Before ProQuest ruins me, I want to record some primitive memories of two stage shows at the Paramount. The first accompanied “Dear Ruth†in June ’47 and was headlined by Perry Como (my elders had a thing for that crooner, who always made me feel incredibly sluggish). I remember sitting in the steeply sloped balcony and experiencing a severe vertigo, and to this day I associate that sensation with the drowsy moan of Perry Como and the sharp pitch of the Paramount’s balcony. That’s a synaesthesia for you.
The second accompanied “My Forbidden Past†in May ’51 and featured Frank Sinatra. Aside from the pitch for “Johnny Concho,†it must have been his last regular stint at the Paramount. The hook of the film is that it starred his then-spouse Ava Gardner (with Robert Mitchum, Melvyn Douglas, and a closet-full of GWTW-style costumes; “silly tripe,†writes Leonard Maltin). At the time, Sinatra was at a low point in his career, no?, and the Paramount stage show paired him with the curvaceous Dagmar. The two of them sang bouncy songs, including “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d ’ve Baked a Cake†and the notorious “Mamma Don’t Bark.†No drowsy moan there.
I’ll check ProQuest for details, but for now I kinda like this fuzzy recall of a vaporous memory.
On the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database (for details, see today’s page on RCMH), I just searched the NYT for “Paramount” and “marquee” between Nov. ‘47 and Nov. '48 and found an article from 18 April '48 about a $250,000 renovation at the Paramount.
The budget included $37,000 for the new marquee, plus unspecified amounts for a new “floating stage,” 3,600 new seats, and a complete paint job. That’s a pretty good price for all this. The work was being done mostly between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. so as not to interfere with the performances, and it was estimated to take six weeks to complete.
The film opening that week (21 April) was “The Big Clock” with a stage show headed by Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. For that, I wouldn’t care what marquee or floating stage the Paramount had sported.
Yes, this database is sensational. If you have on-line access to a research library collection, it’s terrific.
Some institutions allow library membership privileges for a fee that may well be worthwhile for access to the rest of the collection. And when Stanford, NYPL, and other institutions collaborate for complete on-line access to all their non-copyrighted collections, we’ll all have a blast. Meanwhile, I enjoy fingering hard-copy library materials. At my library, back issues of Variety are still the original paper product.
Meanwhile, what’s this got to do with RCMH? At midnight last night when I tested out ProQuest on line, I looked up the review of “Shane” at RCMH on 24 April ‘53 (it’s already reprinted in the “NYT Directory of Film” and in the paperback “NYT Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made,” ed. Vincent Canby and Janet Maslin). It includes a notice of the stage show, “a musical review in a Latin mood,” excised from the above. I printed out the page (you can do that, too, though you’ll need a magnifying glass to read it: the one that comes with the OED Dictionary works just fine). There’s a notice next to the stage listings (Danny Kaye at the Palace, Patricia Neal and Kim Hunter in “The Children’s Hour” at the Coronet) that Jascha Heifetz was recovering from an attack “on the right hand by a youth wielding an iron bar. The attack apparently was made because of Mr. Heifetz’s insistence on playing German music, despite threats.” Life imitates art?
Whoa— I take back that comment about accessing previous pages on ProQuest Historical Newspapers: you can do that, and you can access subsequent pages as well. There’s a button at the top of the Page Image that allows you to range through the entire issue. This is great. Thanks again, Benjamin.
I went to a university on-line catalogue, then to databases, then to ProQuest Historical Newspapers, then to a hypothetical article based on the release date of a film, then to its review by Crowther, then to full page.
It’s a shame, though, that we can’t access contiguous pages to gather further ads printed on them. Still, it gives us at least a page from the past sans microfilm. I would never have thought of the clever tip you provided. Thanks for sharing it.
veyoung— what an awful thing, that “constant width” that you mention. I never heard of it, but the words send a knife through me. At least RCMH never contemplated going that route, did it?
SimonL— I know of no web archive or site that offers Variety’s grosses, much less its reviews, articles, and other data.
Variety.com charges an annual subscription rate of $259 for access to its on-line archives— whew, no thanks, can’t go there.
The NY Times on-line archive charges $2.95 per article (or a reduced bulk rate of $25.95 for twenty-five articles)— um, no thanks, unless perhaps the article mentions me by name and I’m feeling vain enough to want it. You can get free previews of the first few lines of many articles. But I find that its key-word cataloguing is spotty.
So, for me (for now) archival work in a good library is the only possibility. Microfilms aren’t all that awkward to use, are they?
For rapid reference to release dates in NYC, I use the NY Times Directory of the Film (up to 1969), and then the NY Times Film Reviews (through 1982), and then Variety Film Reviews (1983-86). From there, I track down the specifics in relevant issues of the NY Times, Variety, or NY Herald Tribune (to its demise in ‘67).
Like the rest of us, I enjoy thumbing through “Marquee.” And I also like the journal “Theatre Catalog” (note the idiosyncratic spelling for this American publication!), which is chock full of data about projection, exhibition, and theater design, with swell pictures of the real stuff up to the mid-1960s.
Between “Shane” and “Kiss Me Kate,” RCMH simply used its old Magnascope screen, framed at the standard but by-then unfashionable ratio of 1.33. When RCMH introduced a wider frame on an evidently new screen for its Christmas ‘53 show (the anemic “Easy to Love,” preceding the CinemaScope “Knights”), you could see black lines on its surface where its horizontal panels has been sewn together.
I know I’ve complained about this before (above, on 21 July '04 and 1 Sept '04), but as a pint-sized nut about film projection, I was enraged by what had been happening at that theater. Humpf.
RCMH continued for several years afterward to show its newsreels and announcements-of-next-attraction on its older-size screen, and that was a nice, nostalgic touch.
If memory serves me, the Paramount installed its new trapezoidal white-glass marquee upon the debut of Donald O'Connor’s first talking-mule comedy, “Francis,” which opened on 15 March 1950. I recall newspaper ads proclaiming a refurbished, better-than-ever showplace, with a caricature of the talented ass peering over the edge of the modernized marquee.
Thanks for the Roxy’s ‘53-'55 program list. The only film on it that I saw there was “The Robe,” shortly after it had opened. I recall entering the auditorium knee-deep in the theater’s super-plush carpeting during the scene when Burton entrusts Mature (or was it vice versa?) with the holy garment, and my first thought was how disproportionately wide the screen appeared. Your citation of its size (68'x24’) from Crowther’s review implies that it was indeed wider than the 2.66 ratio for early CinemaScope.
The Roxy showed no short subjects with that film. Instead, it begrudgingly offered a Fox Movietone News on, this time, a disproportionately narrow small screen (squarish rather than at the standard 1.33 ratio, likely to emphasize CinemaScope’s width by contrast). The News ended with a triumphant brief on how 20C-Fox discovered, developed, and deployed its anamorphic lens for our viewing pleasure. The purple traveller curtain closed. After a moment’s reverent silence, a portentous male voice boomed from the choral staircases that we were about to witness a miracle of motion pictures. Then the Fox fanfare began and the traveller curtain slowly parted.
Ha! Bosley Crowther didn’t mention the most annoying feature of early wide screen projection: shutter flicker from the enlarged frame. I first saw the Capitol’s wide screen for “From Here To Eternity” in August ‘53, and it struck me as magnificent: rather wider than most and filling the entire proscenium with a gentle curve. And though I might have been wishfully imagining it, I believe the Capitol showed “FHTE” with stereophonic sound, or so I recall hearing planes scoot across the auditorium during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Three years passed before I returned to the Capitol (“War and Peace,” August ‘56), and it seemed to me then that a somewhat smaller, flatter screen had replaced the earlier one, and that the remainder of the proscenium was newly swathed with billowing traveller curtains. But the shutter flicker had disappeared, and the prolection and sound were flawless.
Phil Spitalny’s Orchestra played many times at the Roxy as well, especially in the late ‘40s. Its eight-week run at the Capitol seems quite a record. Solo headliners would not have wanted to tie themselves up for such a stretch. Am I right in thinking that “Stage Door Canteen” was a United Artists film? In that case, it was an exception to the stream of MGM films that fed the Capitol. I recall that UA, Columbia, and even RKO shared the screen with MGM at the Capitol in the late '40s (“She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “Fort Apache,” “Pitfall,” “Man from Colorado”).
Um, I wouldn’t tell any union member to get lost. I’d chip away at the CEOs and smarmy management honchos who pull in much bigger bucks than any union member could imagine, for doing much less with no loss to fingers or thumbs. The RCMH audience in the ‘30s through '60s was largely union affiliated, and better off because of it.
An impressive show, Eugene. Though I was living in NYC at the time, I don’t recall having heard about it. By that time, of course, the Cinerama proscenium had covered up the orginal stage where the great shows took place. I don’t know whether any of those performers had every played at the Capitol before — possibly Hope and maybe King did. In the late ‘40s, Hope, Lewis, and King certainly appeared in stage shows at the Paramount, which always attracted the biggest, most popular names. The Capitol usually offered something offbeat and perhaps more sophisticated.
Sophistication notwithstanding, the stage show at the Capitol that I remember most was headlined by Arthur Godfrey. It opened in February ’49 and accompanied MGM’s “The Bribe†with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner. Oddly, despite my gargantuan memory of films in that period, I can’t recall a single frame from that picture, except for the impression of some dark and shadowy furtive movements. But the stage show was the main attraction anyway. Godfrey brought on a bunch of his talent-scouted newcomers, introducing each with his gravelly-voiced and slightly cynical, “Well, well, well, isn’t that just wonderful now.†At age seven, I naively believed that the show was being broadcast directly to radio, since at the time Godfrey hosted a popular daily morning CBS show that featured song-and-music routines by winners of his Monday night “Talent Scouts†(remember Julius La Rosa? Holly Ukulani?). It of course wasn’t a direct broadcast, but in that pre-television era, it provided us with images that we then transferred to our home listening experiences.
A third memorable stage show accompanied the ’49 Christmas presentation of “Adam’s Rib,†which I saw as a consolatory turn-away from the long lines for “On the Town†at RCMH. Hardly a consolation prize, the film was great, and the stage show offered a pitch-perfect match. It featured Eddy Duchin and his Orchestra, with some impressive finger-work at the piano in classical-sounding pieces (Chopin?) that drew the attention of even this mass-pop-culture-bred kid. I sensed that something larger that what I knew was happening. And I liked it even better than the flashy acrobat act that was more obviously but pleasantly designed for my boyish tastes. The name “Eddy Duchin†meant nothing to me at the time, but years later I recovered the memory when scrolling through microfilmed back issues of the NY Times from the period.
According to the venerable Hagstrom’s map (1961 edition), the boundary between eastern Jamaica (postal zones 32, 33, and 35) and western Hollis (postal zone 23) is 180 Street running north to south from Hillside Avenue to the Murdock Avenue spur off Linden Boulevard, then eastward along Hillside Avenue to 188 Street so that the northern sector belongs to Jamaica and the southern to Hollis, then north along 188 Street to 80 Road just south of Union turnpike, which constitutes the northern border of Jamaica (complicated somewhat on the western end when 80 Road disappears on that side of St. John’s University, and challenged not the least by my own map which is missing a crucial page at the the northern end of Hollis). Does my explanation make sense?
Warren— Thanks for your spirited account of Gable’s live turn at the Capitol in Feb. ‘34. Everyone should read the full account in your richly detailed “Clark Gable: A Biography,” pp. 116-17. The delicious passage about the police escort from the Waldorf-Astoria where his wife Ria and his current flame Elizabeth Allan were staying (in separate suites, no Walls of Jerico there) punctuates your riff on the Capitol. Did you ever wonder what went on in Major Bowes’s nine-room apartment above the Capitol between the acts? What, for example, might The King have nibbled on while there? Cheesecake from Lindy’s? Fittingly, the Capitol hosted the premieres of most of Gable’s later pictures, GWTW of course, but also notably “The Misfits” too.
Gerald and Warren— Ah, yes, the Avenue Playhouse on Sixth Ave — I recall it in my mind’s eye on the west side of the street, mid-block, with a semi-circular white marquee framed by green neon tubing. Both of you have contributed good info to its page on this site. I recall nothing about its policy, and remember it just as a mysterious presence in the area. And yes, Warren, Bryan Kerfft’s elequent history of the World at the top of this page fully explains the origins of its English decor. I’m going to work on uncovering the name of the film I saw there in the late ‘50s.
Thanks, Warren, for the World’s early history as a showcase for British imports. That might explain the theater’s Tudor design. I recall being inside it only once in the late ‘50s, and can’t remember for what film. Its glory days as the theater for “Open City,” “Paisan,” “Bicycle Thief,” “The Titan,” and “Shoe Shine” had passed, and the major imports were then opening at the Paris, Fine Arts, Plaza, Beekman, et al. I’ve got to look up the films that played there in the late '50s before porn set in.
True — Yet at peak times, usually close to holidays, roadshow theaters often added public screenings in the morning and around 5 pm (if the film’s length permitted that screening between matinee and evening performances). I saw “The Ten Commandments” at the Criterion at 9 am because the price was right for my skinny wallet (and have recounted that disasterous experience on this site’s page for the Criterion).
Tom N— see my serial postings for the Wollaston Theater last 30 Dec-2 Jan. As a kid who visited Quincy in ‘49-'50, I remeber hose theaters, and respondants have filled in the gaps in my memory. The Art on Hancock showed 20C-Fox films and was wonderfully art deco; the Strand on Coddington showed Warners product and was Palladian. I recall yet another, the Regent on (I think) Washington, which showed MGM and Columbia films and had a modified Beaux Arts style. I’m straining to recall a Publix-like theater that showed Paramount films. Finally, on the town line between Quincy and Braintree was the Quintree Drive-In. If the Quincy library has back issues of the local newspapers, you can start there.
There might have been yet another scale for 9 am Saturday screenings at reduced rates. At the time, I was volunteering as a Big Brother in a Harlem neighborhood, and the director got a hold of a dozen or so tickets to chaperone that number of kids to a morning show. I jumped at the opportunity, and on a cold December dawn in ‘59 travelled from Brooklyn to Harlem to pick up the kids. Naturally, there was a lot of confusion and no-shows, and we finally arrived at the State after the picture had begun, the dozen of us slinking into balcony seats during the dark nativity scene. The kids loved the picture, and sat throughout the 212 minutes totally transfixed. I remember dozing off from time to time.
Warren — Yes, “accompanied by short subjects.” When the Capitol again dropped stage shows in ‘51, newspaper ads (at first) emphasized that “short subjects” would pick up the slack; and so they did: the live organ interlude accompanied by a bouncing-ball sing-along, “The Capitol News” (remember the specially designed theater-header with the US Capitol Building radiating electricity?), a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a live-action short (or two), and coming attractions with a report from MGM about works-in-progress, in that order and each segment punctuated by a closing and opening of the rippling lime-green traveller curtain.
“Ruby Gentry” opened at the Mayfair (aka Embassy 2,3,4) on Christmas Day ‘52. Jones’s films that played at the Capitol include Minelli’s “Madame Bovary” (opened on 25 August '49, with stage show) and Wyler’s “Carrie” (with Olivier, 16 July '52, post-stage show). It’s grotesque of me to remember these things.
The release date for “Duel in the Sun” was 7 May ‘47 (not June as I had reported from faulty memory—I remembered it as a fine, warm Spring day), so you can check it in back issues of the NYT or Herald Tribune as I once did. Off hand, I believe that one other such saturated booking before Premier Showcase might have been for John Huston’s “Beat the Devil.” It opened at the Palace, Albee, and across the RKO neighborhood circuit on 12 March '54. I recall having seen coming attractions for it at the RKO Dyker (advertised to follow, I think, “Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef” in then-novel CinemaScope) and thinking, “Gee, that movie hasn’t opened in NYC yet!” Did off-beat films with Jennifer Jones in starring roles invite that sort of distribution?
Before ProQuest ruins me, I want to record some primitive memories of two stage shows at the Paramount. The first accompanied “Dear Ruth†in June ’47 and was headlined by Perry Como (my elders had a thing for that crooner, who always made me feel incredibly sluggish). I remember sitting in the steeply sloped balcony and experiencing a severe vertigo, and to this day I associate that sensation with the drowsy moan of Perry Como and the sharp pitch of the Paramount’s balcony. That’s a synaesthesia for you.
The second accompanied “My Forbidden Past†in May ’51 and featured Frank Sinatra. Aside from the pitch for “Johnny Concho,†it must have been his last regular stint at the Paramount. The hook of the film is that it starred his then-spouse Ava Gardner (with Robert Mitchum, Melvyn Douglas, and a closet-full of GWTW-style costumes; “silly tripe,†writes Leonard Maltin). At the time, Sinatra was at a low point in his career, no?, and the Paramount stage show paired him with the curvaceous Dagmar. The two of them sang bouncy songs, including “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d ’ve Baked a Cake†and the notorious “Mamma Don’t Bark.†No drowsy moan there.
I’ll check ProQuest for details, but for now I kinda like this fuzzy recall of a vaporous memory.
On the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database (for details, see today’s page on RCMH), I just searched the NYT for “Paramount” and “marquee” between Nov. ‘47 and Nov. '48 and found an article from 18 April '48 about a $250,000 renovation at the Paramount.
The budget included $37,000 for the new marquee, plus unspecified amounts for a new “floating stage,” 3,600 new seats, and a complete paint job. That’s a pretty good price for all this. The work was being done mostly between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. so as not to interfere with the performances, and it was estimated to take six weeks to complete.
The film opening that week (21 April) was “The Big Clock” with a stage show headed by Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. For that, I wouldn’t care what marquee or floating stage the Paramount had sported.
Yes, this database is sensational. If you have on-line access to a research library collection, it’s terrific.
Some institutions allow library membership privileges for a fee that may well be worthwhile for access to the rest of the collection. And when Stanford, NYPL, and other institutions collaborate for complete on-line access to all their non-copyrighted collections, we’ll all have a blast. Meanwhile, I enjoy fingering hard-copy library materials. At my library, back issues of Variety are still the original paper product.
Meanwhile, what’s this got to do with RCMH? At midnight last night when I tested out ProQuest on line, I looked up the review of “Shane” at RCMH on 24 April ‘53 (it’s already reprinted in the “NYT Directory of Film” and in the paperback “NYT Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made,” ed. Vincent Canby and Janet Maslin). It includes a notice of the stage show, “a musical review in a Latin mood,” excised from the above. I printed out the page (you can do that, too, though you’ll need a magnifying glass to read it: the one that comes with the OED Dictionary works just fine). There’s a notice next to the stage listings (Danny Kaye at the Palace, Patricia Neal and Kim Hunter in “The Children’s Hour” at the Coronet) that Jascha Heifetz was recovering from an attack “on the right hand by a youth wielding an iron bar. The attack apparently was made because of Mr. Heifetz’s insistence on playing German music, despite threats.” Life imitates art?
Whoa— I take back that comment about accessing previous pages on ProQuest Historical Newspapers: you can do that, and you can access subsequent pages as well. There’s a button at the top of the Page Image that allows you to range through the entire issue. This is great. Thanks again, Benjamin.
Benjamin— Yes, it works.
I went to a university on-line catalogue, then to databases, then to ProQuest Historical Newspapers, then to a hypothetical article based on the release date of a film, then to its review by Crowther, then to full page.
It’s a shame, though, that we can’t access contiguous pages to gather further ads printed on them. Still, it gives us at least a page from the past sans microfilm. I would never have thought of the clever tip you provided. Thanks for sharing it.
veyoung— what an awful thing, that “constant width” that you mention. I never heard of it, but the words send a knife through me. At least RCMH never contemplated going that route, did it?
SimonL— I know of no web archive or site that offers Variety’s grosses, much less its reviews, articles, and other data.
Variety.com charges an annual subscription rate of $259 for access to its on-line archives— whew, no thanks, can’t go there.
The NY Times on-line archive charges $2.95 per article (or a reduced bulk rate of $25.95 for twenty-five articles)— um, no thanks, unless perhaps the article mentions me by name and I’m feeling vain enough to want it. You can get free previews of the first few lines of many articles. But I find that its key-word cataloguing is spotty.
So, for me (for now) archival work in a good library is the only possibility. Microfilms aren’t all that awkward to use, are they?
For rapid reference to release dates in NYC, I use the NY Times Directory of the Film (up to 1969), and then the NY Times Film Reviews (through 1982), and then Variety Film Reviews (1983-86). From there, I track down the specifics in relevant issues of the NY Times, Variety, or NY Herald Tribune (to its demise in ‘67).
Like the rest of us, I enjoy thumbing through “Marquee.” And I also like the journal “Theatre Catalog” (note the idiosyncratic spelling for this American publication!), which is chock full of data about projection, exhibition, and theater design, with swell pictures of the real stuff up to the mid-1960s.
Between “Shane” and “Kiss Me Kate,” RCMH simply used its old Magnascope screen, framed at the standard but by-then unfashionable ratio of 1.33. When RCMH introduced a wider frame on an evidently new screen for its Christmas ‘53 show (the anemic “Easy to Love,” preceding the CinemaScope “Knights”), you could see black lines on its surface where its horizontal panels has been sewn together.
I know I’ve complained about this before (above, on 21 July '04 and 1 Sept '04), but as a pint-sized nut about film projection, I was enraged by what had been happening at that theater. Humpf.
RCMH continued for several years afterward to show its newsreels and announcements-of-next-attraction on its older-size screen, and that was a nice, nostalgic touch.
If memory serves me, the Paramount installed its new trapezoidal white-glass marquee upon the debut of Donald O'Connor’s first talking-mule comedy, “Francis,” which opened on 15 March 1950. I recall newspaper ads proclaiming a refurbished, better-than-ever showplace, with a caricature of the talented ass peering over the edge of the modernized marquee.
Warren—
Thanks for the Roxy’s ‘53-'55 program list. The only film on it that I saw there was “The Robe,” shortly after it had opened. I recall entering the auditorium knee-deep in the theater’s super-plush carpeting during the scene when Burton entrusts Mature (or was it vice versa?) with the holy garment, and my first thought was how disproportionately wide the screen appeared. Your citation of its size (68'x24’) from Crowther’s review implies that it was indeed wider than the 2.66 ratio for early CinemaScope.
The Roxy showed no short subjects with that film. Instead, it begrudgingly offered a Fox Movietone News on, this time, a disproportionately narrow small screen (squarish rather than at the standard 1.33 ratio, likely to emphasize CinemaScope’s width by contrast). The News ended with a triumphant brief on how 20C-Fox discovered, developed, and deployed its anamorphic lens for our viewing pleasure. The purple traveller curtain closed. After a moment’s reverent silence, a portentous male voice boomed from the choral staircases that we were about to witness a miracle of motion pictures. Then the Fox fanfare began and the traveller curtain slowly parted.
Ha! Bosley Crowther didn’t mention the most annoying feature of early wide screen projection: shutter flicker from the enlarged frame. I first saw the Capitol’s wide screen for “From Here To Eternity” in August ‘53, and it struck me as magnificent: rather wider than most and filling the entire proscenium with a gentle curve. And though I might have been wishfully imagining it, I believe the Capitol showed “FHTE” with stereophonic sound, or so I recall hearing planes scoot across the auditorium during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Three years passed before I returned to the Capitol (“War and Peace,” August ‘56), and it seemed to me then that a somewhat smaller, flatter screen had replaced the earlier one, and that the remainder of the proscenium was newly swathed with billowing traveller curtains. But the shutter flicker had disappeared, and the prolection and sound were flawless.
Phil Spitalny’s Orchestra played many times at the Roxy as well, especially in the late ‘40s. Its eight-week run at the Capitol seems quite a record. Solo headliners would not have wanted to tie themselves up for such a stretch. Am I right in thinking that “Stage Door Canteen” was a United Artists film? In that case, it was an exception to the stream of MGM films that fed the Capitol. I recall that UA, Columbia, and even RKO shared the screen with MGM at the Capitol in the late '40s (“She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “Fort Apache,” “Pitfall,” “Man from Colorado”).
Um, I wouldn’t tell any union member to get lost. I’d chip away at the CEOs and smarmy management honchos who pull in much bigger bucks than any union member could imagine, for doing much less with no loss to fingers or thumbs. The RCMH audience in the ‘30s through '60s was largely union affiliated, and better off because of it.
An impressive show, Eugene. Though I was living in NYC at the time, I don’t recall having heard about it. By that time, of course, the Cinerama proscenium had covered up the orginal stage where the great shows took place. I don’t know whether any of those performers had every played at the Capitol before — possibly Hope and maybe King did. In the late ‘40s, Hope, Lewis, and King certainly appeared in stage shows at the Paramount, which always attracted the biggest, most popular names. The Capitol usually offered something offbeat and perhaps more sophisticated.
Sophistication notwithstanding, the stage show at the Capitol that I remember most was headlined by Arthur Godfrey. It opened in February ’49 and accompanied MGM’s “The Bribe†with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner. Oddly, despite my gargantuan memory of films in that period, I can’t recall a single frame from that picture, except for the impression of some dark and shadowy furtive movements. But the stage show was the main attraction anyway. Godfrey brought on a bunch of his talent-scouted newcomers, introducing each with his gravelly-voiced and slightly cynical, “Well, well, well, isn’t that just wonderful now.†At age seven, I naively believed that the show was being broadcast directly to radio, since at the time Godfrey hosted a popular daily morning CBS show that featured song-and-music routines by winners of his Monday night “Talent Scouts†(remember Julius La Rosa? Holly Ukulani?). It of course wasn’t a direct broadcast, but in that pre-television era, it provided us with images that we then transferred to our home listening experiences.
Another stage show I remember opened in June ’49, accompanying “Neptune’s Daughter†with Esther Williams (“Baby, It’s Cold Outside†struck me as unaccountably risqué, but I couldn’t imagine what the star might do to warm up with Riccardo Montalban; and Red Skelton struck me as funnier in any event). The evident feature of the stage show was a tuneful singing trio whose bee-bop style must have been the rage, but whose name escapes me now. What I recall more vividly was the comedian Jerry Lester, a precursor of the zany Ernie Kovacs and less-zany Red Buttons. Lester alternately bounced around the stage like a manic-but-less-impressive Jerry Lewis, and he then stopped for monologues that would descend to the maudlin, like a crude avatar of Steve Allen. As it happened a few years later, he preceded Allen on early-television late-night talk shows with an original format cooked up to feature him and the curvaceous Dagmar, called “Jerry Lester’s Bean-Bag Club.†One of my aunts owned a TV, and at her house, I’d beg to stay up late to glimpse the comic I remembered from the Capitol.
A third memorable stage show accompanied the ’49 Christmas presentation of “Adam’s Rib,†which I saw as a consolatory turn-away from the long lines for “On the Town†at RCMH. Hardly a consolation prize, the film was great, and the stage show offered a pitch-perfect match. It featured Eddy Duchin and his Orchestra, with some impressive finger-work at the piano in classical-sounding pieces (Chopin?) that drew the attention of even this mass-pop-culture-bred kid. I sensed that something larger that what I knew was happening. And I liked it even better than the flashy acrobat act that was more obviously but pleasantly designed for my boyish tastes. The name “Eddy Duchin†meant nothing to me at the time, but years later I recovered the memory when scrolling through microfilmed back issues of the NY Times from the period.
According to the venerable Hagstrom’s map (1961 edition), the boundary between eastern Jamaica (postal zones 32, 33, and 35) and western Hollis (postal zone 23) is 180 Street running north to south from Hillside Avenue to the Murdock Avenue spur off Linden Boulevard, then eastward along Hillside Avenue to 188 Street so that the northern sector belongs to Jamaica and the southern to Hollis, then north along 188 Street to 80 Road just south of Union turnpike, which constitutes the northern border of Jamaica (complicated somewhat on the western end when 80 Road disappears on that side of St. John’s University, and challenged not the least by my own map which is missing a crucial page at the the northern end of Hollis). Does my explanation make sense?
Warren— Thanks for your spirited account of Gable’s live turn at the Capitol in Feb. ‘34. Everyone should read the full account in your richly detailed “Clark Gable: A Biography,” pp. 116-17. The delicious passage about the police escort from the Waldorf-Astoria where his wife Ria and his current flame Elizabeth Allan were staying (in separate suites, no Walls of Jerico there) punctuates your riff on the Capitol. Did you ever wonder what went on in Major Bowes’s nine-room apartment above the Capitol between the acts? What, for example, might The King have nibbled on while there? Cheesecake from Lindy’s? Fittingly, the Capitol hosted the premieres of most of Gable’s later pictures, GWTW of course, but also notably “The Misfits” too.
Yes— “Stromboli”! The newspaper ads were terrific, but the only person I knoew who saw it was one of my aunts, and she panned it: “It was …awful.”
Gerald and Warren— Ah, yes, the Avenue Playhouse on Sixth Ave — I recall it in my mind’s eye on the west side of the street, mid-block, with a semi-circular white marquee framed by green neon tubing. Both of you have contributed good info to its page on this site. I recall nothing about its policy, and remember it just as a mysterious presence in the area. And yes, Warren, Bryan Kerfft’s elequent history of the World at the top of this page fully explains the origins of its English decor. I’m going to work on uncovering the name of the film I saw there in the late ‘50s.
Thanks, Warren, for the World’s early history as a showcase for British imports. That might explain the theater’s Tudor design. I recall being inside it only once in the late ‘50s, and can’t remember for what film. Its glory days as the theater for “Open City,” “Paisan,” “Bicycle Thief,” “The Titan,” and “Shoe Shine” had passed, and the major imports were then opening at the Paris, Fine Arts, Plaza, Beekman, et al. I’ve got to look up the films that played there in the late '50s before porn set in.
True — Yet at peak times, usually close to holidays, roadshow theaters often added public screenings in the morning and around 5 pm (if the film’s length permitted that screening between matinee and evening performances). I saw “The Ten Commandments” at the Criterion at 9 am because the price was right for my skinny wallet (and have recounted that disasterous experience on this site’s page for the Criterion).
Tom N— see my serial postings for the Wollaston Theater last 30 Dec-2 Jan. As a kid who visited Quincy in ‘49-'50, I remeber hose theaters, and respondants have filled in the gaps in my memory. The Art on Hancock showed 20C-Fox films and was wonderfully art deco; the Strand on Coddington showed Warners product and was Palladian. I recall yet another, the Regent on (I think) Washington, which showed MGM and Columbia films and had a modified Beaux Arts style. I’m straining to recall a Publix-like theater that showed Paramount films. Finally, on the town line between Quincy and Braintree was the Quintree Drive-In. If the Quincy library has back issues of the local newspapers, you can start there.
There might have been yet another scale for 9 am Saturday screenings at reduced rates. At the time, I was volunteering as a Big Brother in a Harlem neighborhood, and the director got a hold of a dozen or so tickets to chaperone that number of kids to a morning show. I jumped at the opportunity, and on a cold December dawn in ‘59 travelled from Brooklyn to Harlem to pick up the kids. Naturally, there was a lot of confusion and no-shows, and we finally arrived at the State after the picture had begun, the dozen of us slinking into balcony seats during the dark nativity scene. The kids loved the picture, and sat throughout the 212 minutes totally transfixed. I remember dozing off from time to time.
Warren — Yes, “accompanied by short subjects.” When the Capitol again dropped stage shows in ‘51, newspaper ads (at first) emphasized that “short subjects” would pick up the slack; and so they did: the live organ interlude accompanied by a bouncing-ball sing-along, “The Capitol News” (remember the specially designed theater-header with the US Capitol Building radiating electricity?), a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a live-action short (or two), and coming attractions with a report from MGM about works-in-progress, in that order and each segment punctuated by a closing and opening of the rippling lime-green traveller curtain.
“Ruby Gentry” opened at the Mayfair (aka Embassy 2,3,4) on Christmas Day ‘52. Jones’s films that played at the Capitol include Minelli’s “Madame Bovary” (opened on 25 August '49, with stage show) and Wyler’s “Carrie” (with Olivier, 16 July '52, post-stage show). It’s grotesque of me to remember these things.
The release date for “Duel in the Sun” was 7 May ‘47 (not June as I had reported from faulty memory—I remembered it as a fine, warm Spring day), so you can check it in back issues of the NYT or Herald Tribune as I once did. Off hand, I believe that one other such saturated booking before Premier Showcase might have been for John Huston’s “Beat the Devil.” It opened at the Palace, Albee, and across the RKO neighborhood circuit on 12 March '54. I recall having seen coming attractions for it at the RKO Dyker (advertised to follow, I think, “Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef” in then-novel CinemaScope) and thinking, “Gee, that movie hasn’t opened in NYC yet!” Did off-beat films with Jennifer Jones in starring roles invite that sort of distribution?