The print of GW Pabst’s 1931 version of Brecht-Weill’s “Threepenny Opera†had been struck from copies recently found in Germany more than two decades after the Nazis had attempted to destroy all traces of the film. The showing understandably created a stir in 1960, all the more so since its original release in the US had been compromised by lawsuits brought by Brecht against the German studio for altering his script.
I went to it already primed by a long-running off-Broadway (at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street) adaptation of it by Marc Blitzstein with glossed-up production values. The live cast included Lotte Lenya thirty years after she’d originated the role of Pirate Jenny, as well as Bea Arthur and Jo Sullivan. The movie, by comparison, seemed a downer to me at the time, though images of its fog-bound streets, leering faces, and shadowy depths continue to haunt me to this day.
Warren— thanks for ‘46. Yes, Connee Boswell was a great repeater at the Roxy. I wonder whether Senor Wences had anything to do with the success of “Razor” and its ss?
There are two programs from RCMH that I regret having misplaced over the years. The first was for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,†which I remember seeing in a packed house one Friday evening in October ’61 after a day of undergrad classes. I found it immensely enjoyable even though it strayed from the novel that had drawn me into a great cult-following at the time. I always thought that I could have done a terrific job playing the part of “Paul/FredBaby,†since I shared that character’s writerly aspirations and was, through similar experiences, depraved beyond my years. I’ll never forget the gasp from 5,900 viewers when George Peppard first opened his closet, and have been trying to build a wardrobe like that since then. Mickey Rooney gave us a deplorable Mr. Yunioshi, but the ambience of Bohemian-luxe NYC life seemed just right for the era (though I’d never known a NYC 5&10 store to look like the one they stole the masks from, and the interiors of Tiffany’s and the NYPL were clearly H’wood sets). Here’s the NY Times’s opening day ad to substitute for my lost program:
The other program would have been for “To Kill a Mockingbird,†which I remember seeing on a Friday evening in the middle of March ’63. As it happened, it was my first date with my now wife, so there was double reason to save the program. After martinis and some supper on the East Side (or was it beer and hot dogs in Yorkville?) we hopped onto the subway for the last stage show, which usually began around 9:30 pm. Upon reaching 50 Street, we joined a line that stretched around the block. The top-coated ushers were barking, “The last stage show has already begun; tickets are now on sale for the final showing of the movie only.†Who cared? When we reached the box-office forty-five minutes later, the ushers were barking, “The final showing of the movie has begun; there is some seating in the side rear sections only.†Who cared? The result is that we missed both the stage show and the film’s opening credits; and the seats were so far from the screen that the latter looked like a small TV tube. Who cared? Here’s the NY Times’s review of the film by Bosley Crowther:
NYC newspapers had been on strike since the previous December, but the Times has archived its West Coast edition, from which I’ve drawn the above. For greater legibility, here’s a blow-up of the review itself, spliced onto an account in “Variety†of the stage show that we missed seeing (there’s no other record of it in the NYC press):
For all that, five months later we traveled to DC for Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, 28 Aug. ‘63. On the evening of this historic day, I was nearly killed by Robert Kennedy when, in front of the White House, his chauffered limo loomed out of nowhere and swept through the parting gates, brushing my belt buckle as it passed. I’ll never forget the grin on RFK’s face in response to my startled affront. Imagine the headlines if his car had mowed me down: “RFK kills student after march… Kinship denied…Student’s political passions had been galvanized by show at RCMH….â€
Seeing “La strada” at the T-L 52 (along with seeing “Seven Samurai” at the Guild a few months later) provided one of those unforgettable compass points in my movie-going life. As a h.s. kid who’d just discovered the thrill of converting my lunch money into subway tokens and box-office tickets, I found that those fims (and “Rififi” at the Fine Arts and “Ladykillers” at the Sutton and “The Lady Vanishes” at MoMA, all in the same short season) expanded my horizons past the point of no return. They taught me that there is a world beyond my shores and a past full of wit and wisdom beyond my ken. As a cynical college kid a few years later, I renounced “La strada” as too sappy and sentimental when measured against the likes of “La dolce vita” and “8 ½.” Now I’d reverse the judgment.
The oddest feature of that theater that I recall as both a movie house and as a playhouse was the downward sloping, horizontally splayed beaux-arts cornucopias on each side of the proscenium, retained after the ‘58 renovation eliminated the second balcony. I haven’t been in that house since the '99 renovation, so I wonder what that recent job entailed. I wish there were a site like this for NYC live playhouses.
The dominant colors were deep red and ivory white and were replicated in the draperies hung in lounge of mirrors. The latter appears among the tinted postcards that Lostmemory posted on this page last 9 March ‘05.
Yes, chain mail decorated the Victoria. I didn’t mention that above, because I’d already written about it in a post on the Victoria’s page. (That post appeared on 19 January ‘05; in looking for it, I found that the first substantive post I made in CinemaTreasures occurred one year ago today, 20 July '04—I’ll light a candle on my tofu cake tonight.)
I variously identified the chain mail as “steel medallions” and “aluminum medallions” without inquiring further: Wm Morrison likely describes it, and his book might have been the one I referred to through memory last January (I vividly recall a detailed description of how the renovators broke trough the rear wall and extended the length into the alley behind the Astor and Bijou).
In any case, the wall was covered with red velvet, matching the red velvet traveler curtain on the stage-apron, and the chain mail sat as a skin over that covering. It gleamed in light reflected from the screen, bathing the house in a silvery glow with b&w movies and in an irridescent glow with color films. The effect was very unusual. I should also note that with the introduction of wide screen in ‘53, a few feet were sliced off each end of the narrow proscenium to accommodate the new format. Even still, the screen remained the smallest of any I remember in the major Times Square houses (I exclude the original Trans-Lux houses).
Yes, if memory again serves, the balcony floors were of old-fashioned (and quite creaky) wood—though I might be mistaken here. The overall impression that I retain conveys a sense of dissonance between the two largely unremodeled balconies and the ‘48 main floor renovation. The first film I saw at the Victoria was “Joan of Arc” in '49, a film that welded me to the fourteenth century for longer than it should have; the last was “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in '68, chiefly because that day an earlier showing at the Beekman was sold out.
Marquees: yes, they mirrored each other in style, though the Astor’s had greater length because the lobby’s frontage on B'way was longer.
The Lunt-Fontanne: The oddest feature of that theater as both a movie house and as a playhouse, I recall, was the downward sloping, horizontally splayed beaux-arts cornucopias on each side of the proscenium, retained even after the ‘58 renovation eliminated the second balcony. Since I haven’t been in that theater since the '99 renovation, I wonder what that job entailed. I wish there were a site like this for NYC live playhouses.
Thanks for the photos, old and new. I attended the Brattle only a few times (memorably for “Zero pout conduit” in the mid-‘70s), but whenever I found myself in the neighborhood, I’d drop into the Casablanca for a beer. Nearly always I’d bump into someone I knew from some other part of the world (a really small world), or else I’d find myself deep into conversation with a stanger who knew more about movies than me.
“Jazz on a Summer’s Day,†filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, was every college kid’s (read: every college boy’s) idea of a cool film. I can’t count the number of beery conversations we slurred thorough as we debated the merits of Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan and Dinah Washington and Jack Teagarden and Mahalia Jackson and more. As it happened, my best friend in college came from Tiverton RI, just across the bay from Newport, so that the following July 4 weekend I visited him and we attended the 1960 Festival.
As it also happened, the event that year witnessed the first college-student riot of the 1960s. 20,000 or so fans grew restive at the slow pace of bringing on the acts, and that (plus the beer and the sun and a bunch of people who scaled the walls after not being admitted when the attendance reached capacity) generated a rapidly escalating pandemonium. To contain the madness, the good citizens of Newport urged police to close the bridges to and from the island, which the police did. And then things got worse, because all the out-of-town collegians were pent up on the island with no place to go. My friend had friends who lived in Newport, so we walked to their house and crashed out on the floor for the night.
Little did we know then of the riots that would ensue throughout the rest of the ‘60s, nor how by the decade’s end we’d be gassed, maced, jailed, hooted at, pestered, pursued, threatened, and otherwise harassed for our convictions about civil rights, social justice, and an ill-advised war. And all so that four decades later we could wonder once again about the fate of affirmative action, civil liberties, and the quest for weapons of mass destruction. Today’s news about corporate insider John Roberts leaves us with no cheer. Plus ça change… .
Thanks for a smartly worded and largely correct summary. I’d modify a few details and ambiguities in paragraphs 11-13.
“The Astor was extended and enlarged in a similar way”: The Astor was enlarged in a similar way by virtue of eliminating the stage (as had been done to the Victoria in ‘48), but it was not extended. Instead, the entire interior was gutted, the second balcony removed, the proscenium and stage area removed, and the remaining space, rather squarish and boxy, received a modern treatment with accoustic walls and mural design.
The Victoria was enlarged by gutting the proscenium and box seats, eliminating the stage, and extending the stage wall out toward the Astor and Bijou by about 12 feet. But the second balcony remained, and so did the original curve to the side walls as they reached out to where the proscenium had been; the rake in the orchestra floor remained so that it first descended, then rose slightly as it approached where the orchestra pit had been, and then dipped again and descended toward the new screen area. The effect was odd, as the floor level consequently waved down and up and down again. The rake at the renovated Astor was conventional and had evidently been completely refigured after the gutting.
“The Victoria Theater is a rare example of a wonderful, fully worthwhile remodeling job”: These words seem to me to describe the Astor rather than the Victoria, for the reasons given above. The Victoria’s antiquated second balcony (I remember its wooden floors creaking when I saw “Paths of Glory” and “Dr. Strangelove” there in their original runs), the curvature of its walls, and the make-do raking represented compromises that the remodeling of the Astor did not make.
“The interior of the theater was brought out to the street in this redesign”: You mean the Astor, not the Victoria. The latter’s tunnel entrance wrapped around a cigar-store fronting on B'way, and then (as you correctly describe in par. 6) opened onto the left side of the rear orchestra promenade (whose exit doors in turn opened on to W. 46 Street, as it the Booth theater a block away (see “The Pillowman”: it’s truly great, a cracked rewriting of Shakespeare’s “Tempest”).
The Hagstrom map for the Astor and Victoria is not accurate to scale. When you say that the bulk of the Victoria was on 46 Street, that’s not true: only the rear wall faced that street; the bulk of the theater then reached inward with a long narrow thrust to the south, not at all squarish as was the Astor.
A final comment about Bryan Krefft’s informative initial description on this page: It identifies the Astor’s predominant colors as red, gold, and ivory. That might have been true when the theater opened. By the time I first visited it in the late ‘40s, it had received a Yale Blue drapery treatment that covered the entire proscenium and box-seat walls (with box-seats removed). The ivory and gold of the ceiling and remaining walls had faded, or were barely visible in the dimly lit interior. The '59 renovation of course deployed blue, black, and green as you describe.
Yes, the books by Stern and Morrison are wonderful. Thanks for bringing them to our attention.
That’s “Diner,” not “Dinner.” And I felt sad when I first saw the Roscoe closed, not demolished. The wrecking ball evidently swung in the more recent past.
Directed by and starring Paul Henreid, “For Men Only” received the advertising tag “… and the women who love them. It’s every woman’s picture!” I never knew that it concerned frat boys. It opened at Loew’s State on 15 January, 1952.
Who could ever forget the Roscoe. It indeed looked like an old barn, on both the outside and the inside. I remember it in the early pre-CinemaScope 1950s when it received product a week later than the two theaters in nearby Livingston Manor (named appropriately the Livingston and the Manor). The latter received theirs from the two theaters in Monticello, which received theirs from the two theaters in Liberty. And so Hollywood passed through greater Sullivan County, which no doubt received its films after they had passed through greater Broome County with the metropolitan centers of Binghamton, Vestal, and Johnson City that drew more important crowds. Whatever their route, the films were seriously out of date when they arrived in summery Roscoe. Brooklynites had already seen them the preceding winter.
The only film I ever saw in the Roscoe was “Kansas Raiders,” with Audie Murphy playing Jesse James during his apprenticeship with Quantrill’s Raiders. My folks and I hated Westerns, but that film passed the time one sultry July or August night in ‘51. According to the NY Times Directory, it had opened at the RKO Palace on January 26 of that year. We were lucky to have caught it at the Roscoe. The theaters further up on the food chain played their attractions for an entire week; the one and only screen in Roscoe alternated its fare every three or four days.
Years passed, and I’m not sure that the lake near Roscoe where we stayed at a bungalow colony for a week in ‘51 even exists any more. —Lake Muskaday, do you hear me? You were once a man-made lake, a product of engineering marvels and WPA work in the mid-twentieth-century, but you might have dried up even as other products of the New Deal threaten to dry up before our very eyes.— Yet, from where I now live, Roscoe lies mid-way en route to NYC, and the fabulous Roscoe Diner is one helluva road-stop in-between.
When we first started patronizing that Diner in 1970, the Roscoe Theater was still very much in operation—even in winter (thereby answering my childish question, “Does the Roscoe close down when the vacationers go away?”)—and still defiantly showing six-months-old movies. So it did after all make the transition to CinemaScope (thereby answering my adult question, “Did theaters like that survive?”)—though I had to wonder how the management ever fit a larger screen into that barn-like space. And, yes, my credibility received further strain in the 1980s when the theater was twinned: how they succeeded in doing it, I’ll never know. And, yes, I felt sad one wintery day a few years ago when we exited Route 17 at the Roscoe Diner and found the theater demolished. For me, Roscoe had always meant the Roscoe Theater first and foremost, and only after that did it mean the Roscoe Dinner.
Warren— thanks a million for those photos. I thought I’d never see the interior of the Dyker again! The left-hand side of the auditorium shown constituted the Children’s Section, where I held forth on many a Saturday afternoon in the early ‘50s (Wednesday afternoons in the summer).
The exterior photo clearly dates from after the ‘73 Academy Awards presentation in March '74. I’d guess that the interior photo predates the summer of 1951. In my post of 10 March '05 above, I tried to describe the “modernization” that took place around that time. I recall that the drapery came down and the walls were repainted in lime green. Or so I believe. What’s the source for the latter photo?
Yes, the side wall did sacrifice commercial space. But the busiest section of 86 Street was (and remains with increasing intensity) between 4th and 5th Avenues, with the old RKO Shore Road smack in the middle (perhaps another reason why that theater was profitably sold and converted to retail space). Activity tapered off east of 5th Avenue. Fifth Avenue, in any case, sustained tha major commerce as it rain from Downtown to 86 Street, diminishing after that.
My wife, who grew up around the corner in the 1950s, tells me that every afternoon an old guy would sit on the steps with a bag of live eels, selling those delicacies (die Aale) to regular customers from the neighborhood. Many a relative of hers first met his or her mate in the Tuxedo Ballroom next door.
What a downer! For fifty-one years I’ve believed that I saw “Creature” in 3-D as God meant it to be. Possibly I derived something of a 3-D effect from it by looking at it cross-eyed. As a movie-mad kid, I discovered that crossing my eyes at a flat image could do that. Years later an ophthalmologist told me (1) that there is some truth to my assumption and (2) that viewing so many movies strabismically provided good exercise for my young optic nerves. Who knows? I began wearing eyeglasses in my mid-twenties and am now a prisoner of bi-focals.
BTW, does the RKO nabe ad imply that “Creature” was not shown in 3-D? I remember seeing it that week at the Dyker and could swear that it was in 3-D. I’m certain that the Paramount showed it in 3-D.
“Blackout” opened at the Palace on 21 May 1954. The theater’s Vaudeville-cum-movie shows in those days changed every week.
I had forgotten that “Phantom of the Rue Morgue” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (each of which had opened separately at the Paramount earlier that Spring) toured the RKO circuit in a 3-D double-bill. And that, on the Loew’s circuit, “Red Garters” and “Top Banana” (which I believe had opened in 3-D at the Astor and the Victoria theaters respectively) made their neighborhood tours in 2-D projection. Polaroid viewing had lost its appeal.
Here’s a Program from June ‘66. If you want to read the fine print, after you click on the URL you must click the image itself so that it enlarges on your screen. I’m sorry that a print-out won’t be so clear.
The stage and screen fare listed here delivered the theater’s typically high-class full-entertainment package. The live portion concluded with the celebrated fireworks effect.
Another stylish show from the period accompanied “How to Steal a Million†the following August. I’ve lost the program for it, but I remember that the Purdue University Band performed in the theater’s aisles and that a lavish re-enactment of the battle of Iwo Jima constituted the finale. I also remember that my date and I were sitting in my favorite seats at RCMH: in the row on the left-side cross-aisle, so as to have an unobstructed view of the stage and screen. My mom had discovered the advantages of these seats when I was a kid and prone to interference from grown-up heads in front of us. As an adult, I favored these seats so that I could stretch my long legs in full comfort. When the Purdue University Band began its march across the aisle, I thought fractionally of tripping up the tuba player for devilment when he passed, but I withdrew the idea for fear of being ejected from the theater before viewing Audrey Hepburn on the screen. Still, if we had happened to see the movie before the stage show, well then…
This program is the last in my collection with the old cursive “Showplace†logo and the majuscule RCMH name.
Yes, the (um) Great Communicator’s film opened at the Strand on 20 January, 1950, about a month after Cecil B. DeMille’s epic premiered at the Rivoli and Paramount.
I believe that “Fifty Years Before Your Eyes” was released in summer, 1950. It was a wonderful compilation that constituted as much a history of the movies as of the first half of the now-completed century. I remember seeing it on a double-bill with Jacques Tourneur’s (and Burt Lancaster’s) equally wonderful “Flame and the Arrow” when visiting one of my aunts in Boston at the time. Both of those films pumped me up to such an extent that I drove my family crazy for the rest of the visit. Did “Fifty Years” open in NYC at the Embassy-72? My vague memory summons up images of the Globe in the NY newspapers.
The Apu trilogy really is sublime. Remember how at the end of “Manhattan” Woody Allen, suicidal beyond repair, makes a list of things that would help to keep him alive? The Apu trilogy ranks high on the list, and generates a laugh because of its funny sound in Allen’s Brooklynese pronunciation. But its inclusion is so appropriate.
Here’s a Showbill from the 55th Street Playhouse in July, 1960:
View link
View link
The print of GW Pabst’s 1931 version of Brecht-Weill’s “Threepenny Opera†had been struck from copies recently found in Germany more than two decades after the Nazis had attempted to destroy all traces of the film. The showing understandably created a stir in 1960, all the more so since its original release in the US had been compromised by lawsuits brought by Brecht against the German studio for altering his script.
I went to it already primed by a long-running off-Broadway (at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street) adaptation of it by Marc Blitzstein with glossed-up production values. The live cast included Lotte Lenya thirty years after she’d originated the role of Pirate Jenny, as well as Bea Arthur and Jo Sullivan. The movie, by comparison, seemed a downer to me at the time, though images of its fog-bound streets, leering faces, and shadowy depths continue to haunt me to this day.
Warren— thanks for ‘46. Yes, Connee Boswell was a great repeater at the Roxy. I wonder whether Senor Wences had anything to do with the success of “Razor” and its ss?
There are two programs from RCMH that I regret having misplaced over the years. The first was for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,†which I remember seeing in a packed house one Friday evening in October ’61 after a day of undergrad classes. I found it immensely enjoyable even though it strayed from the novel that had drawn me into a great cult-following at the time. I always thought that I could have done a terrific job playing the part of “Paul/FredBaby,†since I shared that character’s writerly aspirations and was, through similar experiences, depraved beyond my years. I’ll never forget the gasp from 5,900 viewers when George Peppard first opened his closet, and have been trying to build a wardrobe like that since then. Mickey Rooney gave us a deplorable Mr. Yunioshi, but the ambience of Bohemian-luxe NYC life seemed just right for the era (though I’d never known a NYC 5&10 store to look like the one they stole the masks from, and the interiors of Tiffany’s and the NYPL were clearly H’wood sets). Here’s the NY Times’s opening day ad to substitute for my lost program:
View link
The other program would have been for “To Kill a Mockingbird,†which I remember seeing on a Friday evening in the middle of March ’63. As it happened, it was my first date with my now wife, so there was double reason to save the program. After martinis and some supper on the East Side (or was it beer and hot dogs in Yorkville?) we hopped onto the subway for the last stage show, which usually began around 9:30 pm. Upon reaching 50 Street, we joined a line that stretched around the block. The top-coated ushers were barking, “The last stage show has already begun; tickets are now on sale for the final showing of the movie only.†Who cared? When we reached the box-office forty-five minutes later, the ushers were barking, “The final showing of the movie has begun; there is some seating in the side rear sections only.†Who cared? The result is that we missed both the stage show and the film’s opening credits; and the seats were so far from the screen that the latter looked like a small TV tube. Who cared? Here’s the NY Times’s review of the film by Bosley Crowther:
View link
NYC newspapers had been on strike since the previous December, but the Times has archived its West Coast edition, from which I’ve drawn the above. For greater legibility, here’s a blow-up of the review itself, spliced onto an account in “Variety†of the stage show that we missed seeing (there’s no other record of it in the NYC press):
View link
The clip from “Variety†(20 Feb. ’63, p. 62) offers a good example of that paper’s over-the-top style (its writers seemed too crazed to go on strike with the rest): “male climbs the ladder … for okay balancing;†the “finale, a scene in Venice, … never happened to a doge.†I’m only sorry we missed the aria from “Barber of Seville†that Lorna Ceniceros so colorfully coloratured. As for Crowther’s critique, it’s grotesquely out of joint (even the headline misstates his argument): it lauds the kids’ performances (Mary Badham is the sister of John Badham, no?), ignores Robert Duvall’s astonishing début, and dismisses the racial conflict at the heart of the story as a “conventional†melodramatic distraction.
For all that, five months later we traveled to DC for Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, 28 Aug. ‘63. On the evening of this historic day, I was nearly killed by Robert Kennedy when, in front of the White House, his chauffered limo loomed out of nowhere and swept through the parting gates, brushing my belt buckle as it passed. I’ll never forget the grin on RFK’s face in response to my startled affront. Imagine the headlines if his car had mowed me down: “RFK kills student after march… Kinship denied…Student’s political passions had been galvanized by show at RCMH….â€
Proprio quello che intendo anch'io.
Seeing “La strada” at the T-L 52 (along with seeing “Seven Samurai” at the Guild a few months later) provided one of those unforgettable compass points in my movie-going life. As a h.s. kid who’d just discovered the thrill of converting my lunch money into subway tokens and box-office tickets, I found that those fims (and “Rififi” at the Fine Arts and “Ladykillers” at the Sutton and “The Lady Vanishes” at MoMA, all in the same short season) expanded my horizons past the point of no return. They taught me that there is a world beyond my shores and a past full of wit and wisdom beyond my ken. As a cynical college kid a few years later, I renounced “La strada” as too sappy and sentimental when measured against the likes of “La dolce vita” and “8 ½.” Now I’d reverse the judgment.
Florian Zabach’s great show-stopping solo was “The Hot Canary.” It brought the house down every time he performed it.
The oddest feature of that theater that I recall as both a movie house and as a playhouse was the downward sloping, horizontally splayed beaux-arts cornucopias on each side of the proscenium, retained after the ‘58 renovation eliminated the second balcony. I haven’t been in that house since the '99 renovation, so I wonder what that recent job entailed. I wish there were a site like this for NYC live playhouses.
Robert:
The dominant colors were deep red and ivory white and were replicated in the draperies hung in lounge of mirrors. The latter appears among the tinted postcards that Lostmemory posted on this page last 9 March ‘05.
Benjamin—
Yes, chain mail decorated the Victoria. I didn’t mention that above, because I’d already written about it in a post on the Victoria’s page. (That post appeared on 19 January ‘05; in looking for it, I found that the first substantive post I made in CinemaTreasures occurred one year ago today, 20 July '04—I’ll light a candle on my tofu cake tonight.)
I variously identified the chain mail as “steel medallions” and “aluminum medallions” without inquiring further: Wm Morrison likely describes it, and his book might have been the one I referred to through memory last January (I vividly recall a detailed description of how the renovators broke trough the rear wall and extended the length into the alley behind the Astor and Bijou).
In any case, the wall was covered with red velvet, matching the red velvet traveler curtain on the stage-apron, and the chain mail sat as a skin over that covering. It gleamed in light reflected from the screen, bathing the house in a silvery glow with b&w movies and in an irridescent glow with color films. The effect was very unusual. I should also note that with the introduction of wide screen in ‘53, a few feet were sliced off each end of the narrow proscenium to accommodate the new format. Even still, the screen remained the smallest of any I remember in the major Times Square houses (I exclude the original Trans-Lux houses).
Yes, if memory again serves, the balcony floors were of old-fashioned (and quite creaky) wood—though I might be mistaken here. The overall impression that I retain conveys a sense of dissonance between the two largely unremodeled balconies and the ‘48 main floor renovation. The first film I saw at the Victoria was “Joan of Arc” in '49, a film that welded me to the fourteenth century for longer than it should have; the last was “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in '68, chiefly because that day an earlier showing at the Beekman was sold out.
Marquees: yes, they mirrored each other in style, though the Astor’s had greater length because the lobby’s frontage on B'way was longer.
The Lunt-Fontanne: The oddest feature of that theater as both a movie house and as a playhouse, I recall, was the downward sloping, horizontally splayed beaux-arts cornucopias on each side of the proscenium, retained even after the ‘58 renovation eliminated the second balcony. Since I haven’t been in that theater since the '99 renovation, I wonder what that job entailed. I wish there were a site like this for NYC live playhouses.
Gerlad—
Thanks for the photos, old and new. I attended the Brattle only a few times (memorably for “Zero pout conduit” in the mid-‘70s), but whenever I found myself in the neighborhood, I’d drop into the Casablanca for a beer. Nearly always I’d bump into someone I knew from some other part of the world (a really small world), or else I’d find myself deep into conversation with a stanger who knew more about movies than me.
Here’s a Showbill program from the 55th Street Playhouse in April, 1960:
View link
View link
“Jazz on a Summer’s Day,†filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, was every college kid’s (read: every college boy’s) idea of a cool film. I can’t count the number of beery conversations we slurred thorough as we debated the merits of Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan and Dinah Washington and Jack Teagarden and Mahalia Jackson and more. As it happened, my best friend in college came from Tiverton RI, just across the bay from Newport, so that the following July 4 weekend I visited him and we attended the 1960 Festival.
As it also happened, the event that year witnessed the first college-student riot of the 1960s. 20,000 or so fans grew restive at the slow pace of bringing on the acts, and that (plus the beer and the sun and a bunch of people who scaled the walls after not being admitted when the attendance reached capacity) generated a rapidly escalating pandemonium. To contain the madness, the good citizens of Newport urged police to close the bridges to and from the island, which the police did. And then things got worse, because all the out-of-town collegians were pent up on the island with no place to go. My friend had friends who lived in Newport, so we walked to their house and crashed out on the floor for the night.
Little did we know then of the riots that would ensue throughout the rest of the ‘60s, nor how by the decade’s end we’d be gassed, maced, jailed, hooted at, pestered, pursued, threatened, and otherwise harassed for our convictions about civil rights, social justice, and an ill-advised war. And all so that four decades later we could wonder once again about the fate of affirmative action, civil liberties, and the quest for weapons of mass destruction. Today’s news about corporate insider John Roberts leaves us with no cheer. Plus ça change… .
Benjamin—
Thanks for a smartly worded and largely correct summary. I’d modify a few details and ambiguities in paragraphs 11-13.
“The Astor was extended and enlarged in a similar way”: The Astor was enlarged in a similar way by virtue of eliminating the stage (as had been done to the Victoria in ‘48), but it was not extended. Instead, the entire interior was gutted, the second balcony removed, the proscenium and stage area removed, and the remaining space, rather squarish and boxy, received a modern treatment with accoustic walls and mural design.
The Victoria was enlarged by gutting the proscenium and box seats, eliminating the stage, and extending the stage wall out toward the Astor and Bijou by about 12 feet. But the second balcony remained, and so did the original curve to the side walls as they reached out to where the proscenium had been; the rake in the orchestra floor remained so that it first descended, then rose slightly as it approached where the orchestra pit had been, and then dipped again and descended toward the new screen area. The effect was odd, as the floor level consequently waved down and up and down again. The rake at the renovated Astor was conventional and had evidently been completely refigured after the gutting.
“The Victoria Theater is a rare example of a wonderful, fully worthwhile remodeling job”: These words seem to me to describe the Astor rather than the Victoria, for the reasons given above. The Victoria’s antiquated second balcony (I remember its wooden floors creaking when I saw “Paths of Glory” and “Dr. Strangelove” there in their original runs), the curvature of its walls, and the make-do raking represented compromises that the remodeling of the Astor did not make.
“The interior of the theater was brought out to the street in this redesign”: You mean the Astor, not the Victoria. The latter’s tunnel entrance wrapped around a cigar-store fronting on B'way, and then (as you correctly describe in par. 6) opened onto the left side of the rear orchestra promenade (whose exit doors in turn opened on to W. 46 Street, as it the Booth theater a block away (see “The Pillowman”: it’s truly great, a cracked rewriting of Shakespeare’s “Tempest”).
The Hagstrom map for the Astor and Victoria is not accurate to scale. When you say that the bulk of the Victoria was on 46 Street, that’s not true: only the rear wall faced that street; the bulk of the theater then reached inward with a long narrow thrust to the south, not at all squarish as was the Astor.
A final comment about Bryan Krefft’s informative initial description on this page: It identifies the Astor’s predominant colors as red, gold, and ivory. That might have been true when the theater opened. By the time I first visited it in the late ‘40s, it had received a Yale Blue drapery treatment that covered the entire proscenium and box-seat walls (with box-seats removed). The ivory and gold of the ceiling and remaining walls had faded, or were barely visible in the dimly lit interior. The '59 renovation of course deployed blue, black, and green as you describe.
Yes, the books by Stern and Morrison are wonderful. Thanks for bringing them to our attention.
That’s “Diner,” not “Dinner.” And I felt sad when I first saw the Roscoe closed, not demolished. The wrecking ball evidently swung in the more recent past.
Directed by and starring Paul Henreid, “For Men Only” received the advertising tag “… and the women who love them. It’s every woman’s picture!” I never knew that it concerned frat boys. It opened at Loew’s State on 15 January, 1952.
Who could ever forget the Roscoe. It indeed looked like an old barn, on both the outside and the inside. I remember it in the early pre-CinemaScope 1950s when it received product a week later than the two theaters in nearby Livingston Manor (named appropriately the Livingston and the Manor). The latter received theirs from the two theaters in Monticello, which received theirs from the two theaters in Liberty. And so Hollywood passed through greater Sullivan County, which no doubt received its films after they had passed through greater Broome County with the metropolitan centers of Binghamton, Vestal, and Johnson City that drew more important crowds. Whatever their route, the films were seriously out of date when they arrived in summery Roscoe. Brooklynites had already seen them the preceding winter.
The only film I ever saw in the Roscoe was “Kansas Raiders,” with Audie Murphy playing Jesse James during his apprenticeship with Quantrill’s Raiders. My folks and I hated Westerns, but that film passed the time one sultry July or August night in ‘51. According to the NY Times Directory, it had opened at the RKO Palace on January 26 of that year. We were lucky to have caught it at the Roscoe. The theaters further up on the food chain played their attractions for an entire week; the one and only screen in Roscoe alternated its fare every three or four days.
Years passed, and I’m not sure that the lake near Roscoe where we stayed at a bungalow colony for a week in ‘51 even exists any more. —Lake Muskaday, do you hear me? You were once a man-made lake, a product of engineering marvels and WPA work in the mid-twentieth-century, but you might have dried up even as other products of the New Deal threaten to dry up before our very eyes.— Yet, from where I now live, Roscoe lies mid-way en route to NYC, and the fabulous Roscoe Diner is one helluva road-stop in-between.
When we first started patronizing that Diner in 1970, the Roscoe Theater was still very much in operation—even in winter (thereby answering my childish question, “Does the Roscoe close down when the vacationers go away?”)—and still defiantly showing six-months-old movies. So it did after all make the transition to CinemaScope (thereby answering my adult question, “Did theaters like that survive?”)—though I had to wonder how the management ever fit a larger screen into that barn-like space. And, yes, my credibility received further strain in the 1980s when the theater was twinned: how they succeeded in doing it, I’ll never know. And, yes, I felt sad one wintery day a few years ago when we exited Route 17 at the Roscoe Diner and found the theater demolished. For me, Roscoe had always meant the Roscoe Theater first and foremost, and only after that did it mean the Roscoe Dinner.
Thanks, Zouave: the photos capture some of the spirit.
Warren— thanks a million for those photos. I thought I’d never see the interior of the Dyker again! The left-hand side of the auditorium shown constituted the Children’s Section, where I held forth on many a Saturday afternoon in the early ‘50s (Wednesday afternoons in the summer).
The exterior photo clearly dates from after the ‘73 Academy Awards presentation in March '74. I’d guess that the interior photo predates the summer of 1951. In my post of 10 March '05 above, I tried to describe the “modernization” that took place around that time. I recall that the drapery came down and the walls were repainted in lime green. Or so I believe. What’s the source for the latter photo?
Yes, the side wall did sacrifice commercial space. But the busiest section of 86 Street was (and remains with increasing intensity) between 4th and 5th Avenues, with the old RKO Shore Road smack in the middle (perhaps another reason why that theater was profitably sold and converted to retail space). Activity tapered off east of 5th Avenue. Fifth Avenue, in any case, sustained tha major commerce as it rain from Downtown to 86 Street, diminishing after that.
Thanks again
My wife, who grew up around the corner in the 1950s, tells me that every afternoon an old guy would sit on the steps with a bag of live eels, selling those delicacies (die Aale) to regular customers from the neighborhood. Many a relative of hers first met his or her mate in the Tuxedo Ballroom next door.
What a downer! For fifty-one years I’ve believed that I saw “Creature” in 3-D as God meant it to be. Possibly I derived something of a 3-D effect from it by looking at it cross-eyed. As a movie-mad kid, I discovered that crossing my eyes at a flat image could do that. Years later an ophthalmologist told me (1) that there is some truth to my assumption and (2) that viewing so many movies strabismically provided good exercise for my young optic nerves. Who knows? I began wearing eyeglasses in my mid-twenties and am now a prisoner of bi-focals.
BTW, does the RKO nabe ad imply that “Creature” was not shown in 3-D? I remember seeing it that week at the Dyker and could swear that it was in 3-D. I’m certain that the Paramount showed it in 3-D.
“Blackout” opened at the Palace on 21 May 1954. The theater’s Vaudeville-cum-movie shows in those days changed every week.
I had forgotten that “Phantom of the Rue Morgue” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (each of which had opened separately at the Paramount earlier that Spring) toured the RKO circuit in a 3-D double-bill. And that, on the Loew’s circuit, “Red Garters” and “Top Banana” (which I believe had opened in 3-D at the Astor and the Victoria theaters respectively) made their neighborhood tours in 2-D projection. Polaroid viewing had lost its appeal.
Here’s a Program from June ‘66. If you want to read the fine print, after you click on the URL you must click the image itself so that it enlarges on your screen. I’m sorry that a print-out won’t be so clear.
View link
View link
The stage and screen fare listed here delivered the theater’s typically high-class full-entertainment package. The live portion concluded with the celebrated fireworks effect.
Another stylish show from the period accompanied “How to Steal a Million†the following August. I’ve lost the program for it, but I remember that the Purdue University Band performed in the theater’s aisles and that a lavish re-enactment of the battle of Iwo Jima constituted the finale. I also remember that my date and I were sitting in my favorite seats at RCMH: in the row on the left-side cross-aisle, so as to have an unobstructed view of the stage and screen. My mom had discovered the advantages of these seats when I was a kid and prone to interference from grown-up heads in front of us. As an adult, I favored these seats so that I could stretch my long legs in full comfort. When the Purdue University Band began its march across the aisle, I thought fractionally of tripping up the tuba player for devilment when he passed, but I withdrew the idea for fear of being ejected from the theater before viewing Audrey Hepburn on the screen. Still, if we had happened to see the movie before the stage show, well then…
This program is the last in my collection with the old cursive “Showplace†logo and the majuscule RCMH name.
Yes, the (um) Great Communicator’s film opened at the Strand on 20 January, 1950, about a month after Cecil B. DeMille’s epic premiered at the Rivoli and Paramount.
I believe that “Fifty Years Before Your Eyes” was released in summer, 1950. It was a wonderful compilation that constituted as much a history of the movies as of the first half of the now-completed century. I remember seeing it on a double-bill with Jacques Tourneur’s (and Burt Lancaster’s) equally wonderful “Flame and the Arrow” when visiting one of my aunts in Boston at the time. Both of those films pumped me up to such an extent that I drove my family crazy for the rest of the visit. Did “Fifty Years” open in NYC at the Embassy-72? My vague memory summons up images of the Globe in the NY newspapers.
The Apu trilogy really is sublime. Remember how at the end of “Manhattan” Woody Allen, suicidal beyond repair, makes a list of things that would help to keep him alive? The Apu trilogy ranks high on the list, and generates a laugh because of its funny sound in Allen’s Brooklynese pronunciation. But its inclusion is so appropriate.