Gaumont Birmingham

I used to go regularly in the id 1950s as a child, Wonderful memories of a great theatre.

The conversion to three strip Cinerama was an expensive waste of money. ABC had already converted the ABC Bristol Road and had access to the best film in the process (How the West Was Won). The Gaumont opened with Cinerama Holiday, played it for nine weeks and then closed again for ten days while the 3 strip kit was ripped out and replaced with 70mm for the opening of It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World on December 26th, which at least could be advertised as “in Cinerama” (albeit single lens). In June 1964 when The Fall of the Roman Empire opened, the Cinerama tag had to be dropped.

The Gaumont’s Cinerama screen, whilst having the largest sheet size in the UK (84' x 34' = 2,856 square feet) did not have the greatest width which was that at the ABC Coliseum Glasgow , namely 90'. The screen depth at Glasgow, however, was only 30' giving it only 2,700 square feet overall.

The Gaumont was closed for one day on Monday December 12th 1977 and this is probably when the Cinerama screen was removed. The replacement screen was 52 feet by 22 feet, which was not especially large (the Odeon Harlow had a screen almost 60 feet wide), which makes some of the comments on here about seeing post 1977 films on a huge screen somewhat puzzling. Rather strangely the Gaumont had its 70mm capability removed at the same time and so when in early 1978 Star Wars opened it was in 35mm (as was Close Encounters which followed it). When Star Wars came off after 10 weeks it went into the Odeon Queensway which gleefully announced “for the first time in Birmingham in 70mm”. The same thing happened with Close Encounters which played for 17 weeks at the Gaumomnt in 35mm and then a further 7 weeks in 70mm at the Odeon Queensway (curiously, Close Encounters had opened at Queensway and played there for two weeks before transferring to the Gaumont).

To quote Allan Eyles in his book Gaumont British Cinemas:- “In the late seventies, when 70mm spectaculars were no longer pouring out, the Gaumomnt lost the biggest screen in Europe and the maximum picture size became 52 feet by 22 feet”. I suppose that they may have just masked the old screen down to the smaller size which was required to improve the 35mm image, making it brighter and sharper. This was because the Gaumont’s role in the late seventies/early eighties was to be Rank’s principle first run house. The Odeon New Street was increasingly tied up with live shows, for example in 1980 the Odeon had only eight weeks entirely on film, and there were six weeks when no films were shown at all. The rest of the time films were often restricted to one, two or three days between stage shows. The last 70mm presentation at the Gaumont was a weeks revival of Fiddler on the Roof in June 1977. When a 70mm print of a Rank release became available, as with The Blue Lagoon in 1980, it played at the Odeon Queensway.