Exclusive Preview: ‘A 1928 Night at the Movies’ – A Celebration of the Tennessee Theatre’s 90th Anniversary

 

The historic Tennessee Theater is having its 90th anniversary this year, and it will be celebrating by becoming something of a time machine. This coming Monday, October 1st, the Tennessee Theater will host a one-time-only event called “A 1928 Night at the Movies,” which will allow all Knoxvillians to experience the glamourous theater as it would have been by Jazz-age audiences: not merely a film screening, but a night out.

For this event, the Tennessee Theater will be screening an approximation of what it did on its opening weekend. And because theater attendees in the early days of cinema were accustomed to something more along the lines of a variety show than a single presentation, the Tennessee Theater’s Monday night program will reflect this: in addition to a feature film and its trademark Wurlitzer organ performance, visitors will also get to see a comedy short, a cartoon, and even a vintage newsreel from the days of the theater’s grand opening. And although the event is free to the public, they’re even encouraging patrons to pay a symbolic and unadjusted-for-inflation ticket price of 60 cents—just for authenticity’s sake. I’ll be bringing some dimes, for sure.

All this information has been readily available on the web to those keeping tabs on the theater’s programming announcements, but Arts Knoxville has been given the Tennessee Theater’s blessing to announce a few exclusive specifics. Firstly, the comedy short that will be played before the nights feature will star none other than the classic slapstick duo Laurel and Hardy! The prolific comedy team starred in eleven short films in 1928, so it’s still anyone’s guess as to which exact title that Knoxvillians will be treated to.

The feature, however, is certain: “A 1928 Night at the Movies” will culminate with a screening of It starring Clara Bow, who codified the term “It-Girl” with her iconic role in the film. Although It was released a year before the Tennessee Theater’s grand opening, the first-ever screening at the Tennessee Theater featured another Clara Bow film called The Fleet’s In, which, like many titles of the highly flammable era of celluloid silents, is now lost to time.

In a review of the historic Fleet’s In screening, the 1928 News Sentinel claimed that “Clara (Bow) had a hard time trying to keep the attention of this first audience whose eyes wandered to the great dome, to the vases on the walls filled with glass flowers, to the fresco of queer little animals silhouetted around the cornice, the pinkish red walls and the huge stage with its ornamental borders.” I don’t imagine Monday night’s audience will have a hard time focusing on It, however, which is a fantastic choice to replace the theater’s long-lost opener.

A rambunctious love-triangle rom-com between a seamstress, her boss, and his friend, It centers on Clara Bow’s character, who has, as they say, “It”—defined by Cosmopolitan writer Elinor Glyn as “that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force.” Much like a more recently-coined aura of confidence that will go unnamed in this classy publication, “It” is an indifferent swagger that can’t be learned and can’t be ignored. When the film’s leading man sees the leading lady for the first time, the camera does a hard zoom-in on his reaction shot—a move uncharacteristic of the silent era but one wholly necessary for framing Bow as a presence to be reckoned with.

Her characterization is, of course, historically loaded. She’s the “New Woman” of the Roaring Twenties, an indecorous flapper-type who defies historical notions of what it has meant to be referred to as “she”—Bow’s character works outside of the home, she is grown and single, she lives with another woman who has a child out-of-wedlock, and she is, as a particularly conservative character says, “rather lacking in reserve” (or, in another character’s words, “positively top-heavy with ‘IT!’”).

On one level, the film’s titular conceit works as a plot mechanic: it allows a sort of automatic buy-in to the sometimes unbelievable “love at first sight” trope that rom-coms often hinge upon. In a way, the film is the structural opposite of another delightful rom-com screened by the Tennessee Theater, When Harry Met Sally; this film’s front-loaded pop-psychology makes being smitten with Cupid’s arrow a matter of course, and the drama comes from the many structural barriers keeping the two lovers apart. Much of this barricading comes in the form of formulaic love-triangle stuff, of course, but it’s often sociopolitical as well, perhaps influenced by the “social problem” movies of the previous decade. On the one hand, the film totally works as bubbly rom-com, but that energy is always threatened by pressing societal forces.

Bow’s character lives in poverty, for example—the kind of neighborhood where riffraff kids just wander in her apartment when the door is left open too long—and she’s in love with her wealthy employer. Her social life becomes a subject of media scrutiny when her roommate’s child custody is threatened by social services, who disapprove of the lack of financial stability and male presence in the home. Bow’s fierce and scrappy independence is a threat to the social structure of the film world—typified by the leading man’s other hopeful lover, who is much more of a traditionally glamorous aristocratic beauty, covered in gleaming evening gowns for much of the film. Bow’s idea of a good time is not cruising on a yacht, but singing sea shanties on a ukulele or tearing up some fairground rides (the filming of which constantly plays around with disorienting movement—it’s one of the film’s most powerful sequences). She (and It) is a bit of a riot.

Directed by Clarence G. Badger (with uncredited direction by the masterful Josef von Sternberg), It will surely make for a crowd-pleasing grand finale to “A 1928 Night at the Movies,” a singular event not to be missed by lovers of film, history, and Knoxville art culture. There’s also a good chance that the film (and all the shorts leading up to it) will be projected on celluloid!

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