One of my favourites screened at last year’s giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, William Beaudine’s The Canadian — based on W. Somerset Maugham’s play, The Land of Promise — premiered at Toronto’s Loew’s Yonge St. Theatre on January 10, 1927.

Produced in 1926, The Canadian was released in a year that saw nearly twenty films, including another Famous Players-Lasky hit, Mantrap, set in Canada or involving aspects of the burgeoning Canadian identity.

Far from the “gay and glorious romance” stated in the above ad, The Canadian depicts the harshness of the Canadian West in the early 20th century, in which Frank (Thomas Meighan), a rancher, hastily married to Nora (Mona Palma), a recent emigre from England, share nothing but utter contempt for one another. The dryness of Frank’s wheat crops have nothing on the cold relationship between husband and wife.

Since the film’s action takes place within a twin-room ranch-house, Beaudine, one of the most talented directors of the silent era, is handed the daunting task of using minimal camera movement, free of flourish, to convey that sense of frontier alienation.

What’s most captivating, however, is that the film, shot near Calgary, never fully reveals the identity of the titular character: Meighan’s tough, no-nonsense rancher, working the land handed to his family by the Dominion Lands Act, or the stranger in a strange land that is Nora, who relinquishes her British identity for that of the subservient Canadian.

With the surprising success of The Artist, a modern-day silent film dealing with the downfall of an actor at the on-set of the sound revolution, here are a few articles published here over the last few years dealing with the talkie transition in Toronto.

Talkies the talk of Toronto!

For the first time in the entirety of a feature film, they could hear the creaking of the stairs, the ghostly wind and the voices of all the characters. “Even the credits were spoken,” said the Daily Star. Other sound films had already played at the Tivoli, mostly Vitaphone shorts and silents with synchronized scores and a few short talking sequences, so this evening was mostly a welcome sensory overload! (Read more…)

Talking pictures in the silent era

Talking pictures settled permanently in Toronto in late 1928, but it was far from the first time Hogtown movie-goers were exposed to the concept that the flickers needn’t be silent.

In November of 1924, four years before the Tivoli and Uptown Theatres were wired for all-talking pictures, those attending the premiere of Elinor Glyn’s His Hour at Shea’s Hippodrome were treated to short subjects from radio pioneer Lee de Forest‘s Phonofilm, a sound-on-film process.

On the screen, an orchestra performed “Come on, Spark Plug,” the sound modestly filling the auditorium while the Hippodrome’s orchestra sat silent; a Spanish dancer performed what the Toronto Daily Star referred to as a series of romantic gyrations; a politician delivered a short address, followed by a roll call from the Democratic National Convention.

A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor followed next, with the Broadway star performing a few gags and singing “The Dumber They Are, the Better I Like ‘Em” and “Oh, Gee, Georgie” from the Ziegfeld show Kid Boots. (Read more…)

Buster Keaton, turntables and sound effects: The early days of cinema redux

Lecturers who traveled with films often provided non-musical sounds during screenings. Robert Gutteridge’s book Magic Moments refers to a 1933 Toronto Daily Star interview looking back at one of the Lumiere Cinematographe’s first Toronto appearances in 1896: “Whenever the blacksmith on the screen struck the picture anvil, down came the backstage hammer on a real anvil.” (Read more…)

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You’re fired: Silent film musicians & the talkie revolution

The successful commercialization of synchronized sound films in the late 1920s was arguably the medium’s most important technological achievement since its invention. But often neglected is how the costly conversion to sound systematically put thousands of silent film musicians out of work.

In Toronto, sound films first arrived at the Tivoli, at Richmond and Victoria Sts., when the Fox Movietone film Street Angel premiered on October 5, 1928. As Luigi Romanelli’s  orchestra sat silently in the pit, the whirring strings and woodwinds from New York’s Roxy Orchestra emanated from loudspeakers in the Famous Players theatre. (Read more…)

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Always Cool and Comfortable at the Pantages

Indeed, while the Pantages orchestra played along to Gershwin tunes like “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” and “It’s All The Same To Me,” talking pictures wouldn’t make their way into the Pantages until late April 29, 1929, with the premiere of William Wellman’s Chinatown Nights, starring Wallace Beery, Florence Vidor and Warner Oland.

An early gangster film, it was originally shot as a silent, with dialogue later over-dubbed. The Toronto Daily Star was quick to pan the film, claiming the grandest Canadian theatre’s “first talkie has too much shooting,” and that “its moral tone is not high.” (Read more…)

Silent Sundays, Toronto’s only year-long celebration of silent cinema, returns for our winter screening at the Revue Cinema with King Vidor’s devastating love story, La Boheme, on Sunday, January 15.

La Boheme
Directed by King Vidor
Starring Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Renee Adoree
Based on the book by Henri Murger
1926 | 120 min | 16mm

Featuring live piano accompaniment by William O’Meara.

About the film

With the modern-day silent film The Artist in full Oscar contention, Silent Sundays returns with a true gem from the silent era. Two of its greatest stars (Gish, Gilbert) and one of its greatest directors (Vidor) presented the screen’s first adaptation of Puccini’s opera, La Boheme. Gish, at the height of her stardom, plays Mimi, an orphaned embroiderer about to lose her Paris apartment, who falls in love with Rodolphe (Gilbert), a playwright in the same predicament. Rarely screened and unavailable on DVD in Canada, this devastating love story was a box office smash for Metro Goldwyn Mayer upon its release and played to packed houses for two solid weeks in Toronto’s Regent Theatre in May, 1926.

About the accompanist

Musical accompaniment was an integral part of the silent era. The Revue once again welcomes pianist William O’Meara, who has gained worldwide recognition for his silent film work. He has performed at the TIFF Cinematheque, Nuit Blanche, the Toronto Silent Film Festival, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Podenone, Italy and as far east as Perm, Russia, where he played the organ to the noted Russian silent, Man with a Movie Camera.

About the series

Silent Sundays launched in 2009 with the intention of screening silent films in an authentic silent movie house like The Revue, which opened in 1912. By selecting family-friendly comedies and adventure films, the series caters to the Revue’s neighbourhood crowd, and the results have consistently filled the Revue’s seats with cinephiles, families and the uninitiated alike. The National Post‘s Lia Grainger says the atmosphere “is so convincing it makes you want to check that your bonnet isn’t blocking anyone’s view” and that it showcases “a simple charm rarely duplicated in cinema today.”

Silent Sundays screens at the Revue Cinema, 400 Roncesvalles, on Sunday, January 15, 4pm. Admission is $12 for non-members, $10 members, and $7 for seniors and children. Doors open at 3:45PM. Come early and enjoy our silent era slideshow and hear the top musical hits of 1926!

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the advent of sound ended the careers of many silent film musicians who’d long been employed in Toronto movie houses. I expand on the sometimes turbulent history of labour relations in exhibition by looking at modern-day film projectionists and how they’re coping with the digital age. Originally published by The Globe & Mail in November, 2011.

The lobby of the 97-year-old Fox Theatre in the Beaches is decorated with classic film posters. Its former coat check vestibule is now a box office. With the exception of sugar-free syrups and organic juices at the concession stand, it appears much as it did in the 1950s.

But upstairs in the projection booth, owners Andy Willick and Daniel Demois recently converted to 2K digital cinema projection, a format that is fast becoming an industry standard even among the smaller independent and repertory theatres in Toronto, such as the Bloor and Royal cinemas. “With the big chains going digital, the availability of 35-millimetre prints is diminishing and will be even more difficult for an independent cinema to obtain,” said Mr. Demois.

The conversion and requisite upgrades cost the Fox $100,000. The owners of the east-end showplace are now wondering if the new system’s automation will still require full-time projectionists.

With the new format, films no longer arrive in heavy cans but as an encrypted hard drive that gets uploaded to the cinema’s server. “You can build a playlist, set up your whole week. It can be done by a projectionist in one sitting,” added Mr. Demois.

Eric Kruka, a spokesperson for IATSE Local 58, which represents projectionists, says that although negotiations with the Fox are still under way, they will continue to have a presence at the Queen Street East theatre. “It’ll be a matter of mutually deciding on where our skills are needed.”

“We’re not trying to eliminate them from the theatre,” said Mr. Willick. A 2008 merger with the stage-craft union has allowed its 30 members to learn new skills and work in live theatre. “Their skills as stage-hand workers could be applied in a movie theatre setting to do maintenance on equipment and fix masking.”

Sitting in the dimly-lit projection booth overlooking the multiplex that is TIFF Bell Lightbox – also equipped with digital cinema but showcasing many 35-mm and 70-mm prints – Mr. Kruka said that fewer jobs have been available since he completed his apprenticeship 12 years ago. “We took a pretty big hit when the big chains gave us the boot in the late 1990s,” he said, referring to their cost-cutting tactic of hiring unskilled projectionists in their highly automated environments.

“The large chains are in the food-service business. The movies are there as a loss leader to get people in to buy popcorn,” said Mr. Kruka, adding that the employers currently associated with the union are genuinely concerned about how films are presented.

According to Dave Callaghan, a second-generation projectionist whose passion for the craft is almost contagious, the projectionist’s main goal is to be invisible to the audience. “We bring an informed eye and ear to the movie-going experience. My role is to see that the film is reproduced in such an unobtrusive way that the audience gets so wrapped up in the story [they] forget they’re at the movies.”

Beginning his career at the former Cedarbrae Cinemas in Scarborough in 1971, Mr. Callaghan has worked at many forgotten Toronto movie houses, from the Golden Mile and the Roxy in Toronto’s east end, and for 13 years, the Hyland – one of the jewels of the former Odeon chain.

Jonathan Hlibka of the Projection Booth Theatre on Gerrard Street East asserts that adapting to new technologies will be essential to their craft. “They’ll have to learn the software, how the new hardware works, and have a deep understanding of the various formats as they emerge.” As Mr. Hlibka examines the digital cinema possibilities currently on the market for his theatre, he says the projectionist’s job is going to look a lot more like that of an engineer rather than a technician.

Both Mr. Kruka and Mr. Callaghan are well aware of how quickly new formats emerge. “I recently had to download a manual for a video projector I wasn’t entirely familiar with,” added Mr. Callaghan, who still works as a projectionist in various theatres around town, including Bell Lightbox and the Fox. “It’s a constant battle to keep up with everything.”

Eulogizing the physicality of real, pixel-free film, Mr. Callaghan said “it has a certain simplicity to it. You can just hold it up to the light and figure out what you need to do.”

Mr. Willick – whose theatre will still call on the union whenever 35-mm is screened – sympathizes with the cinephiles who bemoan the death of celluloid but maintains that the problem with the Canadian marketplace is the rough quality of circulating prints. “When we played The Shining last year, it was so brittle that it broke twice during the screening. That’s not charming, and it certainly doesn’t add any value to the experience.”

This year, they screened a digitally restored 2K version of Stanley Kubrick’s film and had their best Halloween-night attendance since taking over the cinema in 2007.

“It might seem like push-button automation, but the technology doesn’t have a brain,” said Mr. Callaghan, confident that the projectionist’s place in movie-going is at least more stable than that of the very film they’ve been handling for over a century.

Top image shows projectionists at the Imperial Cinema, circa 1940. Silent Toronto Archives.

While rummaging through the Revue Cinema’s projection booth in preparation for a recent Silent Sundays screening, I found this old “Adult entertainment” sign buried under some obsolete  electronics.

As we recently examined, Ontario was the first Canadian province to enact “Adult entertainment” film designations, reflecting the public’s reaction to the changing mores in Hollywood and European film-making. With their playful italics and authoritative bold type, these signs dangled underneath a theatre’s marquee or canopy — seen here at the Mavety Theatre showing The Tender Trap in 1956 — leading pre-pubescent boys to imagine what restrictive fun they were missing out on unless accompanied by an adult.

By the time Frank Sinatra’s film hit the west-end theatre, two other rating designations existed in Ontario’s 427 cinemas and 82 drive-in theatres: “General,” open to all, and “Restricted,” enacted in 1953, admitting those 18 and over.

But in the mid-1950s, cinemas were no longer the only place to see a film, and the kink in the neck of theatre exhibitors – otherwise known as television broadcasters — realized they weren’t under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Board of Censors and ceased submitting films for approval, prompting chief censor O.J. Silverthorne’s call for a federal film censorship board.

“What good is it for us to have one of the best Theatre Acts on the continent in this province, apply it conscientiously and carefully to all films shown in theatres, and then have television stations able to show any film they want without coming near us?” he asked the Toronto Daily Star outside the Board’s Leaside Ave. office on November 2, 1957.

Silverthorne had yet to witness anything licentious on Ontario airwaves, but there was “always that chance,” added the Chairman, who, at least weary of the power held by his office, once referred to the Theatres Act as “probably the most dictatorial act on the continent.”

Calls had previously been made by the clergy in censoring CBLT-Toronto, the CBC’s television service, prompting Public Relations spokesman Ron Fraser to defend the public broadcaster’s self-censoring methods. If something wasn’t in good taste, “it got the axe,” Fraser told the Daily Star. “As for the variety shows — sure, we might show girl dancers swinging their skirts or wearing brief costumes. Surely that isn’t indecent.”

Back at the Board of Censors, Rock & Roll movies were another problem faced by Silverthorne at the half-century mark. Socially conscious films like The Blackboard Jungle (1955), which featured Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, led to teenpics like Rock, Rock, Rock (1956) and Sweet Beat (1957). Silverthorne, whose censors and five inspectors regulated theatres province-wide, saw the B-grade filler as having a harmful effect on kids. ”The rock and roll era has not helped our work one bit and most of the films using it as a theme are full of hoodlum goons,” he said.

Teenpics, however, would be the least of Silverthorne’s worries. As the decade progressed, more European products — a few of which featured the supple curves of Brigitte Bardot or Gina Lollabrigida — made their way into Ontario theatres. Silverthorne’s 1958 report to the Premier showed a decrease in the amount of films shown overall, but a 30% increase in non-British imports — a natural supply and demand reaction to the broadening multi-culturalism of the 1950s — saw the emergence of a new kind of censorship.

Many of the European films censored that year weren’t done so to shield the eyes of puritanical North American audiences from any salacious material, but to prevent the perpetuation of what Silverthorne called the “misunderstanding of American life” shown in the immigrants’ countries of origin. With the new influx, Silverthorne’s broadening of cultural borders shows faint irony, given that overt American patriotism was once shunned by his predecessors.

Sources
The Toronto Daily Star, January 10, 1956; November 2, 1957; May 8 1959.
Liberty Magazine, February 1957, pp.32-35
Archives of Ontario, RG 31-2, Silverthorne’s 1958 annual report
Above image of O.J. Silverthorne from Toronto Daily Star, November 2, 1957.

In this weekend’s Globe & Mail, I examined how the digital conversion currently underway in several Toronto cinemas is affecting film projectionists. The Fox Theatre in the Beaches recently converted to 2k digital cinema projection, but here it is in 1934 — simpler times — when it was known as the Prince Edward Theatre. On the bill that day was Wheeler & Whoolsey’s Cockeyed Cavaliers.

The canopy shadowing Queen St., installed upon its opening in 1914 sadly no longer exists.

Image source: City of Toronto Archives, series 0372, sub-series 0358, item 1370.

If a modern-day horror film were shot in the Royal Ontario Museum, a director might be inclined to set some action in the museum’s bat cave.

But the revered exhibit didn’t exist 50 years ago when Julian Roffman directed The Mask, a psychological 3-D horror film which made use of the museum’s iconic totem pole. Premiering at Toronto’s Downtown Theatre on November 10, 1961, it ushered Canadian cinema into the horror genre established by Hollywood in the 1920s.

Screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox this week, the film, a drug-use allegory in which an archaeologist blames an ancient mask for terrible nightmares and murder, has always been a personal favourite of Paul Corupe, a Toronto-based writer and editor who founded Canuxploitation, a website examining the history of Canadian exploitation cinema. “The Mask is one of the first Canadian genre movies I saw that I truly recognized as Canadian,” says Mr. Corupe, comparing Mr. Roffman’s effort – the first Canadian film distributed by a major Hollywood studio – to a spook-show ride at the CNE: “A little creaky and campy, maybe, but still thrilling fun.”

In horror films – from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, to late-night cable staple Murder By Phone, in which a disgruntled employee kills customers through the phone lines and Deadly Eyes, where dachshunds dressed as large contaminated rats overrun the city and the TTC – Toronto typically seems cold and impersonal, says Mr. Corupe. “The quasi-futuristic concrete architecture so popular in the 1970s appears a lot because it gives the impression of soul-destroying bureaucracy and sinister government agencies up to no good,” he added.

The TIFF Bell Lightbox screening of The Mask on Wednesday coincided with UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. Sylvia Frank, director of the Film Reference Library, says that while much attention is paid to the preservation of early cinema, many more recent Canadian films are in danger of disappearing due to limited restoration funds. “The Mask is a perfect example,” said Ms. Frank. “It’s one of the only prints available in the world.”

Both Ms. Frank and Mr. Corupe agree that the uncertain survival status of many early Canadian horror films is partly due to the intense criticism they received upon their release, but late-night television viewing, DVDs and the interest generated on the internet have kept them alive – although Mr. Corupe still awaits the horror film debut of the ROM’s bat cave.

The above article is a slightly edited version of what ran in the Globe and Mail on Saturday, October 22, 2011. Image: The Toronto Daily Star, Nov 10, 1961.

Silent Sundays, our long-running celebration of silent cinema, returns for a special Halloween screening at the Revue Cinema with Paul Leni’s moody and gag-filled The Cat and the Canary on Sunday, October 30 at 4:00 p.m.

Directed by Paul Leni
From the stage play by John Willard
Starring Laura La Plante, Creighton Hale, Arthur Edmund Carewe
1927 | 82 mins | 16mm

Featuring live piano accompaniment by Laura Silberberg. The feature will be preceded by a short film.

About the film

Overshadowed by horror masterpieces of the 1920s like F.W.  Murnau’s Nosferatu and Rupert Julien’s The Phantom of the Opera, German director Paul Leni offered Hollywood two under-rated gems: The Man Who Laughs and The Cat and the Canary. The latter, a rarely-screened, stylized haunded house whodunit features just enough laughs to entertain the kids!

Influencing later “old dark house” films, the atmospheric silent introduces Annabelle West (La Plante) as the sole inheritor of a family will, provided she is deemed sane. Events take a mysterious turn when the lawyer disappears and Annabelle’s sanity comes into question. Based on a famous stage play, the film was dubbed “The Mystery Thriller of the stage filmed with new effects!”

When it premiered at the Uptown Theatre in September of 1927, the Daily Star called the film an audience phenomenon: “No audience ever shrieked quite so hard and so often here as that at the opening performances of this adaptaion of the well-known ghost play.”

The haunted house whodunit genre was popular genre throughout the 1920s. D.W. Griffith’s One Exciting Night was released in 1922 and Lon Chaney had spooked audiences in The Bat in 1926, but the Daily Star was quick to praise The Cat and the Canary: ”The fun in this ghost picture that so much resembles The Bat is created by the unexpected — not always the usual. There is nothing in the ghost technique of this that Lon Chaney and The Bat producer and other mystery people have not exploited. But the characters are more uncommon and the atmosphere are of the spook sort, less of the sheerly fantastic.”

About the accompanist

Silent Sundays welcomes Laura Silberberg, a Doctoral student in music composition at the University of Toronto. She has composed music in a variety of genres, including orchestral, chamber, choral, electroacoustic and top 40/popular music. Laura also composed the score for a children’s musical, In Harmony, which has been published and performed in Canada and the United States. Laura’s compositions and piano improvisations have been featured live on CBC Radio’s Here and Now show three times, as Metro Morning with Andy Barrie.

Laura has performed her compositions across Canada, the United States and in Japan. Her compositions have been performed by such renowned performers as the Gryphon Trio, Beverley Johnston and Peter Stoll, and the Amadeus Choir, having won the International Amadeus Songwriting Competition nine times. Laura was honoured by Maclean’s Magazine as one of 50 up and coming young Canadians under 30. She has received several scholarships from the University of Toronto for academic and musical excellence as well as three Ontario Graduate Scholarships.

Laura has accompanied several silent films at TIFF Bell Lightbox, the Toronto International Film Festival as well as the Toronto Silent Film Festival.

About the series

Silent Sundays launched in 2009 with the intention of screening silent films in an authentic silent movie house like The Revue, which opened in 1912. By selecting family-friendly comedies and adventure films, the series caters to the Revue’s neighbourhood crowd, and the results have consistently filled the century-old cinema’s seats with cinephiles, families and the uninitiated alike. The National Post‘s Lia Grainger says the atmosphere “is so convincing it makes you want to check that your bonnet isn’t blocking anyone’s view” and that it showcases “a simple charm rarely duplicated in cinema today.”

The Revue Cinema is located at 400 Roncesvalles Ave. Show starts at 4pm. Admission is $12 non-members/$10 members/$7 seniors & children.

Faced with declining attendance, films took a backseat at the Victory Theatre in September of 1961 when it became the Victory Burlesque, featuring striptease artists, Catskills comedians and musical acts.

Despite competition from neighbouring burlesque houses like the Casino and the Lux Theatre, the Victory’s opening weekend still packed them in. Headliner Little Star, “the blazing gal from outer space” – whose stage-name and tagline sounded not unlike that week’s Lux headliner, the iconic Blaze Starr – played continuous shows from 1pm until closing.

(A film, Portrait of a Mobster, was also shown. On Sunday, free hotdogs were served courtesy of  neighbour Shopsy’s.)

The late Tura Satana, most famous for her role in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was one of burlesque’s most popular stars in the early ’60s who visited headlined the Victory in April, 1963. “The Victory was a classy place, absolutely classy, and as a head-liner you were treated really well,” she said while visiting Toronto in 2008. “You’d see a lot of rule-breaking in other clubs, but they were pretty strict about enforcing them there.”

The Morality Clause

The rules, however, were sometimes broken, and most, if not all the time, Toronto’s Police Morality Squad was on-hand to witness a fallen pastie, a strict requirement in burlesque aesthetic. In April, 1962 – five months after police had warned management about a few line-crossing performances – Ann Perri, the “Jane Russell of Burlesque,” challenged the legalities of striptease.

Toronto Police inspectors, in attendance, charged Perri, theatre owners Myer and Lionel Axler as well as manager Jack Diamond with permitting an obscene performance.

The police report, signed by Insp. H.S. Thurston, alleges that Perri, 32, had “removed all of her costume with the exception of a flesh-coloured ‘G’ string and pasties, then lay on the floor, gyrating, raising her hips and simulating the act of sexual intercourse, moaning. At the completion of her act, she lowered the front of her ‘G’ string, exposing the pubic hair and a portion of her private person.”

In court, Perri claimed that burlesque’s popularity was due to its “aesthetic appeal,” not the sparse nudity. Magistrate Joseph Addison, probably having attended a burlesque house or two in his day, wasn’t buying it: “My recollection is that the more clothes the girls took off and the lewder their gestures, the more people applauded.”

The Axlers, as owners of New Strand Theatres Ltd., were ordered to pay $100 and Diamond $50. Perri’s charges were dismissed the following day.

The legalities of striptease

What was permitted on stage was often subjective, claimed Myer Axler, whose grandfather Isidore Axler built the building in 1922. In December of 1961, inspectors from the Morality Squad met with Axler and provided him with a “specific outline of the requirements for vaudeville acts.” While on the Burlesque Beat with the Toronto Star in 1965, Robert Fulford shared that particular list of requirements:

1. Pasties and full pants are to be worn. Pasties are to be other than flesh coloured and securely attached. If you should lose a pastie, cover yourself appropriately and go off stage and the orchestra will cut your act. All panties will be other than flesh coloured and have a two inch strip of heavier material up the middle of the back.
2. Once you start to remove your clothing, you cannot touch your body with your hands.
3. You cannot communicate with the audience: i.e talking, noises, give away items to patrons.
4. Do not touch curtains, walls or proscenium.
5. You are not permitted to lie down on stage or run-way
6. You are not permitted to bump a prop.
7. You are not permitted to make any body movements that in the eyes of the public would simulate an act of sexual intercourse.
8. You cannot run any article of clothing between your legs.
9. After the first performance Friday, you must return to the mezzanine where your act will be analyzed by management. When your act has been reviewed and deletions are made from your routine, you will do your act as approved by the management for the balance of the engagement.

Still, the occasional pasty slipped off from time to time, and as the years went on, boundaries softened.

By the ’70s, lewder acts could be seen in Yonge St. strip clubs like Starvin’ Marvin’s. In 1975, architect Mandel Sprachman gave the building its fourth lease on life, revamping it as the Golden Harvest cinema, catering Toronto’s Chinatown community. As other businesses took over the street-level store-front space, it closed by the early 1990s.

So much history, as Moore notes. “I’d love to see a plaque honouring its history,” he says of the building which will celebrate 90 years of social adjustment, unrest and moral-loosening next year.

The former Standard Theatre is a designated heritage property under the City of Toronto’s Heritage Preservation services. This series is a composite of two different articles originally published by the Toronto Star and Open File.

Sources
The Toronto Star, October 9, 1941; September 1, 1961; April 29, 1962; May 30, 31, 1962; February 20, 1965.
The Globe & Mail, May 31, 1962; June 20, 1962.
Fulford, Robert. “Crisis at the Victory Burlesk,” pp.255-258 in “The Underside of Toronto,” McLelland & Stewart, 1970.
Standard Theatre Heritage Designation Papers, City of Toronto Heritage Preservation Services, August 2006.

Images: top, Archives of Ontario, RG32B, file 49, item 15; middle, Satan’s Angel, 1969; bottom, The Toronto Star, April 29, 1962.

It’s no secret that Toronto houses many old theatres, from the majestically restored Elgin & Winter Garden, the iconic, soon-to-reopen Bloor Cinema to countless others still flickering away. But many of them, long since closed, are dilapidated shells of their former selves.

The former Standard Theatre, a three-storey structure housing a Royal Bank and a few Chinatown merchants on the north-east corner of Dundas and Spadina is one of the latter, but perhaps the most important surviving theatre in Toronto’s history. After opening in 1922 until the early 1990s, it catered to both Jewish and Chinese communities, and as the Victory Burlesque in the 1960s and 70s, played a significant role in loosening the tight-collared morals of Toronto the Good.

Built by Isidore Axler and architect Benjamin Brown, the Standard initially catered to Toronto’s Jewish community, featuring the likes of Jacob Ben-Ami, Paul Muni and Stella Adler. But unlike other cities, “Yiddish theatre in Toronto was not confined to Jewish neighbourhoods, which is why you had Yiddish performances at Massey Hall, Hart House and other venues,” says Ryerson University sociologist Paul Moore.

As performances slowed down in 1924, the site became a fixture for Jack Corcoran’s boxing promotions. Although nearly two decades since African-American boxer Jack Johnson first held the world heavyweight title, the site regularly featured mixed-race matches, much to the dismay of some local white boxing fans.

By the late ’20s, it was often the site of mass pro-labour protests and other forms of social unrest and the police often kept their eye on the building with the intent to circumvent an insurrection. In January, 1929, as a wave of anti-communism fervour swept the nation, Toronto Police Chief Draper banned the use of Yiddish at the Standard after complaints that “seditious utterances were made” during a memorial for Lenin.

John MacDonald, then secretary of the Communist party of Canada, told the Daily Star that he planned to appeal to various labour organizations for support. “The actions of Chief Draper show that he has no knowledge of the Labor movement and in fact, is absolutely ignorant and its ideals,” said MacDonald.

In 1935, sound was installed and the theatre was re-named The Strand, still presenting Yiddish stage productions but slowly becoming more and more dependent upon Hollywood films.

Moore, who maintains that a classic movie theatre shouldn’t be preserved simply because it is a classic movie theatre, advocates for the Standard’s preservation, “not only because of its Jewish theatre roots, but also because it was Nat Taylor’s first theatre.”

Taylor, as head of 20th Century Theatres, later invented the dual screen cinema, the multiplex concept, as well as countless other innovations in exhibition. He re-opened the theatre in October, 1941, renaming it the Victory, building a massive chain of cinemas along the way.

To be continued in The Standard: Pasties & g-strings at the Victory Burlesque. This article contains information I originally published at Openfile.

Sources

Image sources: (from top) City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 58, 1232a; Archives of Ontario