“The Fourposter” day-dated at the Sutton. “Limelight” day-dated at Trans-Lux 60th Street. The jet under construction on the Victoria’s magnificent billboard advertises David Lean’s “Breaking (Through) the Sound Barrier,” with Ralph Richardson, which followed the Harrisons' vehicle at the theater on 6 Nov. ‘52.
The “Baby Doll”/“Best Things in Life Are Free” is the only shot of the Victoria. “Separate Tables” and “The Strange One” played next door at the Astor. “A Face in the Crowd,” above the Mayfair marquee, played at the Globe diagonally across the street. The oyster shucker at Tofanetti’s (third from last) exactly captures the tone of the real thing.
Ahhh! I had no idea that the Bay Ridge offered Vodvil that late in its history. And with Keye Luke as M.C.—he must have been promoting the upcoming release of his “Dark Delusion,” the very last of the Drs. Kildare/Gillespie series, released in Jan. ‘47. During the war years, he displayed his patriotism in such fims as “The First Yank into Tokyo.” Gotta wonder how many jugglers and ventriloquists he introduced, and where, in the Loew’s circuit, and how often the stage at the Bay Ridge was lit up for live shows. I fly into NYC on Sat., and if the flight pattern is right (as it sometimes is), I look forward to catching a glimpse of the old neighborhood.
How much VM? Plenty, evidently, all over the RKO circuit. But tell me: what was Howard Keel doing on second-billing at the Albee? The date was early summer, 1959; but the NY Times doesn’t list “Floods of Fear” at all in its Directory. Leonard Maltin identifies the film as a “British” release. We don’t need to worry about hyper-Demetrification at RKO: Lana and Keel likely kicked VM off the nabe screens a week or two later.
One of the features that followed “The Robe” on the RKO circuit was “Beat the Devil.” I remember seeing coming attraction for it in black and white on the reduced conventional 1:1.33 screen, diminished so as to heighten the impact of CinemaScope’s size and color.
All those seats, and none with a view of the original CinemaScope screen. In ‘58 I saw “Gigi” at the Sutton on its exclusive first-run after leaving its reserved-seats engagement at the Royale. When it finally reached the nabes, I returned to see it at the Alpine, and remember thinking that it looked magnificently better on the huge screen. Terrific, in fact.
Yes to all you write, plus: in the 50s and 60s, Loew’s Alpine boasted of the largest CinemaScope screen in Brooklyn— larger than those at the B'klyn Paramount, the Fox, and Loew’s Kings. It spanned nearly the entire width of the theater’s proscenium-free viewing area.
The Alpine’s conventional wide-screen, however, might not have been the borough’s largest, since its masking closed in at the sides without rising at the top. The result limited the viewing area somewhat. Here I’d bet that the Fox won the title for size.
That’s a superb photo of the screen and proscenium. I doubt that the movie projection was smaller than the tv projection— Since the Paramount did not have Magnascope, I can only imagine that the screen size and masking were not adjustable and hence remained the same for both formats.
The photo is terrific for the details in the orchestra pit. On the left and right sides we see the tops of the curtained portals through which, when the pit rose to stage level, the headline stars entered and exited for their numbers. To the left of the pit stands the mighty organ. Great stuff.
Ed— Many thanks— I have a bunch of such booklets from the early ‘50s, along with programs from RCHM of that vintage, which I’ll post on these pages when I return later in the Spring. I’d love to see the Showplace Program for “Crossed Swords” if you still have it.
EdSolero— Was the program for “Crossed Swords” a booklet for the film only, or did it include a list of the stage acts such as the “Showplace Program” presented in earlier years? The colorful cover bears no resemblance to the older monochrome programs. The stucker about “final attraction” is sad—a perverse parody of the “next attraction” announcements that graced the former programs.
As I remember it, the situation of Loew’s State was about as regular as one can get, with the rear balcony wall on W 45 Street and the rear stage wall on W 46 Street. During intermissions in the roadshow era, the W 45 Street exit doors were opened to allow patrons a smoking area on the street.
That’s a great story about the architectural fiasco of the State’s dressing rooms! But why didn’t Loew simply use the several floors of office space above the lobby for a temporary site until the building on E 46 became available? The office workers could have used other space in the neighborhood. In any case, I’m glad to hear that some architects goofed in the grand manner then as others continue to do today.
Yes, Theaterat, it was a comfortable theater, a small jewel. I never knew that live wrestling occupied the premises in ‘63, though I still lived in the neighborhood at the time. I believe the last film I caught there was “The Harder They Fall” with Humphrey Bogart in '56. I still have flashbacks of seeing “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “East of Eden” there in '54: at the age of twelve I thought both films boring (er, just who was Jo Van Fleet supposed to be?), but found the photography in each to be stunningly terrific. Most memorably in the late '40s I recall there my first glimpse of the Marx Bros. in a revival of “A Night at the Opera.” My sides still hurt from laughing.
Vincent— Perhaps “Serenade” had a whiff of both terrible and unsuitable about it. David Thompson, a great fan of the director Anthony Mann, thought it “intolerable,” even if Mann’s wife Sarita Montiel was a co-star. The plot had its lurid moments and seemed inappropriate for family fare, but was wholly ripe for wisecracks from teenage boys. Yes, the films you mention were variously off-key, too; but other hoilday films included “Kim,” “Royal Wedding,” “Singin' in the Rain,” “Funny Face,” “Auntie Mame,” “The Sundowners,” “Charade” (even if some complained), and “How To Succeed in Business,” no mean bundles of celluloid.
Here are pages from the special souvenir program for “The Robe: In CinemaScope†at the Roxy in September, 1953:
View link View link (instructions about simulating CinemaScope in your hand) View link View link (the marketplace orgy: my favorite scene in the movie) View link (the program’s back cover)
In my post above on 5 March 2005, I’ve described how the cashier bilked my dad out of a few extra nickels by switching to evening prices just as we approached the gilded box office. Still, it was a great show. And the carpets and seats were the plushest in town. But no matter what the program instructs you to do by holding the page ten inches from your nose, the effect of CinemaScope at the Roxy did not correspond to it. The screen seemed exceptionally wide, all the more so because in my eleven-year-old’s fantasies I had imagined that the proportions would have been taller than wide. On previous visits to the Roxy, the theater’s incomparable height awed me, leading me to think that the screen might have stretched from floor to ceiling in a vertiginous arc. It came as a surprise, then, to find to the contrary that the screen spanned uninhibitedly from side to side covering the theater’s incomparable width. The Fox Movietone News on the conventional screen seemed deliberately small and squared-off to exaggerate the breadth of the new process by comparison, as Vito commented last 28 February.
Mario Lanza’s “Serenade†might rank among RCMH’s worst holiday film selections, but it points to the tremendous purchase that “the singing Clark Gable†held on the American public. It certainly drew a trio of teenagers to W. 50 Street, largely to flaunt their cruel boyish talents for mocking grand opera. As our elders threatened to call upon ushers to eject us, we simply kept changing seats. At one time or another that day, we had occupied just about every section in the orchestra and third balcony.
During the stage show, we greeted “The Glory of Easter†with at least some pretense of decorum, but the act that seized our sincere and undivided attention was Larry Griswold’s gymnastic turn. One of the inventors of the trampoline, Griswold impersonated a rubber-limbed drunk who climbed atop a high-diving-board and swing precariously from its edges, only to plunge into and bounce back from a spring-netted “swimming pool.†The shtick, widely performed on t.v. variety shows at the time, invariably brought the house down, and it thrilled us to see the real thing live On The Great Stage.
Less could be said for the musical finale that featured the pop song “No, Not Much.†The previous summerâ€"the summer of ‘55â€"Bill Haley seared our imaginations with “Rock Around the Clock,†and after that we could no longer tolerate any tunes from earlier decades. RCMH did not allow R&R to degrade its sound system until much later that Spring (see above, 5 Jan.). Meanwhile, its management had to have conceded that Lanza was washed up and that hooligans like me portended the future of ticket sales. At least in those days, the Showplace of the Nation knew how to adapt.
“Serenade†and the Easter show drew such a diverse clientele only a few weeks short of fifty years ago. As I look through my collected programs, I’m surprised to find that I have none from the mighty year that preceded it. In 1955 I had turned thirteen and had fallen in with a bad crowd. For a while, I feigned great indifference to the Rockettes and preferred to hang out with my friends in barrooms and back alleys, or at least at Loew’s Alpine where we smoked Kool cigarettes and watched Martin and Lewis movies. Fathers warned one other, “Lock up yer daughters; Box Office Billy’s a hormone-raging teenager now.†By the time I finally snapped out of that phase, I had lost a great deal. But I still have a clutch of programs from 1954 and earlier, and I’ll share them eventually on this site. Under the crunch of upcoming work, I’ll be running for the next couple of months with no access to a scanner. Till that’s over, this seems a good time to pause.
And I know it was July 1956, because that year I had to go to summer school, and the trip into Gotham to see “The King and I†amounted to a great act of playing hooky. The film opened on 28 June and received an unprecedented “five stars†from Kate Cameron in the NY Daily News. One of my summer-school pals plotted an unofficial but well-earned day-off to see this cinematic marvel. During the oh-so-sad final scene, we could hear patrons around us sobbing aloud, and as the lights rose and the Roxy’s billowing contour curtain fell, we turned around to see almost all the audience daubing their eyes. The breezy, even chilly ice show lifted our spirits. (You can see a tiny photo of the “Manhattan Moods†stage-set from my Roxy post from last 23 December)Twenty years later, I took my kids to see a revival of this film and slept through it.
Here we learned great things about this “filmization†of the B’way musical. But its chief feature was doubtless 20C Fox’s opportunity to beat the drums for CinemaScope55, its latest technological milestone. The program’s cover suggests Yul King-Kong Brynner’s miscegentic captivity of Deborah Fay-Naomi Kerr. That Rita Moreno and Carlos Rivas could play Siamese lovers reminds us of a H’wood where any ethnic other could substitute for any other ethnic.
Who would ever believe that two fourteen-year-old boys would sneak off to RCMH to see a fairy-tale story of the real-life just-married Grace Kelly doomed to a royal marriage when Louis Jourdan seemed a prole option? Jordan was in training for “Gigi.†Alec Guinness was coming down from his sublime “Ladykillers†(twenty years later I had to explain to my kids why I really wanted to see “Star Wars†for the umpteenth time). And nobody today could imagine what a hold Princess Grace had on our celebrity fantasies. That’s why my friend and I subwayed in to W 50 Street to see “The Swan.â€
The stage show was arguably as good as or better than the movie (though the movie I thought was very good). The “Minstrel Show†theme carried through from the drum-beat ballet led by the acrobatic John Charivel to the latter’s appearance with his own acrobatic troupe, Les Charivels, and a solo juggling act by the Great Alcetty, to a spectacular river-boat finale with the Rockettes. A classic RCMH show, whose movie was timed to meet the headlines and whose stage show was wonderfully buoyant.
Vincent and Ed— That was one of the biggest screens in those days, and it was indeed the one on which the Roxy projected its features from Dec. ‘52 until Sept. '53 (think of Disney’s “Peter Pan,” Merman’s “Call Me Madam,” and MM’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the first two of which I saw on it). As I explained in my post of 28 Oct. in response to Warren’s superb photo (and offering a lesser image of my own from that era), the theater prided itself on its unmasked presentation, arguing that soft blue light on the rear curtains reduced eye-strain. My hunch is that the photo might have captured an early-morning gathering of exhibitors in April '53 for a preview of the then-new CinemaScope process.
SimonL—Thanks for all the hard work you did that weekend! If I remember correctly, I saw it with a friend the day after it opened. The NY Daily News (Kate Cameron) awarded it four stars, and that intrigued the two of us, who thought MM would be forever consigned to junk. It was a hot weekend, but I wore a jacket and tie to appear older than my fourteen-years, fearing the cashiers might reject me for being under-age. And, yes, I recall that the house was packed. Many posts back, you mentioned that you can be seen in the TCM newsreel clips ushering for the opening of “Anastasia.” Next time it’s on TV, we’ll look for you. I recall seeing that show a few days before Christmas, hoping to beat the holiday rush.
Warren—Life imitated art when you saw “Bus Stop” on a bus stop. But give the film another chance (Joshua Logan, perhaps a godsend to B'way, brought nothing but disaster to the screen, except for this film; after that, it got progressively worse, no?). After a nine-hour trip from The Big Easy, who could see straight? On my first visit to Atlanta (1967), I headed for the Fox, too, with no interest in seeing the movie. It was “Hombre” with Paul Newman, but I paid more attention to the dreamscape of Ali Baba cradling the proscenium. If I practiced what I’ve preached, I’ll have to give that film another chance, huh?
Of all the celebrated stage performances that I regret having missed in my lifetime, Kim Stanley’s Cherie in “Bus Stop†ranks high on the list. Barring that, Marilyn Monroe’s star-turn in the film version offered a swell substitute, with wonderful touches all its own. Who could ever forget MM stretched teary eyed across the diner’s countertop horizontally covering the full CinemaScope frame in the film’s climactic marriage proposal scene? On the Roxy’s gigantic screen, it looked magnificent. My memory of its final frames remains indelible, as the billowing contour curtain descended on the image of MM waving gaily from behind the window of the departing bus. The film presented my favorite MM performance of all, confirmed by a retrospective of all her major work that I had seen over a scant weekend just after her death. The tiny art-house screen couldn’t compete with the Roxy’s sweeping curveâ€"what could?â€"but the audience lapped the comedy up and applauded at the end, which it didn’t do for any other film in the series.
And of all the Roxy’s stage shows that I had seen, “Magic of the Stage†presented my favorite, too. It amounted to a spectacular display of scenery and stage effects that dwarfed the skate-bladed performers. Its “Story in verse by Robert C. Rothafel†excerpted in the program’s italics will unintentionally split your sides: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour! But the centerpiece with its “Scenery Ballet†and “Dancing Spotlights†pulled out all the scenic stops and taught me a lot about stage machinery. It began with a bare stage, onto which scenery kept descending from and ascending to the vast fly space, demonstrating how rapidly sets could be set up and struck. At one point, the CinemaScope screen dropped down, replete with shape-shifting masks, and illuminated from behind so as to show off the sound amplifiers. At another point, the full-stage cyclorama rose to expose the brick wall at the rear of the stage, co-incidently revealing the stage’s triangular floor-plan and the situation of the auditorium obliquely between W. 50 and W. 51 Streets so as to enable the orchestra’s width at its greatest point to exceed a city block. This width had always caused me to marvel, and now I knew the reason why. I could have watched that display for hours and been happy if the Blades and Roxyettes had all glided off to Norway.
“Bhowani Junction†showed off Ava Gardner, Pakistan, Northern India, and George Cuckor’s eye for spectacle all at once. 1956 was a year of great competition for RCMH with the Roxy as the latter had booked blockbuster Fox musicals (“Carousel,†“The King and Iâ€) ordinarily associated with MGM and the Music Hall. “Junction†seemed an answer to Fox’s “Rains of Ranchipur†which had played at the Roxy the previous Christmas, just as the sophisticated sexiness of Ava seemed an alternative to the spontaneous sex-appeal of Marilyn Monroe, whose “Bus Stop†was slated to park at the Roxy.
The stage show, too, revealed competitive ambitions. The Rock-’n-Roll number in the “Block Party†sequence marked the first time in my experience that such barbarous noise (introduced to teen-aged America only a year earlier) was heard at RCMH, briefly displacing the hitherto canonical Gershwin, Porter, Kern, et al. Chopin’s melodies in any case ended the show with a divertissement by the Corps de Ballet augmented by toe-dancing Rockettes. In between that and the Rockette’s earlier high kicks performed against a Times Square setting, we thrilled to the Three Houcs, a trio of jugglers, and Pat Henning, a stand-up commedian.
My grandfather had heard that the show was sensational, and he popped me five dollars to take a friend to see it. With the money left over (the 10:30 am show cost 90 cents in those days), we went afterwards to MoMA (50 cents in those days) to see a screening of “The Lady Vanishes,†and still had enough to spend on movies the following week.
SimonL— Yes, you’ve documented it exactly. In the mid-to-late ‘50s, Variety consistently reported weekly grosses of $120,000-to-$150,000 at RCMH, and double that by the time prices had doubled in the mid-'60s. Christmas and Easter weeks in the mid-'50s would reach $180,000. Weekends always brought packed houses, and summers would also register a rise in daily attendance.
The famous lines at Christmas and Easter grew primarily at morning and early afternoon performances, packed with families and children, but prices were lower at those times. On ordinary weekends, however, long lines regularly formed for evening performances when prices were higher. Consequently, the grosses for a couple of solid weekend evenings could approach or equal those for an entire week of mornings and matinees at holiday times.
Late-winter months always marked the slowest business. Between mid-January and mid-March in the post-WWII years through the mid-60s, RCMH usually turned over three bookings(and turned over four during those weeks in 1950).
Weighing in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, “Giant†left a scant twenty minutes for the Roxy’s stage show plus a few minutes on either end for seating the patrons. But it was a great show all around, sore as our backsides might have been after sitting in the Roxy’s plush seats for nigh-on-to four hours. I remember seeing it after school on the day before the Columbus Day holiday. I can’t recall which Irving Berlin favorites accompanied the Native-American motifâ€"“I’m an Indian, Too†from “Annie Get Your Gunâ€? For a small snapshot of Manuel Del Toro and Nicky Powers as Indian Chief and Medicine Man with the Roxyette Squaws, see my post on 23 December above.
Wonderful picture!
“The Fourposter” day-dated at the Sutton. “Limelight” day-dated at Trans-Lux 60th Street. The jet under construction on the Victoria’s magnificent billboard advertises David Lean’s “Breaking (Through) the Sound Barrier,” with Ralph Richardson, which followed the Harrisons' vehicle at the theater on 6 Nov. ‘52.
Yes, RobertR, good shots.
The “Baby Doll”/“Best Things in Life Are Free” is the only shot of the Victoria. “Separate Tables” and “The Strange One” played next door at the Astor. “A Face in the Crowd,” above the Mayfair marquee, played at the Globe diagonally across the street. The oyster shucker at Tofanetti’s (third from last) exactly captures the tone of the real thing.
Ahhh! I had no idea that the Bay Ridge offered Vodvil that late in its history. And with Keye Luke as M.C.—he must have been promoting the upcoming release of his “Dark Delusion,” the very last of the Drs. Kildare/Gillespie series, released in Jan. ‘47. During the war years, he displayed his patriotism in such fims as “The First Yank into Tokyo.” Gotta wonder how many jugglers and ventriloquists he introduced, and where, in the Loew’s circuit, and how often the stage at the Bay Ridge was lit up for live shows. I fly into NYC on Sat., and if the flight pattern is right (as it sometimes is), I look forward to catching a glimpse of the old neighborhood.
How much VM? Plenty, evidently, all over the RKO circuit. But tell me: what was Howard Keel doing on second-billing at the Albee? The date was early summer, 1959; but the NY Times doesn’t list “Floods of Fear” at all in its Directory. Leonard Maltin identifies the film as a “British” release. We don’t need to worry about hyper-Demetrification at RKO: Lana and Keel likely kicked VM off the nabe screens a week or two later.
One of the features that followed “The Robe” on the RKO circuit was “Beat the Devil.” I remember seeing coming attraction for it in black and white on the reduced conventional 1:1.33 screen, diminished so as to heighten the impact of CinemaScope’s size and color.
LostMemory—
All those seats, and none with a view of the original CinemaScope screen. In ‘58 I saw “Gigi” at the Sutton on its exclusive first-run after leaving its reserved-seats engagement at the Royale. When it finally reached the nabes, I returned to see it at the Alpine, and remember thinking that it looked magnificently better on the huge screen. Terrific, in fact.
Theaterat—
Yes to all you write, plus: in the 50s and 60s, Loew’s Alpine boasted of the largest CinemaScope screen in Brooklyn— larger than those at the B'klyn Paramount, the Fox, and Loew’s Kings. It spanned nearly the entire width of the theater’s proscenium-free viewing area.
The Alpine’s conventional wide-screen, however, might not have been the borough’s largest, since its masking closed in at the sides without rising at the top. The result limited the viewing area somewhat. Here I’d bet that the Fox won the title for size.
Warren—
That’s a superb photo of the screen and proscenium. I doubt that the movie projection was smaller than the tv projection— Since the Paramount did not have Magnascope, I can only imagine that the screen size and masking were not adjustable and hence remained the same for both formats.
The photo is terrific for the details in the orchestra pit. On the left and right sides we see the tops of the curtained portals through which, when the pit rose to stage level, the headline stars entered and exited for their numbers. To the left of the pit stands the mighty organ. Great stuff.
Ed— Many thanks— I have a bunch of such booklets from the early ‘50s, along with programs from RCHM of that vintage, which I’ll post on these pages when I return later in the Spring. I’d love to see the Showplace Program for “Crossed Swords” if you still have it.
EdSolero— Was the program for “Crossed Swords” a booklet for the film only, or did it include a list of the stage acts such as the “Showplace Program” presented in earlier years? The colorful cover bears no resemblance to the older monochrome programs. The stucker about “final attraction” is sad—a perverse parody of the “next attraction” announcements that graced the former programs.
As I remember it, the situation of Loew’s State was about as regular as one can get, with the rear balcony wall on W 45 Street and the rear stage wall on W 46 Street. During intermissions in the roadshow era, the W 45 Street exit doors were opened to allow patrons a smoking area on the street.
That’s a great story about the architectural fiasco of the State’s dressing rooms! But why didn’t Loew simply use the several floors of office space above the lobby for a temporary site until the building on E 46 became available? The office workers could have used other space in the neighborhood. In any case, I’m glad to hear that some architects goofed in the grand manner then as others continue to do today.
Yes, Theaterat, it was a comfortable theater, a small jewel. I never knew that live wrestling occupied the premises in ‘63, though I still lived in the neighborhood at the time. I believe the last film I caught there was “The Harder They Fall” with Humphrey Bogart in '56. I still have flashbacks of seeing “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “East of Eden” there in '54: at the age of twelve I thought both films boring (er, just who was Jo Van Fleet supposed to be?), but found the photography in each to be stunningly terrific. Most memorably in the late '40s I recall there my first glimpse of the Marx Bros. in a revival of “A Night at the Opera.” My sides still hurt from laughing.
AlAlvarez—
Many, many thanks for a superb contribution to this site!
Vincent— Perhaps “Serenade” had a whiff of both terrible and unsuitable about it. David Thompson, a great fan of the director Anthony Mann, thought it “intolerable,” even if Mann’s wife Sarita Montiel was a co-star. The plot had its lurid moments and seemed inappropriate for family fare, but was wholly ripe for wisecracks from teenage boys. Yes, the films you mention were variously off-key, too; but other hoilday films included “Kim,” “Royal Wedding,” “Singin' in the Rain,” “Funny Face,” “Auntie Mame,” “The Sundowners,” “Charade” (even if some complained), and “How To Succeed in Business,” no mean bundles of celluloid.
Here are pages from the special souvenir program for “The Robe: In CinemaScope†at the Roxy in September, 1953:
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View link (instructions about simulating CinemaScope in your hand)
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View link (the marketplace orgy: my favorite scene in the movie)
View link (the program’s back cover)
In my post above on 5 March 2005, I’ve described how the cashier bilked my dad out of a few extra nickels by switching to evening prices just as we approached the gilded box office. Still, it was a great show. And the carpets and seats were the plushest in town. But no matter what the program instructs you to do by holding the page ten inches from your nose, the effect of CinemaScope at the Roxy did not correspond to it. The screen seemed exceptionally wide, all the more so because in my eleven-year-old’s fantasies I had imagined that the proportions would have been taller than wide. On previous visits to the Roxy, the theater’s incomparable height awed me, leading me to think that the screen might have stretched from floor to ceiling in a vertiginous arc. It came as a surprise, then, to find to the contrary that the screen spanned uninhibitedly from side to side covering the theater’s incomparable width. The Fox Movietone News on the conventional screen seemed deliberately small and squared-off to exaggerate the breadth of the new process by comparison, as Vito commented last 28 February.
Here’s a Program from April, 1956:
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Mario Lanza’s “Serenade†might rank among RCMH’s worst holiday film selections, but it points to the tremendous purchase that “the singing Clark Gable†held on the American public. It certainly drew a trio of teenagers to W. 50 Street, largely to flaunt their cruel boyish talents for mocking grand opera. As our elders threatened to call upon ushers to eject us, we simply kept changing seats. At one time or another that day, we had occupied just about every section in the orchestra and third balcony.
During the stage show, we greeted “The Glory of Easter†with at least some pretense of decorum, but the act that seized our sincere and undivided attention was Larry Griswold’s gymnastic turn. One of the inventors of the trampoline, Griswold impersonated a rubber-limbed drunk who climbed atop a high-diving-board and swing precariously from its edges, only to plunge into and bounce back from a spring-netted “swimming pool.†The shtick, widely performed on t.v. variety shows at the time, invariably brought the house down, and it thrilled us to see the real thing live On The Great Stage.
Less could be said for the musical finale that featured the pop song “No, Not Much.†The previous summerâ€"the summer of ‘55â€"Bill Haley seared our imaginations with “Rock Around the Clock,†and after that we could no longer tolerate any tunes from earlier decades. RCMH did not allow R&R to degrade its sound system until much later that Spring (see above, 5 Jan.). Meanwhile, its management had to have conceded that Lanza was washed up and that hooligans like me portended the future of ticket sales. At least in those days, the Showplace of the Nation knew how to adapt.
“Serenade†and the Easter show drew such a diverse clientele only a few weeks short of fifty years ago. As I look through my collected programs, I’m surprised to find that I have none from the mighty year that preceded it. In 1955 I had turned thirteen and had fallen in with a bad crowd. For a while, I feigned great indifference to the Rockettes and preferred to hang out with my friends in barrooms and back alleys, or at least at Loew’s Alpine where we smoked Kool cigarettes and watched Martin and Lewis movies. Fathers warned one other, “Lock up yer daughters; Box Office Billy’s a hormone-raging teenager now.†By the time I finally snapped out of that phase, I had lost a great deal. But I still have a clutch of programs from 1954 and earlier, and I’ll share them eventually on this site. Under the crunch of upcoming work, I’ll be running for the next couple of months with no access to a scanner. Till that’s over, this seems a good time to pause.
Here’s a program from July 1956:
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And I know it was July 1956, because that year I had to go to summer school, and the trip into Gotham to see “The King and I†amounted to a great act of playing hooky. The film opened on 28 June and received an unprecedented “five stars†from Kate Cameron in the NY Daily News. One of my summer-school pals plotted an unofficial but well-earned day-off to see this cinematic marvel. During the oh-so-sad final scene, we could hear patrons around us sobbing aloud, and as the lights rose and the Roxy’s billowing contour curtain fell, we turned around to see almost all the audience daubing their eyes. The breezy, even chilly ice show lifted our spirits. (You can see a tiny photo of the “Manhattan Moods†stage-set from my Roxy post from last 23 December)Twenty years later, I took my kids to see a revival of this film and slept through it.
A souvenir program was ours for the purchase:
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Here we learned great things about this “filmization†of the B’way musical. But its chief feature was doubtless 20C Fox’s opportunity to beat the drums for CinemaScope55, its latest technological milestone. The program’s cover suggests Yul King-Kong Brynner’s miscegentic captivity of Deborah Fay-Naomi Kerr. That Rita Moreno and Carlos Rivas could play Siamese lovers reminds us of a H’wood where any ethnic other could substitute for any other ethnic.
Here’s a Program from May, 1956:
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Who would ever believe that two fourteen-year-old boys would sneak off to RCMH to see a fairy-tale story of the real-life just-married Grace Kelly doomed to a royal marriage when Louis Jourdan seemed a prole option? Jordan was in training for “Gigi.†Alec Guinness was coming down from his sublime “Ladykillers†(twenty years later I had to explain to my kids why I really wanted to see “Star Wars†for the umpteenth time). And nobody today could imagine what a hold Princess Grace had on our celebrity fantasies. That’s why my friend and I subwayed in to W 50 Street to see “The Swan.â€
The stage show was arguably as good as or better than the movie (though the movie I thought was very good). The “Minstrel Show†theme carried through from the drum-beat ballet led by the acrobatic John Charivel to the latter’s appearance with his own acrobatic troupe, Les Charivels, and a solo juggling act by the Great Alcetty, to a spectacular river-boat finale with the Rockettes. A classic RCMH show, whose movie was timed to meet the headlines and whose stage show was wonderfully buoyant.
Vincent and Ed— That was one of the biggest screens in those days, and it was indeed the one on which the Roxy projected its features from Dec. ‘52 until Sept. '53 (think of Disney’s “Peter Pan,” Merman’s “Call Me Madam,” and MM’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the first two of which I saw on it). As I explained in my post of 28 Oct. in response to Warren’s superb photo (and offering a lesser image of my own from that era), the theater prided itself on its unmasked presentation, arguing that soft blue light on the rear curtains reduced eye-strain. My hunch is that the photo might have captured an early-morning gathering of exhibitors in April '53 for a preview of the then-new CinemaScope process.
SimonL—Thanks for all the hard work you did that weekend! If I remember correctly, I saw it with a friend the day after it opened. The NY Daily News (Kate Cameron) awarded it four stars, and that intrigued the two of us, who thought MM would be forever consigned to junk. It was a hot weekend, but I wore a jacket and tie to appear older than my fourteen-years, fearing the cashiers might reject me for being under-age. And, yes, I recall that the house was packed. Many posts back, you mentioned that you can be seen in the TCM newsreel clips ushering for the opening of “Anastasia.” Next time it’s on TV, we’ll look for you. I recall seeing that show a few days before Christmas, hoping to beat the holiday rush.
Warren—Life imitated art when you saw “Bus Stop” on a bus stop. But give the film another chance (Joshua Logan, perhaps a godsend to B'way, brought nothing but disaster to the screen, except for this film; after that, it got progressively worse, no?). After a nine-hour trip from The Big Easy, who could see straight? On my first visit to Atlanta (1967), I headed for the Fox, too, with no interest in seeing the movie. It was “Hombre” with Paul Newman, but I paid more attention to the dreamscape of Ali Baba cradling the proscenium. If I practiced what I’ve preached, I’ll have to give that film another chance, huh?
Here’s a program from September, 1956:
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Of all the celebrated stage performances that I regret having missed in my lifetime, Kim Stanley’s Cherie in “Bus Stop†ranks high on the list. Barring that, Marilyn Monroe’s star-turn in the film version offered a swell substitute, with wonderful touches all its own. Who could ever forget MM stretched teary eyed across the diner’s countertop horizontally covering the full CinemaScope frame in the film’s climactic marriage proposal scene? On the Roxy’s gigantic screen, it looked magnificent. My memory of its final frames remains indelible, as the billowing contour curtain descended on the image of MM waving gaily from behind the window of the departing bus. The film presented my favorite MM performance of all, confirmed by a retrospective of all her major work that I had seen over a scant weekend just after her death. The tiny art-house screen couldn’t compete with the Roxy’s sweeping curveâ€"what could?â€"but the audience lapped the comedy up and applauded at the end, which it didn’t do for any other film in the series.
And of all the Roxy’s stage shows that I had seen, “Magic of the Stage†presented my favorite, too. It amounted to a spectacular display of scenery and stage effects that dwarfed the skate-bladed performers. Its “Story in verse by Robert C. Rothafel†excerpted in the program’s italics will unintentionally split your sides: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour! But the centerpiece with its “Scenery Ballet†and “Dancing Spotlights†pulled out all the scenic stops and taught me a lot about stage machinery. It began with a bare stage, onto which scenery kept descending from and ascending to the vast fly space, demonstrating how rapidly sets could be set up and struck. At one point, the CinemaScope screen dropped down, replete with shape-shifting masks, and illuminated from behind so as to show off the sound amplifiers. At another point, the full-stage cyclorama rose to expose the brick wall at the rear of the stage, co-incidently revealing the stage’s triangular floor-plan and the situation of the auditorium obliquely between W. 50 and W. 51 Streets so as to enable the orchestra’s width at its greatest point to exceed a city block. This width had always caused me to marvel, and now I knew the reason why. I could have watched that display for hours and been happy if the Blades and Roxyettes had all glided off to Norway.
Here’s a Program from May, 1956:
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“Bhowani Junction†showed off Ava Gardner, Pakistan, Northern India, and George Cuckor’s eye for spectacle all at once. 1956 was a year of great competition for RCMH with the Roxy as the latter had booked blockbuster Fox musicals (“Carousel,†“The King and Iâ€) ordinarily associated with MGM and the Music Hall. “Junction†seemed an answer to Fox’s “Rains of Ranchipur†which had played at the Roxy the previous Christmas, just as the sophisticated sexiness of Ava seemed an alternative to the spontaneous sex-appeal of Marilyn Monroe, whose “Bus Stop†was slated to park at the Roxy.
The stage show, too, revealed competitive ambitions. The Rock-’n-Roll number in the “Block Party†sequence marked the first time in my experience that such barbarous noise (introduced to teen-aged America only a year earlier) was heard at RCMH, briefly displacing the hitherto canonical Gershwin, Porter, Kern, et al. Chopin’s melodies in any case ended the show with a divertissement by the Corps de Ballet augmented by toe-dancing Rockettes. In between that and the Rockette’s earlier high kicks performed against a Times Square setting, we thrilled to the Three Houcs, a trio of jugglers, and Pat Henning, a stand-up commedian.
My grandfather had heard that the show was sensational, and he popped me five dollars to take a friend to see it. With the money left over (the 10:30 am show cost 90 cents in those days), we went afterwards to MoMA (50 cents in those days) to see a screening of “The Lady Vanishes,†and still had enough to spend on movies the following week.
SimonL— Yes, you’ve documented it exactly. In the mid-to-late ‘50s, Variety consistently reported weekly grosses of $120,000-to-$150,000 at RCMH, and double that by the time prices had doubled in the mid-'60s. Christmas and Easter weeks in the mid-'50s would reach $180,000. Weekends always brought packed houses, and summers would also register a rise in daily attendance.
The famous lines at Christmas and Easter grew primarily at morning and early afternoon performances, packed with families and children, but prices were lower at those times. On ordinary weekends, however, long lines regularly formed for evening performances when prices were higher. Consequently, the grosses for a couple of solid weekend evenings could approach or equal those for an entire week of mornings and matinees at holiday times.
Late-winter months always marked the slowest business. Between mid-January and mid-March in the post-WWII years through the mid-60s, RCMH usually turned over three bookings(and turned over four during those weeks in 1950).
Here’s a program from October, 1956:
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Weighing in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, “Giant†left a scant twenty minutes for the Roxy’s stage show plus a few minutes on either end for seating the patrons. But it was a great show all around, sore as our backsides might have been after sitting in the Roxy’s plush seats for nigh-on-to four hours. I remember seeing it after school on the day before the Columbus Day holiday. I can’t recall which Irving Berlin favorites accompanied the Native-American motifâ€"“I’m an Indian, Too†from “Annie Get Your Gunâ€? For a small snapshot of Manuel Del Toro and Nicky Powers as Indian Chief and Medicine Man with the Roxyette Squaws, see my post on 23 December above.