Building for Leisure

A relatively early work from the office of Michael Scott, where the project architect was W. M. O’Dwyer, the Ritz Cinema in Carlow was designed in 1937 and opened in 1938. Scott would soon establish his reputation through projects such as the shamrock-planned Irish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and Áras Mhic Dhiarmada/Busáras, Dublin (completed 1953), to become one of the most influential Irish architects of the twentieth century. The Carlow Ritz consisted of a pitched-roofed auditorium designed to hold 875, including 244 on a balcony, fronted by a flat-roofed entrance and circulation block, with a restrained modernist concrete street façade.

The Ritz was officially opened by the English stage and film actress Diana Wynyard in June 1938. According to a report in the Nationalist and Leinster Times, Wynyard congratulated the people of Carlow on having one of the most beautiful, luxurious, and up-to-date cinemas in the country. Some of her enthusiasm is captured in this carefully composed black and white shot of the building. Basil Henry does more than simply record the architecture. In the darkroom, he has done his best to add a touch of glamour and sophistication via bright strips of lighting.

The partially obscured poster indicates that when the photograph was taken the Ritz was showing George B. Seitz’s romantic comedy My Dear Miss Aldrich starring Edna May Oliver, Walter Pidgeon, and  Maureen O’Sullivan, originally released in the US in September 1937. Interestingly, it is Irish-born O’Sullivan who gets top billing on the Carlow poster.

The Democratisation of Entertainment

Eve McAulay

Even at the time, there was an awareness that the era of the Thirties was the great age of the cinema – and that its importance was not just in relation to the movies but also in social, commercial, and architectural terms. As the editor of the ‘Special Cinema Issue’ of the British journal Architectural Design and Construction mused in March 1938:

When the architectural history of the first half of the Twentieth Century comes to be written, what buildings will go down in the history books as worthy monuments of this age?… As regards the whole plane of building activity and as regards new types of building which have come into existence, surely it will be cinemas?

Early venues for the display of films were often basic; a simple hall was all that was required. As cinema became more popular, films were regularly shown in the bigger theatres and variety halls, often as an extra ‘turn’ in the programme. The advent of cinema did not eliminate the huge popularity of the variety shows and so, in the early years, there was not yet an impetus for separate, new structures to be built solely for the display of films.

The very first purpose-built cinema in Dublin was the Phoenix Picture Palace on Ellis Quay which opened in December 1912. Constructed to a rudimentary design by architect Francis Bergin (some of the seating comprised wooden benches), it had a capacity of 730 and survives to this day, although no longer functioning as a cinema (19.1). Other early notable examples around the capital included the La Scala Theatre and Opera House (later the Capitol) on Prince’s Street, by architect Thomas Francis McNamara, which opened with a capacity of 1,900 in 1920, and the Metropole, O’Connell Street. Designed in a stripped classical style, with allusions to Art Deco, by architect Aubrey V. O’Rourke (brother of the City Architect, Horace T. O’Rourke), the Metropole opened in 1922 with a capacity of 1,008 (19.2). These early designs were typical of their time in that they still accommodated the use of the auditorium for musical theatre and variety shows or incorporated other forms of entertainment – the Metropole included a grand ballroom and restaurant within its scheme. They were not built solely for the purpose of displaying films.

Many cinemas, albeit on a more modest scale, were also being built in cities and towns all across the island during the 1920s. It is quite remarkable to consider the scale of cinema construction which continued throughout these years, despite the context of profound political and economic turbulence and uncertainty.

The Savoy Cinema which opened on O’Connell Street, Dublin, in 1929, merely a few months before the publication of Shand’s book, was the first really large-scale cinema to be built in the country, seating 3,000. Designed by an English architect, Frederick Charles Mitchell of London, it exemplified the new method of construction using steel framed concrete. Despite its plain façade, it did – as noted in its Souvenir Opening Programme – make an attempt to conform with the City Architect’s scheme of reconstruction after the destruction of O’Connell Street during the 1916 Rising. However, its new method of construction notwithstanding, the style of its interior decoration, which was designed by English architect, W. E. Greenwood, was deeply traditional and old fashioned (19.4). In fact, in the criticism of generic Atmospheric cinemas in his book, Shand could nearly be describing the interior decorative scheme of the Savoy auditorium: ‘being frescoed with sentimentalised Tuscan villas, Venetian canal-quay suspirations, Spanish patios in the gloaming be-sheiked infinities of Saharan sand…’

There was much support of Shand’s doctrine among contemporary Irish architects and critics. In the Irish Builder review of The Architecture of Pleasure (17 January 1931), there was agreement with the necessity of producing a new building ‘type’ to match a new purpose, disparagingly referring to older cinemas as ‘architectural tripe’. In an article in The Irish Cinema Handbook of 1943, architect Alan Hope was also firmly in the Shand camp in his denunciation of the sham Atmospheric interiors. While he acknowledged the necessity of the cinema interior to offer an escape from the reality of the world, he argued that it was not necessary to create a ‘fancy dress’ of a ‘Modern Arabian Night’ because, ‘like a masquerade it palls with use’ (19.5).

The apparent threat of the insidious power of the movies was another area of controversy which vexed certain contemporary commentators in relation to cinema in Ireland. In The Capuchin Annual of 1938, the theatre actor and critic, Gabriel Fallon, wrote floridly of the dangers of what he called the ‘Celluloid Menace’. He lamented the ‘temples of the new entertainment’ and detailed the certain damage to the morality and mental discipline of the nation as a consequence of people going to the pictures. ‘There is that in the very surroundings of the cinema which atrophies critical faculties.’ Despite this apparent mortal risk, cinema was phenomenally popular. According to a paper ‘Cinema Statistics in Saorstát Éireann’, presented by civil servant Thekla Beere to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland in 1936, the estimated number of admissions to cinemas in the Free State in the year 1934-35 was well over eighteen million, a remarkable statistic given that the population of the country in 1936 was less than three million. This data is precisely coincident with the editorial in the Irish Builder of 12 January 1935, which notes that, while ‘housing and public works have constituted the larger part of the building works of the past year… Cinemas have perhaps been the main feature. In Dublin they appear to multiply year by year and there seems to be no lack of patronage’. Throughout the Thirties, articles in the Irish Builder referred repeatedly to the ‘boom’ in cinema building in every province. In November 1936 it noted that ‘Cinema building shows little sign of diminishing in scope, and in Ireland it may be said to have reached boom dimensions’. Towards the end of the decade, the popularity of the cinema in Ireland was at its zenith. According to architect and critic Manning Robertson in the London Builder of 16 June 1939, ‘Dublin probably possesses greater cinema seating accommodation than any other city of its size in the world, and the visitor will find the general standard of design high, but purely cosmopolitan in style’.

The rise in popularity of the cinema was not surprising in an era of economic depression and political uncertainty: it offered a means of escape from austerity and the problems of everyday life. The cinema offered the chance to escape into opulent and luxurious surroundings and enter a glamorous and exciting world, all just for the price of a ticket. As noted, cinemas also provided a venue for other forms of leisure. The larger examples around the towns and cities had separate cafés and tearooms which were destinations visited independently as well as on the occasion of a night out to the movies. In terms of the popularity of the cinema, particularly in Ireland, it is tempting to see also a conceptual link with the religious experience. The sharing with strangers of a close, intimate space, was so similar to that of a church setting. Here, in the cinema auditorium, was a place of communal intensity and emotion – not for the purpose of piety, but pure entertainment and pleasure.