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Uploaded on: March 23, 2024

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Photo shows the ceiling & lighting of The Albany Newsreel Theatrette.

John Mcadam remembers the Newsreel Theatrette

We didn’t just go to the pictures we went to the one-hour newsreel shows. On the elected day of the newsreels, we would be anxious to catch the first off-peak train into the city: the first after 9:00am. And we knew we had to be on the return off-peak back to Newport before 4:00pm. We had about six hours to navigate the central business grid of Melbourne to choose the best two newsreel offerings and have sandwiches or a meat pie at Coles Cafeteria.

The newsreel theatres were small theatrettes in the basement of buildings housing retail shops or tucked below picture theatres.

The concept of the newsreel was to screen back to back an eclectic blend of short featurettes. A one hour program was made up of one or two weekly newsreel, cartoons such as Tom and Jerry or Donald Duck, Popeye, a Pete Smith Specialty, the 3 Stooges, or a Scotland Yard mystery. The program would run continuously through the day with no intermissions and you could stay in the theatre as long as you wanted to: even all day. In the late fifties Melbourne had six newsreel theatres; Century, Albany, Star, Times, and Tatler.

We knew the location of each theatre and would walk the Robert Hoddle grid comparing the programs at all six theatres; a Pete Smith Specialty versus a 3 Stooges comedy, Bob Dyer’s record shark catch versus a Trade Fair opens in Melbourne, or a Casper versus Sylvester. The decisions while not causing grief or distress were agonizing. We would go to one newsreel in the morning and then head to Coles for lunch and to digest what we had just seen. In the afternoon we would sometimes sit through one and a half of the program just to see the Pete Smith Specialty a second time. And then back to Flinders Street for the off-peak return to Newport- John Mcadam remembers.

Contributed by Greg Lynch -