Just re-reading Nemo’s comments about “dumps”, I realise that we have or had much the same thing in Australia until quite recently: the commuter town my family lived in in the 1990s had a small independent cinema which would show films which had recently stopped playing in the big multiplexes in the city. Last I heard they seemed be showing new releases so maybe that era is over here, too.

I think Alan’s suggestion is more likely — I can well imagine some pro-peace pressure group paying for slide advertisements that ran before the features and newsreels etc. At least, they used to run here, I’m guessing they did in the UK too. Guess I need to read up on British interwar cinemas …

In Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE(1936) Mr. Verloc runs such a dump when he’s not planting bombs. It’s a pretty safe bet he isn’t showing the latest films. (Like in SABOTAGE, many dumps were family run businesses).

This system prevailed (again, in the US, but probably elsewhere) until the 1970s. I was born in 1957, so I can remember the last years of it in the late 1960s and earliest 1970s. There was a dump in my town of 10,000 or so people that seated about 200 and was sometimes referred to (by kids anyway) as “The Armpit” or “The Stinkbox”.

So its quite possible that in 1936 a film could open in a majestic theatre in the center of Everytown in February and be playing in Mr. Verloc’s dump in November or December.

For more on second-run theaters:

http://www.kulture-void.com/motion/kvp/ecg/dennis.html

On other hand, there’s always the possibility that Liepmann shouldn’t be taken too literally. Maybe the quote is not intended to be an exact one; and maybe he was writing from memory and got the date wrong. However, the text indicates he was revising the English edition in mid-January 1937, so he probably wouldn’t confuse a film that came out almost a year earlier for one from a month or two ago.

Get ready for a Homer Simpson “D’oh!” momen’t. The 1936 film referred to is obviously THINGS TO COME, the adaptation of H.G. Wells’ THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but the film begins with an eerily presceint depiction of what would come to be called the blitz, except some of the bombs have poison gas. (At any rate I remember characters with gas masks). This film was widely distributed, although it didn’t do that well at the box office.

Alan:

I did think it might have something to do with some sort of peace group — I hadn’t heard of the Anti-Poison Gas Association, though, thanks for that. It seems that many single-issue groups popped up in the 1930s; on the other side of the (armament) fence were the Air Raid Defence League, not to be confused with (my favourite so far) the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League.

I found the Times reference, it’s from a letter to the editor on 22 July 1936, from the APGA secretary Mr W. Crompton Holgate of Glasgow, writing to urge that the Government continue to support the 1925 Geneva gas protocols. He claims that the APGA has 20,000 members. But it seems to have left few traces, otherwise.

Nemo:

Oh, thanks for clueing me in on the correct name, I wondered why IMDB didn’t know about it. I didn’t realise it was silent, either; I think that would have limited its audience, it does sound like something that might be shown in a lecture hall rather than a cinema. As Liepmann refers to ‘the picture-houses of the United Kingdom’, I now tend to doubt he was thinking of Hell Unlimited.