GIANT KINEMAS

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 January 1928, Page 8

GIANT KINEMAS

“HOT AND COLD RUNNING.” For gorgeousness, comfort, and size the picture theatres in the United States bear away all palms, writes Iris Barry, in the “Daily Mail.” Everyone has heard of “Roxy’s” in New York, that-vast block of masonry, not withput beauty, which houses a small town within itself besides an auditorium seating 6000 and sweeping out like a great fan from a stage which is huge but looks small. There are cafeterias, lounges, a broadcasting station, a sumptuous flat, practice rooms, floor above floor; the orchestra, a really good one, includes 116 i performers. The attendants, groomed to the last fraction in courtesy, number scores. No one can escape a visit to this huge kinema without being shown—and with what pride!—the carpet in the foyer, woven in a single piece and said to be the largest carpet so made. Not far away is the Paramount building, the foyer of‘which towers up in severe marble arches and the upper atmosphere of which blazes with illumination from a forest of chandeliers that strike gleams on the polished surface of the high hall.

It seems the custom to deprecate the existence of these mammoth kinemas; just as in Hollywood the inhabitants almost apologise for the quite astonishing ‘Chinese” theatre recently opened there. But in actual fact these gargantuan and wildly exuberant style of their own; and the Paramount in New York would probably not strike a visitors from the planets as more startling than Versailles must have been in its inception, or the “Chinese” in Hollywood as more fantastic than the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Besides, as kinemas, they are very comfortable and show films niagnificentiy. Of course, films unadulterated are hardly ever to be found in the United States. A great many kinemas show a vaudeville programme with a film tacked on to the end of it. The rest do less magnificently what Mr Rothapfel, of “Roxy’s,” does and stage an immense prologue to the picture along with musical interludes.

This is rather annoying to anyone who wants to see films, as it may be necessary (as it was for the writer when visiting the “Oriental” at Chicago) to wait hours before any motion picture makes its appearance; and the tableaux vivants, ballets, or-

chestral interludes, jazz bands and what not that are provided are not all first rate. It is rather annoying, too, not to be allowed to smoke. Films for more critical audiences are also shown at smaller picture theatres specialising in Continental pictures, revivals of worth-while films of all kinds, experimental or travel films, and oddities. But at least these new kinemas do deserve their nickname of “cathedrals of motion pictures,” even though it may be true, as one of the weekly magazines gibes, that they exist only

to provide half-wits with “hot and cold running entertainment.”