Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fragmentation and Crisis: 1940s admissions figures at the regent cinema, Portsmouth, UK

2006; Routledge; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680600799389

1465-3451

Sue Harper,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The author would like to express her gratitude to Dr Mark Glancy and Professor Vincent Porter for their help with this paper. She would also like to thank the Archivist of the Portsmouth City Museum and Records Office for his valuable assistance. Notes Notes 1 Julian Poole, British cinema audiences in wartime: audience preferences at the Majestic, Macclesfield, 1939–46, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 7(1) (1987), 15–34. 2 Allen Eyles, Hits and misses at the Empire, Picture House, 13 (1989), 25–47. 3 Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, Mass-Observation at the Movies (London, 1987). There is also an unpublished M.A. thesis: Marjorie Hales, British Cinema Attendances in Wartime, Polytechnic of Central London (1988), which looks at the Regent figures. 4 Louis Moss and Kathleen Box, Social Survey Report on Cinema Audiences (London, 1943), and J. P. Mayer, Sociology of Film (London, 1946) and British Cinemas and Their Audiences (London, 1948). 5 Sue Harper, A lower middle-class taste-community in the 1930s: admissions figures at the Regent cinema, Portsmouth, UK, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24(4) (2004), 565–587. 6 See Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: the film industry and the British Government 1927–84 (London, 1985), 174–198, and Ian Jarvie, Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: the North Atlantic movie trade 1920–1950 (Cambridge, 1992) 213–272. 7 This runs counter to some evidence that British cinema admissions were governed by prices in the inter-war period: see Nicholas Hiley, 'Let's go to the pictures': the British cinema audience in the 1920s and 1930s, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 2 (1999), 39–53. 8 Information taken from Kineweekly Year Book, 1940 and 1945, which appeared annually. This lists all cinemas with their price bands. To check the size of cinemas, and details of their closures, it is necessary to look at the Minutes of the Corporation Watch Committee (in Portsmouth City Library) which, at the end of each year, lists the licences granted to cinema owners and gives the seating capacity. For the purposes of argument, I have averaged the Regent's seating capacity for the period as 2000. 9 There is a very useful article by the General Secretary of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association, on the effect of the war on south coast cinemas. See W. R. Fuller, The exhibitor's part, Sight and Sound (Spring 1941), 10–11. 10 The last mention of a recital at the Regent (by a well-known organist) is in the Portsmouth Evening News, 9 July 1942. 11 Mass-Observation File Report 606, Second Portsmouth Report, 15 March 1941 (University of Sussex). 12 Ibid. 13 Portsmouth Evening News, 4 September 1940. 14 Kinematograph Weekly, 15 February 1940, 11. 15 Mass-Observation File Report 606. 16 Portsmouth Evening News, 16 November 1939. 17 Portsmouth Evening News, 24 March 1943. 18 John Stedman, Portsmouth Reborn: destruction and reconstruction 1939–74, Portsmouth Papers, Portsmouth City Museums, 1996, 8–9. 19 Portsmouth Evening News, Smitten City: the story of Portsmouth in the air raids 1940–44 (1944). See also Paul Jenkins, Battle over Portsmouth (Midhurst, 1986). 20 Mass-Observation File-Report 559, Report on Portsmouth and Plymouth, 29 January 1941. 21 Mass-Observation File Report 606. 22 Brad Beaven and John Griffiths, The blitz, civilian morale, and the city: Mass-Observation and working-class morale in Britain 1940–41, Urban History 26(1) (1999), 71–88. 23 Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: the rise and fall of the British costume film (London, 1994), 119–146, and Film in context: Madonna of the Seven Moons, History Today 45(8) (1995), 47–52. 24 Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (Heinemann, 1986), 451–452. 25 Sue Harper, 'Nothing to beat the Hay diet': comedy at Gainsborough and Gaumont-British, in Pam Cook (ed.) Gainsborough Pictures (London, 1997), 80–98. 26 Steadman, op. cit., 12. 27 Ron Windle, Post-war developments, in Barry Stapleton and James Thomas (eds) The Portsmouth Region, Alan Smith (1989), 206–208. 28 Kinematograph Weekly, 3 January 1946, 45, and 7 February 1946, 36. 29 Kinematograph Weekly, 3 January, 1946, 19. 30 Kinematograph Weekly, 31 January 1946, 12. 31 Kinematograph Weekly, 7 January 1946, 33. 32 Of course, the American exhibition industry had to have recourse to an increased number of reissues in the late 1940s, due to changes in production patterns: see Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: history of American cinema 1940–49 (University of California Press, 1997), 292–297. 33 The competition against The Bells of St Mary's was quite strong. In its showing in August, it was up against Caesar and Cleopatra, Tarzan Triumphs, and, at the nearest Copnor cinema, Abbott and Costello's Here Come the Co-eds. 34 The competition against The Wicked Lady was also strong—The Road to Utopia at the Odeon, and elsewhere Son of Lassie and Abbott and Costello's Lost in a Harem.