Gala Theatre

Tiny Table Grove, Illinois was home to two movie theaters - one exclusively from the silent era and the other started silent and converted to sound. Its first movie house was the Pastime Theatre, a 300-seat theater in a converted retail space downtown that booked vaudeville and showed short films. O.H. Mullen built a more modern facility from the ground up and served as Table Grove’s final theater.

Mullen’s Amus-U Theatre opened in 1923 to good success. It would eventually be equipped with sound. The theatre scuffled under a variety of names and ever-shifting owners during the Depression with owners likely knowing that profit potential for a movie theater in a town with fewer than 500 residents was not good. Its name

The theater got one last hope for viability when it was part of a Dale Kennedy Circuit of 21 small town movie houses that switched to lower cost 16mm films. Theaters in nearby Vermont, Astoria, and Blandinsville appear to be in that circuit. The 16mm operation appears to have failed fairly quickly and the theater appears to have been equipped with or switched back to 35mm projection in September of 1947 under new operators… for just two weeks.

During its run, the Table Grove movie house was advertised as the Table Grove Theatre, Grove Theatre, Colonial Theatre, (Garden according to a book on Illinois Theaters), and, finally, the Gala Theatre. It appears to have closed, sadly, on “pal night” (October 6, 1947) with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in “Sinbad, the Sailor” after just two disappointing weeks of operation.

Get Movie Tickets & Showtimes

Want to be emailed when a new comment is posted about this theater?
Just login to your account and subscribe to this theater.