Remembering Manchester’s Movie Theaters
The State, Stand, Palace & Rex Theatres Showed the Stuff Dreams are Made of
MANCHESTER, NH — The Queen City was still a working mill town in the mid-1960s. The textile mills were expiring or already dead, though the shoe shops were still in business. They wouldn’t be wiped out until there was a flood of Italian imports until the 1970s.
One indelible memory comes from a road trip to Daytona Beach Florida with my father. When we were going south on I-95 in North Carolina, he told us to get ready — the said, “Look to the left.”
We did and were startled by the WAUMBEC MILL sign stuck to the side of a brand new metal factory.
“That’s where it wound up,” he said of one of Manchester’s biggest employers that had exited the Queen City in the Sixties. Since Dad had been a bobbin boy — threading the bobbins with thread in the mornings before he reported to West High School in the early 1940s — he may have actually worked there. (“Worst job I ever had,” he told us. “Joining the Navy was a relief.” He had quite West when he was 17 and enlisted in 1943.)
Just as Manchester’s Waumbec Mill would be wiped out (and resurrected in another world), many of Manchester’s movie theaters would suffer the ignominy of being closed down.
There still was a factory that made shoes for Thom McCann on the West Side, near West High in the 1960s, but I think it was out of business by the time I started as a freshman in 1973. Up until the 8th grade (1972–73), teachers would bellowed the warning, “You’ll we’d wind up in the shoe shops” if we didn’t cut out goofing off.
The Old Manchester Movie Palaces
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1941 survey of New England movie theaters revealed that there were five movie theaters and one drive-in in Manchester, though it missed at least three. According to sources, in 1941, The Rex Theatre that had opened the previous year, The Globe Theatre at 670 Elm Street and the Empire Theatre on Massabesic Street were all in business.
According to Chris Reinhardt’s Theatre Project, in the 1930s, The Vitaphone Theatre was operating at 1182 Elm Street. It has been built as movie theater and opened in 1916 as The Eagle. Vitaphone was the sound-on-disc process created by Warner Bros., the first movie studio to release talkies with The Jazz Singer (1927), so the name change was probably around 1927–28.
Some researchers claim that the Vitaphone was the first movie theater in Manchester to show talking pictures. However, that claim was made in an ad in the Manchester Union newspaper for another movie theater, one of two on the West Side.
The Granite Square Theatre was in a neighborhood dominated by the Irish, though other ethnic groups such as Germans and French Canadians shared the area. My father told me that Conant Street where West High was sited was the “dividing line” between the Irish and the French Canadians in the 1930s/40s. If West Side territories could be claimed as Irish and French Canadian, it could be said while the Irish had their movie house, the French Canadians had theirs
Located at 57 Amory Street (the heart of Manchester’s Little Canada), The The Modern Theatre had opened as early as 1915. It was sometimes was known as the Notre Dame Theatre, as Notre Dame Ave. and the Notre Dame Cathedral were nearby. It made claims to have showed the first all-talking movie in Manchester, Melody of Love, likely around 1928 or ‘29.
Reinhardt documents that the Pine Island Drive-in was called the Park-In Theatre. And there was the Manchester Drive-in Theatre on South Willow Street, which operated form 1949 through 1972.
When I was a kid, The Crown Theatre (which had started out as a “playhouse” and been turned into a movie theater in 1925) and the Lyric Theatre were gone. Both of them had been situated on Hanover Street, “The Great White Way” of the Queen City.
Renamed The Variety in 1955, The Crown had closed in 1961.
The Lyric Theatre was at 41 Hanover Street, and went out of business between 1952 and 1955. The block it was in was torn down for a municipal parking lot. On the Lowell Street side of the parking lot, there had once been The Star Theatre, which opened in 1914 and operated until 1932.
The Crown Pub now occupies the site of the erstwhile Crown Theatre.
Places a Kid Could See Westerns
My friend, the late Bill Cashin, remembered seeing cowboy movies as a boy at The Crown.
Bill was from Granite Square, the first neighborhood my father and his family lived in when they moved to Manchester during the Great Depression. He had started out his life in Litchfield, on “The Hopwood Land” (400 acres of farmland dating back to the time of King George II). It was an Eden he remembered but never got back to. He was nine years older than Bill, and they never met.
My father as a kid saw his Westerns in Granite Square’s own eponymous theater, known by its users as “The Spit Box.” (“You could blow a spitball from your straw the entire length of the Granite Square Theatre,” Dad told us, explaining the nickname. It was really small and is still in existence. Now the home of The Elks, it had served as a Chinese restaurant when I was a kid.
It was small because it was built as a nickelodeon. It concerted to sound and showed the cheaply made low-budget programmers like Western serials until it shuttered during the Great Depression.
My father ‘s childhood hero was Tom Mix, who helped put more than a few shekels in the coffers of Joseph Kennedy II, sire of a president and three senators (if you count JFK twice for both offices). The Spitbox wasn’t Joe Kennedy’s only connection to the movie palaces of Manchester. (The hint to the answer to the question, “What other link?” lies in the wording of the sentence. It’s coming up.)
The 1960s & ’70s: The End of An Era
There were four movie theaters in Manchester when I was a kid, not counting drive-ins. The Pine Island that has been mentioned in the 1941 MGM survey was still going strong, but there was also The Bedford Grove and one on South Willow Street, as well as the Sky-Ray in Hooksett.
The four movie houses of my youth were The State Theater (known as the Queen Theatre in the 1960s). Once the top venue in The Queen City, it was located on Elm Street and Bridge.
Two veterans of the Great White Way were still in operation on Hanover: The Palace and The Strand Theatres.
The Rex Theater (which was called The King when I was a kid, and then The Movies when I was a teenager) was on Amherst Street. It lasted the longest as a legitimate movie place. I don’t know when The Strand finally closed its doors, but it ended its run as a sleazy porno grindhouse.
The Palace was an old vaudeville house — an actual theater — that evolved into a movie theater. Thus, there were “boxes” in the sides of the walls, which went unused except for extraordinary crowds, such as a showing of a Three Stooges feature film as Baby Boomers came of age and — in a demand for their heroes that presaged their later response to The Beatles — overwhelmed the Palace.
Opening in 1915, The Palace had been part of the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, which provided the K-O in R-K-O when Joe Kennedy created the Hollywood “major” studio Radio-Keith-Orpheum. R.K.O. was created from Kennedy’s own production companies, the K-O circuit’s vaudeville theaters (to be converted if they hadn’t been already to movie houses) and Radio Corp. of America patents on sound-on-film technology.
Many a vaudeville house showed movies as part of the program in the early silent days, before vaudeville died and they converted to movies-only theaters after the advent of sound. In the transition period from silent to talkies, some of the old palaces featured a short vaudeville program before the movies: Live entertainment instead of a couple of comedy shorts. (See the great Warner Bros. musical Footlight Parade, starring the incomparable Jimmy Cagney, and you’ll see what I mean.)
Riot at the Rex
In Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1941 survey of New England movie theaters, information on the seating capacity was included, with space for both the main auditorium and a balcony, if there was one. The conditon of the theater, whether it showed MGM product and the audience it served (TRANSIENT, NEIGHBORHOOD and MILL) was other information sought by the studio.
One of the other categories, to be filled in by the surveyor, was the question:
BALCONY FOR COLORED?
I am gratified to see, in my perusal of the cards, this wasn’t filled in for theaters in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine. It was surprising to see this, as I thought that such segregation was only in The South. (Movie theater balconies were called “N— Heaven” in the South.”)
The Palace had a balcony, as did The Strand, The State and the smaller Rex.
I actually witnessed a riot from the balcony of the renamed Rex (The King) sometime in 1969. My brother and I were there for a kid’s Saturday matinee of Captain Nemo and the Underwater City. The prices for matinees were cheaper than regular showings. Most of the kids had been dropped off by their mothers, though there were as smattering of mothers and fathers about.
Captain Nemo turned out to be a bore, and boring kids can have fatal consequences. (Then again, exciting kids can be worse.) The flick had Chuck Connors in it, but not the gunplay we expected to him from The Rifleman on the TV set back at home.
The kids were restless by the time Nemo’s submarine sank. The fireworks started as the second feature was unreeled. It was The Five Man Army — an incongruous choice for a kiddie’s matinee.
It was an spaghetti Western featuring Peter Graves of Mission: Impossible amongst a mostly Italian (all badly dubbed) cast. And it had what Captain Nemo and the Underwater City lacked: There was not only guns going off, and spurting blood but — Lo! and behold! BARE BREASTS!!!
The troubled started in the scene where the sadistic Mexican generalissimo who has captured Graves and two senioritas who had come along with the solders of fortune really started playing the heavy. The general put his hand into the bodice of the mute Indian maiden and TORE IT OFF!!
She wasn’t wearing a brassiere.
The exposure to female nudity in 1969 was limited to glimpses of a copy of your father’s Playboy magazine or of a girly calendar in a gasoline station garage. And perhaps National Geographic. This was the introduction to human sexual response for the American boy in the 1960s. There was no porn industry then, let alone the ubiquitous Internet porn.
But there was more:
The scene where the sadistic general ripping off the pretty maiden’s top and exposing her mammaries was punctuated with a scene of graphic violence. Near simultaneous with the boob flash, one of the Five Man Army guys, an “Indian” who for some reason was played by a Japanese actor and was armed with a samurai sword — burst through the general’s closed door, disemboweled the guards and and cleaved the generalissimo’s head in two with deft strokes of the samurai sword. (You can see the scene, minus boobs, at around 1:16 in this Five Man Army trailer.)
The place erupted. The kids went wild! In the grand tradition of the 1960s that was coming to a close, the ushers at The King Theatre (formerly the Rex) had a full-scale riot on their hands. And use their hands they did!
An adult couple marshaled their brood for a retreat from the battle. They headed for the exit door in the balcony, as it was gong to be impossible to go downstairs and exit normally. This riot (not unlike the one I’d seen on TV in Chicago on TV) was in full tumult.
“I thought this was supposed to be a children’t matinee,” the older woman said.
What could you do? We were in the balcony, my brother and I, and the boys battling it out with the ushers were older than us. They certainly didn’t need our help and they were — bigger. As were the ushers.
Shafts of sunlight penetrated he theater from both sides as the exit doors in the main auditorium, near the screen, had been flung open. The ushers were dragging kids out of the place and coming back for more. Rioting kids who had been subdued went limp and had to be hustled out of the theater by two ushers: One to hold their arms and another their legs. This passive resistance tactic — likely seen on TV news coverage of civil rights marchers (fed up with being segregated in movie theater balconies and other graver indignities — and anti-war protestors — had the effect of depleting the strength that could be projected by the usher corps at any one time, as with two on one, the number of individual ushers to handle the remaining rioters was cut.
My brother and I were too small to actually be of use to our allies, in terms of providing Brute Force during this melee of Us (Kids) against them The Establishment (represented by the ushers). But we were determined to pitch in. The other kids in the balcony had the same idea.
We grabbed anything we could —cast-away popcorn and Cracker-Jack boxes, smaller boxes of Goobers and Raisinettes that had been crushed underfoot, discarded soda cups, some empty and some still harboring holding stale soda that had gone “flat” — and hurled them from the balcony at the combatants below. The ushers were too caught up stamping out the riot — and stomping the bigger kids in full revolt — to notice us.
After half the auditorium had been expelled , my brother and I sat down to watch the rest of the movie. Ma wouldn’t be picking us up for a while, and our pocket money was limited. We didn’t have the funds for anything else, like playing pinball. The movie really sucked and our hopes for seeing more naked woman were dashed, as the movie just descended into a formula Western.
But The Five Man Army had been a part of our life lessons, into the mysteries of love and mob violence. All for 75 cents.
The Strand and the Palace: New Lives for Old Grindhouses
The Strand had started life in the 1880s as the Manchester Opera House. The State Theatre, which opened in 1929 as a movie palace showing talkies, and The Rex (opened circa 1940) were always movie-only theaters. A place like The Vitaphonne — known for its cheap ticket prices — might sport a stage, but it was one of limited utility. The manager of the joint might take to the stage to run a bingo game or give out dishes to patrons — something the Vitaphone was renowned for. (Jean Shepherd wrote a short story, The Great Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot, set during the Great Depression, telling a tale of woe based on movie theater giveaways. It’s a different kind of riot than the one caused by The Five Many Army.)
The State was big — the largest movie theater in Manchester and likely the state of New Hampshire — but it lacked the large backstage, including the “flies” (the area in which scenery is moved, positioned and stored) that a vaudeville house had in common with a “legitimate” theater presenting plays.
As I remember it, The Rex was downscale, as the Palace and the Strand soon became as the ’60s wound down and the suzerainty of Television over the American psyche became total. The State Theater that I originally knew as the Queen was the best of the lot.
And then the Bedford Mall opened, with its two brand new theaters just as the old decade was dying and the new decade of the 1970s was aborning. To survive, The State (Queen) sealed off its balcony to turn it into a small venue. It renamed itself Cine 1 (the bigger screen house downstairs) and Cine 2.
A fellow West High student who was an usher at Cine 1 and 2 told me that the back and the basement were crawling with rats. The popcorn came pre-popped in large bags, and he had to wipe the rat shit off of it before heating it up in the popcorn machine.
The twice-renamed State Theatre didn’t have much longer to live, closing in 1978.
The Movie Industry Changes
Up through the early 1970s, Hollywood released movies in a way quite different from now. The prestigious “A” pictures were “road-showed” whereas the programmers — the B’s were sent out to attract the cash in less prestigious theaters.
The State Theatre would only show road-show pictures and “first run” releases. Either The Strand or The Palace managed to bag The Sound of Music in the mid-60s, but they were on the way to their slide into porno grind houses. One of them, I think it was The Strand, had pictures of Hollywood stars on the wall, but they were outdated I still remember a picture of Jimmy Durante, the Schnozolla. He was on TV a lot. (That would be a tradition that the Bedford Mall briefly retained. I saw my first pic of Jack Nicholson in a glass case that featured not just the lobby cards for the movies, but stills of movie stars.)
The Strand managed to outlive The Palace as a movie theater, if the soft core porn and censored prints of something like Deep Throat could be considered movies — at the time, there were doubts. Accounts say The Palace became a grindhouse showing porn, but that is doubtful as it shut off its lights at the end of the decade, before hardcore porn penetrated the Queen City.
One story I remember comes from the time that Deep Throat finally made it to Manchester, around 1974 or ’75. The Palace had been refurbished and turned back into a theater under Mayor Sylvio Dupuis.
Curious about the fabled skin flick, my brother-in-law and the boyfriend of my sister went to see it. My brother-in-law said it was very embarrassing when they came out of the theater when it was all over, as the audience that had just seen the New Hampshire Symphony at The Palace was getting out, too. The two groups stared each other as they slowly walked off.
But that was an era to come.
In the 1960s, as was traditional, a big budget movie such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) would be “opened” in a very limited number of theaters in Los Angeles and New York City. The studios had a lot invested in these pictures: Lawrence’s $15 million budget was unprecedented.
The major Hollywood studios made big pictures as they had to. TV had devoured its audience and now supplied the type of “programmers” for mass entertainment that Hollywood’s B-pictures units had provided.
This was still an age where most TVs were B+W. Movies offered color and a big screen. The largest TV screens were 21 inch.
In the Hollywood of the 1960s, there were pictures of different budgets, but the old B-movie programmers weren’t made. Low-budget independents like American International were around to provide potboilers to drive-ins and second- and third-run movie houses.
If a movie produced by the majors was a dog, they just would release it indifferently, to die as the second feature in a double-bill at grindhouses and fleapits.
The A-list pictures were fully backed by the studio’s marketing department. Newspaper coverage would start with the limited opening, if not before. You might read about a pictures weeks before you could ever see it. The buzz would build, and then the distribution of the picture would be expanded to second-tier cities like Boston and San Francisco. And you’d wait some more….
The studios held on to the rights of their big hits for years before selling them to television. There was no consumer videotape and equipment to watch it with. After you saw a movie, you had your memories of it until you could see it, years later, on TV — cut up, shrunk down and — in the case of Lawrence of Arabia and other CinemaScope blockbusters— panned and scanned. Or you might buy a 3-minute condensation on 8mm film of a classic like High Noon.
Movie theater prices were not uniform, and a place like the State Theatre — considered the best in Manchester until the arrival of the Bedford Mall — would charge a higher ticket price than a lesser movie palace like the Rex.
If the average ticket price at a run-of-the-mill movie theater was, say, 75 cents , a first run house might charge a buck and two bits for its regular fare. At the same theater, a prestigious, big-budgeted roadshow picture might carry a two-dollar ducat.
There were still movie shorts and newsreels at movie theaters in the 1960s. I can actually remember being in an audience sing-along as we sang lyrics on the big screen to the music, following a white “ball” as it bounced on the words, keeping us all more of less in sync. That was when I was a tyke.
Yeah: It wasn’t just coming attractions that were shown between showings of a movie. If you were lucky, the pre-feature short would be The Three Stooges, that would play after the newsreel. (I remember one about the hapless Mets and Casey Stengel.)
Your extra fifty cents at The State likely got you that The Stooges short rather than their brother Shemp in Pick a Peck of Plumbers (also from Columbia and also directed by Jules White, who did the Stooges).
Once a roadshow picture was played out in the first-run houses, it would be rereleased to the second-run houses as would other A pictures. A movie trailer in a second- or third-run house might proclaim NOW AT POPULAR PRICES.
Unlike now, where movies are virtually released to streaming even as they are being released in theaters, a movie had a long, long lifespan.
And the monster hits like Gone With the Wind would be rereleased into first-run houses for years. Because for 37 years, you couldn’t see it on TV.
If you couldn’t afford the two dollar road show, or didn’t want to pay a buck twenty-five, you could wait for the second-run at a second-run house, where you might pay a dollar. (That two-bits now being equivalent $2.50 due to inflation.) There were even third-run houses, charging 75 cents, where the film would be released after playing out the dollar-bill customers.
In Chris Reinhardt’s entry on The Spit Box in his Manchester, New Hampshire Theatre Project website, he writes, “Generally a second or third run theatre. Pictures were often 6 months to a year old by the time they reached the Granite Square.”
Marketing the Movies in Manchester
Movie theaters in Manchester used to have banners proclaiming Held Over! For the really big hits like The Sound of Music or later, The Sting (which played the renamed Cine I & II), the management put out banners or posters proclaiming, Now in Sixth Month!
With The State carved up into two theaters, you could move a picture from Cine 1 into the smaller Cine II in line with the drop off in audience.)
I saw Live and Let Die with the family in Cine I— a big event, as Paul McCartney had done the title song and Sean Connery was out and TV’s Roger Moore in as 007. It was the first Bond movie my brother and I ever saw, although we were aware of the hype of the Connery bond pictures.
That summer, the Bedford Mall would play a twin-bill of Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, both which starred Connery, on his way to becoming a movie legend. Along with Clark Gable, he was the most masculine leading man of the silver screen to become a superstar. (Exiting the theater, one of my fellow eighth grad graduates said, “He raped those women.”)
The Sound of Music, which played at one of the Hanover Street Houses, actually sported a poster boasting that this movie musical — the first flick to surpass the gross of Gone With the Wind in dollars unadjusted for inflation — had played for over a year.
As a kid whose mother had you on a short leash, possibly even paying you the indignity of holding your hand downtown as you strutted your six-year-old stuff on a Long Tuesday, passing by this poster and the real poster of a frowning Christopher Plummer glowering at a light-footed Julie Andrews (who had put you to sleep out of sheer boredom the year before when Ma had taken you to the Bedford Grove drive-in to see Mary Poppins) again and again over time, proved irritating. It was not the kind of movie I wanted to see.
As I have said, there were no VCR machines for the masses in those days, so Hollywood would squeeze every last shekel out of a movie on first release.
A monster hit like Butch Cassidy — which came out a year after Paul Newman went politicking for Gene McCarthy across the street at a neighbor’s house during the 1968 New Hampshire primary — would be rereleased frequently. I first saw it at the Bedford Mall when I was in high school, a good six or seven years after its original release. It was released as if it was a first-run feature.
The Godfather Changes Cinema Releasing Patterns
The Godfather changed the release of A pictures, as Paramount decided not to roadshow it, but immediately open it wide in New York City and Los Angeles. A roadshow picture only opened on several screens, at most, in its initial release — even in cities as big as New York and L.A. As the movie went into wider release across the country, it would be shown in only one theater in a territory, or a couple of theaters if it was a big city like Boston.
Ganger pictures since the heyday of Humphrey Bogart did bad business, and Kirk Douglas’ The Brotherhood several years earlier had been a monumental flop. It had been a Paramount release.
Instead of a couple movie theaters in New York City, Paramount opened The Godfather in a 20. Some of the owners of first-run houses were outraged, as they felt their territory was being violated.
The gamble paid off. The wide-release pattern was repeated throughout the United States, and The Godfather in one year of release surpassed The Sound of Music as the highest grossing film in history. (GWTW remains the champ, when adjusted for inflation.)
With the rise of suburban, cookie-cutter theaters like those in the Bedford Mall, a new distribution paradigm was created. Instead of opening in 4 houses — two on both coasts (NY and L.A.) you opened in 400, all across the country. During the 1970s, the opening week threshold moved to 1,000 theaters, then 2,000. (Currently, a movie can open on 3,500 “screens” — the term theater began to be used less and less as the newer theaters had multiple screens).
And then there was Jaws. The first summer movie that was released as The Godfather had been released. And it broke all box office records, raking in $150 million on its first run, a number surpassed two years later by a movie about a galaxy far far away, which topped it by $28 million.
By the time Jaws was released, The State (Cine 1 and Cine 2) and the Rex — renamed The Movies — were hanging on as the last movie theaters in downtown Manchester, unless you counted the porn house The Strand.
The last movie I saw at the State theater was a 1975 re-release of Chinatown. I can’t remember if it was in Cine I or Cine II, but I do know I’d seen I sat through it twice. I knew it was a classic, and my love affair with films was underway.
I shot home movies with my 8mm camera of it being torn down. Plastered on the outside wall of the adjacent building that was still standing after the theater was demolished, there was an old poster for In Old Arizona, a 1929 flick that introduced the Cisco Kid. (It won gringo Warner Baxter an Oscar playing the Mexican bandito). That was the year it had opened.
The State had been double walled, for sound proofing. Between the common wall it shared with the other building, and the main structure of the theater, there had been a cavity, possibly a passageway. It might have been open, once, before being closed. That poster had been up for nearly 50 years, and soon the adjacent building was gone too.)
By the time I saw Every Which Way But Loose at The Movies with my brother in January 1979, it was the last theater standing in downtown Manchester, but for the haunt of the grotesquerie, The Strand.
We saw it just before he went off to Air Force Basic Training in 1979. Later, I found out that my 16 year old father had accompanied my Uncle Chester to The Rex to see The Glass Key (a classic though they didn’t know that then) before Chester went to Army Basic Training in 1942. (Ironically, the first adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s great novel The Glass Key starring George Raft played the Spit Box.)
As I write this, The Rex has been reborn in the second decade of the new millennium, but not as a movie house. There hasn’t been one in downtown Manchester for decades. Until Chunky’s was opened off of South Willow Street, the Queen City had lacked a movie house for decades.
And then there was COVID-19 and the era of the Pandemic. Coupled with simultaneous releasing of movies in theaters and via streamlining, the industry is changing one again.
MUSIC
ENNIO MORRICONE
Five Man Army theme
