-of-mouth and heaps of praise from the NY critics. They portrayed it as going beyond the New Wave in sophistication and with popular entertainment value sometimes missing from its peers. Plus, everyone agreed that it was quite possibly the funniest film ever made. I thought it was funny, but not that funny; sophisticated but not that sophisticated. After it, de Broca made a couple of films that received some attention, notably “King of Hearts†and “That Man from Rio,†and then disappeared into a stream of work that few have ever heard of. Recent filmographies list one, sometimes two features per year, plus tons of work for television. The phenomenon made me very skeptical about whether European films in the long run were really very much better than their H’wood counterpartsâ€"a good lesson to learn at the time when, to many, sub-titles seemed they could do no wrong.
“Indiscreet†struck me as a dud projecting the exhaustion of a H’wood studio system intent on making its stars of a decade or two earlier perform as though they were younger again. I stand second to none in my admiration for Bergman, ever since at the age of three I saw her twice in “Bells of St. Mary’s,†first at RCMH and then at the RKO Dyker. And if I could only come across like Cary Grant (I try, believe me, I still try). But I remember when seeing the film at that time I thought, “This is what it must have been like at RCMH ten or fifteen years ago.†Only it wasn’t, of course.
One Showplace Program I regret having lost or misplaced around that time was for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof†the following September. Last 22 August, Myrtleave posted a newspaper ad for that film and stage show, and I’m grateful for it. My senior year in high school had just begun, and to celebrate it, a bunch of us piled onto the subway and headed for W 50 Street. The film had its daring moments, to be sure, and also its sexy and its tender ones. I remember that when the great contour curtain descended, we engaged in a lively debate about whether Brick was really an, um, you know, shhing one another so that our frank conversation would not scandalize the tourists and families who sat all around us. It’s a kick to think that little more than a dozen years later Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, and Laurence Olivier would perform in a prime-time television version (I never saw it) based more closely on the play’s uncensored script (or so I’ve heard). It’s also a kick to imagine that today any high school kids might shh one another on any topic whatsoever. And yet films at RCMH allegedly went out of style for lack of suitable GP product.
Yes, Warren, exactly: the Synchro-Screen at the RKO Albee in B'klyn looked like the one in the unidentified theater of the second photo. The photo of the Proctor’s 58th Street boggles the mind. Its screen appears to have pre-empted the traveler curtain. (The Albee, however, retained a functional curtain throughout the wide screen era.) The cited dimensions are also staggering. The largest screens of the pre-‘53 era barely exceeded 24’ in width (RCMH’s was 35'). The viewing area at Proctor’s 58th Street must then have measured 24' in height. With two 12' wings, admittedly set at angles, the theater’s proscenium must have measured 50' wide? In an issue of “Theatre Catalog” from the era, there’s a photo and description of the Albee’s Synchro-Screen. I’ll look it up some day, copy the photo, and post it on the Albee’s page for comparison. It’s quite a modest affair by comparison.
The more I reflect on it, the more I convince myself that the baronet was entirely distinct from the Coronot I and II, and that, as Warren implied above on 2 March 2004, the Coronet—a theater distinct from the Baronet—had itself been twinned into the Coronet I and II. In this case, the Baronet then had an an independent identity and ought to be listed on CinemaTreasures as a separate theater, no?
In Ithaca, the Lakes Drive-In occupied a site on the west side of Cayuga Lake on Route 96. It performed a notable service to the community in 1971 when local theaters refused to show Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” because the film had received an X-rating. The Lakes picked it up and showed it to a packed lot for several weeks. The art-movie crowd simply took to their cars in thousands to see it.
The open-air showing had the other advantage of making the steamy sex scenes visible to passing motorists on Route 96, and to locals who might view the screen from their front poarches. The ooglers didn’t care whether they could hear the soundtrack as long as they could watch Brando going at it with Maria Schneider. In matters of censorship, he who laughs last, laughs best.
Pablo—
I saw “Sleeping Beauty” there in Feb. ‘59 and can vouch that it appeared on the conventional behind-the-proscenium screen that the theater had used for “The Ten Commandments.” Ditto for “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which appeared on the conventional screen in roadshow era.
O yes, the show offered that familiar underwater effect with the Corps de Ballet performing behind a scrim, onto which were projected moving images of waves (with music by Debussy, “La mer”), climaxed by Santa’s arrival that turned the ocean floor into a Christmas village (“Christmas-tide” indeed). No bubbles from any broken wind that I know of.
The film was highly touted and it gave us a view of London that encompassed much more than Tower Bridge and Whitehall, so familiar from other films of the time. How young Albert Finney appeared!
The Baronet struck me as one of the first of the box-like theaters we now find at malls: long and narrow, with drape-covered sides, and, for its time, no particular flair for theatrical presentation. If you think of Bloomingdale’s (and, later, Alexander’s) across the street, you get the idea of how the neighborhood seemed sort of mall-ish. Admittedly high class, but mall-ish nonetheless. As Warren points out in his post for 2 March 2004 above, the Baronet was remodeled (in the early ‘50s) upon an older theater that had stood upon that site for decades. The Coronet I and II (opened in the early ‘60s) were plusher and more comfortable.
O Holy Night! “Auntie Mame†struck a chord with so many people (probably mostly everyone in the ‘40s and ‘50s) who had a “maiden aunt†in the family. Two world wars had depleted the male population sufficiently to produce a couple of generations with a noticeable cadre of unmarried women in their ranks.
Mine had started out her young adult life as a vaudeville songster on the RKO circuit and in Coney Island. There she had met and performed with Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, and many others who once brought down the house. The stories! Her career ended when vaudeville ended and my grandparents wouldn’t approve of her performing out-of-town. When she approached her eighties, she left Brooklyn and took an apartment near me in Tiny Town, not too far from Podunk (yes, there is a Podunk, 250 miles west of Times Square). We eventually knew that she was ready for a nursing home when, at our glittering dinner parties, she regaled friends of my generation with her familiar stories, now progressively emebllished, about how “I performed with ‘em all: Kaye, Sinatra, … and Elvis, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger, too.â€
Before the play, there was the novel which I had read on the subway going back and forth to high school. Roz originated the role on B’way, but by the time I got to see the play, Greer Garson had taken over the part. That was a good choice, too, but it was Peggy Cass who tore us all apart with laughter. Those of us in the standing room could barely stay on our feet. She became a regular on the Jack Paar show, won an AA for the film, appeared in a couple of other shows (we went backstage to see her after “A Thurber Carnivalâ€), and then that was that.
For the Christmas stage show, we sat close to the choral staircase on the right in the first row. My friend claimed that he had heard a Rockette fart. I didn’t, and I never believed him too much after that.
I wonder when the “Polk Ave.” lost that wonderful marquee and became the “Polk”? “Little Miss Roughneck” opened in ‘38, so we know it happened after that. In my neck of the island in B'klyn, several theaters underwent facelifts in the pre-Scope post-war years ca.'48-'52. McCourt’s “Queer Street” captures the Polk of that era (the paragraphs on “Don’t Bother to Knock” are exemplary) without calling the theater “Polk Ave.” or mentioning its elegant marquee. That book goes into some detail about the custodian’s hilarious hanky-panky at the time.
And my deepest thanks to you and those like you who gave us so much pleasure when you presented films with such care and style in those days. Yes, we indeed noticed, and are now delighted to express our gratitude.
Thanks for your expert technical explanation of those maddening seams. The period I refer to extends from the Panoramic screen era of Summer ‘53 to some time around '56. “High Society” played there that summer (I didn’t see it there then); “Friendly Persuasion” was the Thanksgiving show. I don’t remember noticing seams before Summer '53, not even on the Magnascope screen for special sequences in “King Solomon’s Mines,” “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and other films of the early '50s.
Nor do I recall ever seeing a hot spot at RCMH in those years: much must have depended on where one sat (for me, often at the cross-aisle on either the right or left hand side of the orchestra: as a kid, no obstructive heads in front; as an adult, room to stretch my long legs).
Vito: I was a pint-sized nut about projection quality in those days. Now I’m just a crank.
I’m the crank who brought up the topic of visible seams in the screen several times in the past, notably in my post of 1 September 2004. I’ll stand by that claim to my last breath. Those seams enraged me as a kid in the early ‘50s.
The defiantly flat screen at RCMH in 1953 consisted of eight panels @ 4'x70' sewn horizontally so that when the masking dropped for CinemaScope, the viewing measured 28'x70', and when the side masking moved in for regular projection, the surface measured 32'x55' or so.
You cannot see the dark lines in Warren’s picture because the screen’s whiteness bleaches out those details. But if you sat close enough to that screen at the time, you’d go mad looking at them.
The same was true of enlarged screens everywhere in the mid-‘50s, except that to achieve curvature, the panels were sewn vertically on frames set at slight angles to one another to yield an arc of 12:1. If I remember correctly, the Roxy’s CinemaScope screen consisted of sixteen such panels (= 64’ total width), and masking closed in to allow ten panels (= 40' width) of viewing surface for conventional projection.
I further recall that around the time of “Friendly Persuasion” (Nov. ‘56), RCMH finally installed a truly seamless screen. Or perhaps I was just going blind from teenage activities and didn’t notice the familiar old horizontal lines so much. Today, I’d be thrilled to see any screen at all.
Thanks for the info: ars longa, vita brevis, so I’ll probably not get to view this film again.
Corrections to my post above: I just consulted the NY Times of 12 June ‘61 with its review of “Frantic.” The film pre-dated Malle’s “Lovers,” but the latter raeched NY first. According to the plot summary, the person stuck in the elevator was not Moreau, but her lover who had just murdered her husband; while he was stuck there, a couple of kids stole his car and then murdered someone else, thereby making him the prime suspect in that crime. Gee, but those New Wavers loved Hitchcock!
About the Playhouse/Cinema handle: Though Hagstrom’s Atlas names the theater on Seventh Avenue “Carnegie Hall Playhouse,” the NY Times on the above date advertises “White Nights” playing there at the “Carnegie Hall Cinema.” So, Gerald, at least for the time-frame recounted here, you are right. I don’t know when “Playhouse” got attached to either that theater or to the Little Carnegie on E 57 Street.
I’d forgotten about those Baro-coco feathers at the sides of the proscenium! The old Globe (now Lunt-Fontanne) had similar decoration that survived that theater’s transition from movie to legit in ‘58.
And, yes, “Rashomon played there when it opened in ‘50 (though I was too young to see it at the time: I recall, however, that a dubbed version of the latter went on to travel through the RKO nabe circuit). Among films I recall seeing at the Little C were "Tunes of Glory” and “Frantic,” the latter Louis Malle’s first feature, with a very young Jeanne Moreau and a suspenseful scene with her stuck in a tiny French elevator.
By the way, the correct name of this theater is “Little Carnegie Theater,” not at all to be confused with “Carnegie Hall Playhouse” around the corner. Warren and Gerald: You both make different points in your posts of 18 March 2004. Hagstrom’s Atlas of 1961 identifies those theaters (at least at that time) by the titles I have given. “Cinema” might have been attached to one or the other at some later period. But “Playhouse” was definitely the handle of the theater on Seventh Ave. in the early ‘60s.
EdSolero—
I wonder whether your memory of a movie with Kirk Douglas was of “Ulysses,” with Sylvana Mangano and Tonyt Quinn— that would have been a great Sunrise Drive-In movie!
Yet another stage show based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” only now at RCMH and before the Capitol mounted one to escort Dietrich-von Sternberg a year later!
mjc asked for my memory of the Capitol’s presentation of “Zhivago” in ‘65-66. Here are two global impressions:
(1) About Roadshow presentations at the Capitol and elsewhere, I most remember a totally settled, seated audience in place during the entire performance. At the busy B'way palaces for conventional shows, a steady stream of patrons ascended up and descended down the aisles throughout the screening. Often it would come in waves, as diligent ushers shunted files of patrons from one aisle to the next in an effort to balance the seating throughout the auditorium. In that case, every twenty minutes or so a herd of seat-seekers would fan out down the aisle looking for optimal spaces. It could be distracting. One learned never to sit toward the center-side of the aisles on the right or left hand wings of the house for the penalty of contending with the occasional throngs arriving during the pricture. Because seats were reservced for specific performances at roadshow presentations, such interference did not occur. Everyone sat in place from beginning to end, except for the rare squirmer who became quickly conspicuous for his or her movement.
(2) I also remember the theater(s) as completely dark. Since there was no need for the dim lighting that allowed patrons to arrive or depart during the film, once the house lights went out, the palace became black as pitch. Dark scenes on the screen seemed ever so much more vivid because of this darkness, while bright scenes shone yet more brightly as light reflected from the screen bounced off the walls and silvery proscenium curtains. The famous shot in “Zhivago” of the wintertime fields bursting into springtime bloom brought the whole house from drab grey to vibrant color in a few seconds. One feature of the Capitol’s projection (and that of its mid-town peers, too) was that the sides of each frame met the screen’s masking with razor-sharp precision: no fuzzy projector gate edges and no overlap of image on top of the masks.
“Counsellor at Law” appeared on TCM last week, and the few minutes I caught of it looked quite good. I had never heard of that film or play before, and I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing some time.
Good God! My Sophia as Lara? In June ‘57 she appeared on the Capitol’s screen in “The Pride and the Passion” (I was there at the opening showing at 10 am on 28 June), in Nov. '58 with Cary Grant in “Houseboat,” in March '60 in “Heller in Pink Tights” and again in September '60 in “It Started in Naples” (am I right on those two?), but never, thanks Heavens, in “Doctor Z.”
Did this theater have a romance with Old Russia, even after “The Scarlet Empress†failed to pay off? Here’s a “program†for “Dr. Zhivago,†distributed in the form of a leaflet at the Capitol in January, 1966.
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A friend had attended the premiere on 22 December, 1965, and swooned over the film. She then returned to the box office the next day and bought tickets as Christmas presents for everyone she knew. Extravagant woman! I remember that the Capitol’s presentation of the film was absolutely superb. But, then, that was all to be expected. I’ve often meant to check out the film on tv and see whether it holds up under those conditions.
Here’s a Program from March, 1958:
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One of the good things about going to a Catholic high school was that you got a few days off for religious feasts. One such feast was St. Patrick’s Day, when you were sometimes encouraged to attend or perhaps even march in the parade up Fifth Avenue. Despite my Irish surname, I’ve never done that, and probably never will. The closest I came to it was that day in 1958 when my friend and I (his surname blatently Irish too) thought vaguely about checking out the parade and headed off for St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But when we emerged from the subway at W 50 Street, RCMH loomed in front of us, and “The Brothers Karamazov†beckoned us inside. Marilyn Monroe had been touted for the role of Grushenka, but we had seen Maria Schell in René Clément’s “Gervaise†(at the Baronet) and thought that she might play an appropriately wide-eyed naif in the part. Before we knew it, we were sitting in the third mezzanine smoking cigarettes and laughing at the Russian accents (or lack of them).
What I remember most about the stage show is that during the newsreel, the orchestra pit rose abruptly to the stage level without the orchestra on it (you could see that very well from the mezzanine). When the contour curtain descended on the title-strip announcing the next attraction (accompanied by the grand organ), it remained fractionally in place and then suddenly drew upward again, revealing a fully set stage with the entire orchestra on it and ready to launch into the “Lecuona Fantasy.†The effect was stunning. I had always thought that the overture in front of the closed curtain (usually bathed in green, sometimes in red light) served the purpose of allowing stagehands to send up the screen and arrange the set, but now I realized that the stage could be ready for action in a matter of seconds, all prepared as the film portion was winding down. As I recall, RCMH staged this effect a few times in my experience. Once was with “Show Boat†in summer, 1951, when, after the newsreel ended, the orchestra rose from the pit and rolled on stage in a mamouth band wagon and played Americana tunes, more to my liking than the “classical†music it usually undertook. The rapidity of it all amazed me, but I was too young then to reflect upon the mechanics.
When I returned home, I reported to my parents that I had watched a good portion of the parade. It’s a good thing that MGM’s version of Dostoevsky didn’t include the Grand Inquisitor episode from the novel: that would have scared the hell out of me for designing such a lie.
Awww— All the Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations seem like such natural vehicles for the Paramount or the Rivoli. Your news about “Scarlet Empress” at the Capitol shatters my illusions. The stage show sounds over-the-top. Of course, major Paramount bookings at the Capitol after 1952 were commonplace: “A Place in the Sun,” “Sister Carrie,” “War and Peace,” “Vertigo,” etc.
Here’s a program from “La dolce vita†at the Henry Miller’s Theatre in Spring, 1961:
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The film began a reserved-seats two-a-day run at this theater (noticeably spelled “Theatreâ€) on 19 April, 1961, and remained until Roger Vadim’s modernized “Les liaisons dangereuses†with Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau (and soundtrack by Thelonius Monk and Art Blakey) displaced it with a similar roadshow policy on 18 December, 1961.
For “La dolce vita,” I sat in the cheap seats in the second balcony and could barely see the short, elongated TotalScope screen, much less read the subtitles. I kept waiting for an emotional experience of the kind that had thrilled me in “La strada†and “Nights of Cabiria,†but it didn’t happen this time. Over three hours later, I left the theater (er, “theatreâ€) with a horrible stiff neck.
True, “Indiscreet” is exactly the sort of film that TCM lionizes. Life is short and art is long and there’s so much to see, but if the chance comes along, I might peek at it again. Both Grant and Bergman were then a lot younger than I am now, so maybe their ages won’t seem so distracting this time.
Here’s a Program from April, 1959:
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“Merry Andrew†also seemed a minor effort, despite the talent of Michael Kidd, Johnny Mercer, IAL Diamond, Baccaloni, and others associated with it. But it was a RCMH Easter show, and Danny Kaye seemed practically a member of the family (though I never met him), and my high school friends were ready for a good laugh (which hardly came with this picture), so we went to it on Good Friday afternoon while the rest of NYC bowed hushed in prayer. That was a good thing about the Easter show at RCMH: if you didn’t have a reverent bone in your body, you could always walk in on that day without encountering a line. On the other hand, look at what happened to President Lincoln when he went to Ford’s Theater on Good Friday nearly a century earlier.
I’m astonished! I have no memory of it whatsoever. My mom had worked at Best & Co. on 51 Street and Fifth in those years, and I thought I knew the area pretty well as a kid in the ‘40s and '50s. Yes, I recall seeing ads in the NYT alongside those for the Plaza and the Sutton and the Baronet and the 55th Street Playhous. But I never thought to track down the address. It’s a shock how these things creep up on you.
Here’s a Showbill from September 1961:
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Whatever happened to Philippe de Broca? “Le farceur†arrived with exuberant word-of-mouth and heaps of praise from the NY critics. They portrayed it as going beyond the New Wave in sophistication and with popular entertainment value sometimes missing from its peers. Plus, everyone agreed that it was quite possibly the funniest film ever made. I thought it was funny, but not that funny; sophisticated but not that sophisticated. After it, de Broca made a couple of films that received some attention, notably “King of Hearts†and “That Man from Rio,†and then disappeared into a stream of work that few have ever heard of. Recent filmographies list one, sometimes two features per year, plus tons of work for television. The phenomenon made me very skeptical about whether European films in the long run were really very much better than their H’wood counterpartsâ€"a good lesson to learn at the time when, to many, sub-titles seemed they could do no wrong.
Here’s a Program from July 1958:
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“Indiscreet†struck me as a dud projecting the exhaustion of a H’wood studio system intent on making its stars of a decade or two earlier perform as though they were younger again. I stand second to none in my admiration for Bergman, ever since at the age of three I saw her twice in “Bells of St. Mary’s,†first at RCMH and then at the RKO Dyker. And if I could only come across like Cary Grant (I try, believe me, I still try). But I remember when seeing the film at that time I thought, “This is what it must have been like at RCMH ten or fifteen years ago.†Only it wasn’t, of course.
One Showplace Program I regret having lost or misplaced around that time was for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof†the following September. Last 22 August, Myrtleave posted a newspaper ad for that film and stage show, and I’m grateful for it. My senior year in high school had just begun, and to celebrate it, a bunch of us piled onto the subway and headed for W 50 Street. The film had its daring moments, to be sure, and also its sexy and its tender ones. I remember that when the great contour curtain descended, we engaged in a lively debate about whether Brick was really an, um, you know, shhing one another so that our frank conversation would not scandalize the tourists and families who sat all around us. It’s a kick to think that little more than a dozen years later Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, and Laurence Olivier would perform in a prime-time television version (I never saw it) based more closely on the play’s uncensored script (or so I’ve heard). It’s also a kick to imagine that today any high school kids might shh one another on any topic whatsoever. And yet films at RCMH allegedly went out of style for lack of suitable GP product.
Yes, Warren, exactly: the Synchro-Screen at the RKO Albee in B'klyn looked like the one in the unidentified theater of the second photo. The photo of the Proctor’s 58th Street boggles the mind. Its screen appears to have pre-empted the traveler curtain. (The Albee, however, retained a functional curtain throughout the wide screen era.) The cited dimensions are also staggering. The largest screens of the pre-‘53 era barely exceeded 24’ in width (RCMH’s was 35'). The viewing area at Proctor’s 58th Street must then have measured 24' in height. With two 12' wings, admittedly set at angles, the theater’s proscenium must have measured 50' wide? In an issue of “Theatre Catalog” from the era, there’s a photo and description of the Albee’s Synchro-Screen. I’ll look it up some day, copy the photo, and post it on the Albee’s page for comparison. It’s quite a modest affair by comparison.
The more I reflect on it, the more I convince myself that the baronet was entirely distinct from the Coronot I and II, and that, as Warren implied above on 2 March 2004, the Coronet—a theater distinct from the Baronet—had itself been twinned into the Coronet I and II. In this case, the Baronet then had an an independent identity and ought to be listed on CinemaTreasures as a separate theater, no?
In Ithaca, the Lakes Drive-In occupied a site on the west side of Cayuga Lake on Route 96. It performed a notable service to the community in 1971 when local theaters refused to show Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” because the film had received an X-rating. The Lakes picked it up and showed it to a packed lot for several weeks. The art-movie crowd simply took to their cars in thousands to see it.
The open-air showing had the other advantage of making the steamy sex scenes visible to passing motorists on Route 96, and to locals who might view the screen from their front poarches. The ooglers didn’t care whether they could hear the soundtrack as long as they could watch Brando going at it with Maria Schneider. In matters of censorship, he who laughs last, laughs best.
Pablo—
I saw “Sleeping Beauty” there in Feb. ‘59 and can vouch that it appeared on the conventional behind-the-proscenium screen that the theater had used for “The Ten Commandments.” Ditto for “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which appeared on the conventional screen in roadshow era.
Vincent—
O yes, the show offered that familiar underwater effect with the Corps de Ballet performing behind a scrim, onto which were projected moving images of waves (with music by Debussy, “La mer”), climaxed by Santa’s arrival that turned the ocean floor into a Christmas village (“Christmas-tide” indeed). No bubbles from any broken wind that I know of.
Here’s a Showbill from the Baronet for June, 1961:
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The film was highly touted and it gave us a view of London that encompassed much more than Tower Bridge and Whitehall, so familiar from other films of the time. How young Albert Finney appeared!
The Baronet struck me as one of the first of the box-like theaters we now find at malls: long and narrow, with drape-covered sides, and, for its time, no particular flair for theatrical presentation. If you think of Bloomingdale’s (and, later, Alexander’s) across the street, you get the idea of how the neighborhood seemed sort of mall-ish. Admittedly high class, but mall-ish nonetheless. As Warren points out in his post for 2 March 2004 above, the Baronet was remodeled (in the early ‘50s) upon an older theater that had stood upon that site for decades. The Coronet I and II (opened in the early ‘60s) were plusher and more comfortable.
Films I recall seeing at the Baronet include René Clément’s “Gervaise†with Maria Schell, Jacques Tati’s “Mon Oncle,†and a subsequent revival of “M. Hulot’s Holiday.†Or so I think: the theater never inspired me with enough energy to check the facts in the archives. Some day I’ll get around to doing that.
Here’s a Program from December 1958:
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O Holy Night! “Auntie Mame†struck a chord with so many people (probably mostly everyone in the ‘40s and ‘50s) who had a “maiden aunt†in the family. Two world wars had depleted the male population sufficiently to produce a couple of generations with a noticeable cadre of unmarried women in their ranks.
Mine had started out her young adult life as a vaudeville songster on the RKO circuit and in Coney Island. There she had met and performed with Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, and many others who once brought down the house. The stories! Her career ended when vaudeville ended and my grandparents wouldn’t approve of her performing out-of-town. When she approached her eighties, she left Brooklyn and took an apartment near me in Tiny Town, not too far from Podunk (yes, there is a Podunk, 250 miles west of Times Square). We eventually knew that she was ready for a nursing home when, at our glittering dinner parties, she regaled friends of my generation with her familiar stories, now progressively emebllished, about how “I performed with ‘em all: Kaye, Sinatra, … and Elvis, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger, too.â€
Before the play, there was the novel which I had read on the subway going back and forth to high school. Roz originated the role on B’way, but by the time I got to see the play, Greer Garson had taken over the part. That was a good choice, too, but it was Peggy Cass who tore us all apart with laughter. Those of us in the standing room could barely stay on our feet. She became a regular on the Jack Paar show, won an AA for the film, appeared in a couple of other shows (we went backstage to see her after “A Thurber Carnivalâ€), and then that was that.
For the Christmas stage show, we sat close to the choral staircase on the right in the first row. My friend claimed that he had heard a Rockette fart. I didn’t, and I never believed him too much after that.
I wonder when the “Polk Ave.” lost that wonderful marquee and became the “Polk”? “Little Miss Roughneck” opened in ‘38, so we know it happened after that. In my neck of the island in B'klyn, several theaters underwent facelifts in the pre-Scope post-war years ca.'48-'52. McCourt’s “Queer Street” captures the Polk of that era (the paragraphs on “Don’t Bother to Knock” are exemplary) without calling the theater “Polk Ave.” or mentioning its elegant marquee. That book goes into some detail about the custodian’s hilarious hanky-panky at the time.
Vito—
And my deepest thanks to you and those like you who gave us so much pleasure when you presented films with such care and style in those days. Yes, we indeed noticed, and are now delighted to express our gratitude.
REndres—
Thanks for your expert technical explanation of those maddening seams. The period I refer to extends from the Panoramic screen era of Summer ‘53 to some time around '56. “High Society” played there that summer (I didn’t see it there then); “Friendly Persuasion” was the Thanksgiving show. I don’t remember noticing seams before Summer '53, not even on the Magnascope screen for special sequences in “King Solomon’s Mines,” “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and other films of the early '50s.
Nor do I recall ever seeing a hot spot at RCMH in those years: much must have depended on where one sat (for me, often at the cross-aisle on either the right or left hand side of the orchestra: as a kid, no obstructive heads in front; as an adult, room to stretch my long legs).
Vito: I was a pint-sized nut about projection quality in those days. Now I’m just a crank.
I’m the crank who brought up the topic of visible seams in the screen several times in the past, notably in my post of 1 September 2004. I’ll stand by that claim to my last breath. Those seams enraged me as a kid in the early ‘50s.
The defiantly flat screen at RCMH in 1953 consisted of eight panels @ 4'x70' sewn horizontally so that when the masking dropped for CinemaScope, the viewing measured 28'x70', and when the side masking moved in for regular projection, the surface measured 32'x55' or so.
You cannot see the dark lines in Warren’s picture because the screen’s whiteness bleaches out those details. But if you sat close enough to that screen at the time, you’d go mad looking at them.
The same was true of enlarged screens everywhere in the mid-‘50s, except that to achieve curvature, the panels were sewn vertically on frames set at slight angles to one another to yield an arc of 12:1. If I remember correctly, the Roxy’s CinemaScope screen consisted of sixteen such panels (= 64’ total width), and masking closed in to allow ten panels (= 40' width) of viewing surface for conventional projection.
I further recall that around the time of “Friendly Persuasion” (Nov. ‘56), RCMH finally installed a truly seamless screen. Or perhaps I was just going blind from teenage activities and didn’t notice the familiar old horizontal lines so much. Today, I’d be thrilled to see any screen at all.
Gerald—
Thanks for the info: ars longa, vita brevis, so I’ll probably not get to view this film again.
Corrections to my post above: I just consulted the NY Times of 12 June ‘61 with its review of “Frantic.” The film pre-dated Malle’s “Lovers,” but the latter raeched NY first. According to the plot summary, the person stuck in the elevator was not Moreau, but her lover who had just murdered her husband; while he was stuck there, a couple of kids stole his car and then murdered someone else, thereby making him the prime suspect in that crime. Gee, but those New Wavers loved Hitchcock!
About the Playhouse/Cinema handle: Though Hagstrom’s Atlas names the theater on Seventh Avenue “Carnegie Hall Playhouse,” the NY Times on the above date advertises “White Nights” playing there at the “Carnegie Hall Cinema.” So, Gerald, at least for the time-frame recounted here, you are right. I don’t know when “Playhouse” got attached to either that theater or to the Little Carnegie on E 57 Street.
Heh, heh, heh, those copywriter villians.
Warren—
I’d forgotten about those Baro-coco feathers at the sides of the proscenium! The old Globe (now Lunt-Fontanne) had similar decoration that survived that theater’s transition from movie to legit in ‘58.
And, yes, “Rashomon played there when it opened in ‘50 (though I was too young to see it at the time: I recall, however, that a dubbed version of the latter went on to travel through the RKO nabe circuit). Among films I recall seeing at the Little C were "Tunes of Glory” and “Frantic,” the latter Louis Malle’s first feature, with a very young Jeanne Moreau and a suspenseful scene with her stuck in a tiny French elevator.
By the way, the correct name of this theater is “Little Carnegie Theater,” not at all to be confused with “Carnegie Hall Playhouse” around the corner. Warren and Gerald: You both make different points in your posts of 18 March 2004. Hagstrom’s Atlas of 1961 identifies those theaters (at least at that time) by the titles I have given. “Cinema” might have been attached to one or the other at some later period. But “Playhouse” was definitely the handle of the theater on Seventh Ave. in the early ‘60s.