Return to the New Gallery

A few days ago, at the BFI Southbank, I told the story behind Cary Grant’s only British-financed picture, The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss. It had its premiere in November 1936 at the New Gallery in Regent Street, a long-gone cinema that deserves a special place in British film history.

It was where, on 11 October 1927, a “new cinema wonder” made its début. As that day’s Daily Express explained:

A device which will revolutionise the world of entertainment will be presented this morning for the first time in Europe, at the New Gallery Kinema. It is the Western Electric sound projector system of “Movietone,” which reproduces with almost uncanny realism the person and personality of the artist, and at the same time broadcasts full orchestrated effects.

The big picture that began the sound era in Britain was the Fox film 7th Heaven, starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, “the film that plays its own music!”

But Movietone could also talk its own talk, as was demonstrated a few weeks later, when the New Gallery exhibited a series of Fox-Movietone shorts that featured such famous personalities of the time as Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge and George Bernard Shaw actually speaking! In sync!

The landmarks of cinema that were celebrated at the New Gallery in the years that followed included the British premieres of the first ever full-length 3-strip Technicolor film, Becky Sharp, Disney’s first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and David Lean’s Brief Encounter.

The last film to be shown at the New Gallery, before it closed in September 1953, was Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, starring Anna Magnani. But when I went along to Regent Street to look for traces of the New Gallery’s glory days, the Italian director that I was most reminded of was Michelangelo Antonioni. His 1966 film Blow Up offers a perfect snapshot of the absurdities of fashionable London, still alive and well fifty years later in the flagship store of Burberry, which took over the old New Gallery cinema in 2012.

It was an agreeable surprise to be able to step into this reminder of one my favourite Swinging London films, but what of the New Gallery, which had played such an honourable role in British film culture long before London began to swing? For that I had to look up at the splendid original dome:

And above the designer sneakers – which retail for about £500 a pair – I was able see the original grille for the pipes of the old Wurlitzer organ:

And hidden away in a tiny little cubbyhole beneath the grand staircase, quietly out of sight of the fashionistas, I found the organ itself, still in working order, and waiting to have a chance to play again.