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Summary This is a short film thanking cinema-goers for their patronage over the past year and wishing them a happy new year. The film is accompanied by a song, the lyrics for which also appear onscreen.
Description This is a short film thanking cinema-goers for their patronage over the past year and wishing them a happy new year. The film is accompanied by a song, the lyrics for which also appear onscreen.
The film opens with a bare tree, the branches of which are in the shape of 1938. The tree melts away.
Title – Good-bye Old Year…
There is a clock in the background, and a man sings a song thanking the audience for support throughout the year. A Jan 1939 calendar is in the corner of the screen, and various celebration images appear with the song lyrics onscreen.
Title – 1939 Happy New Year
Context
In the style typical of the Hollywood films of the 1930s, with the top hats and champagne glasses evoking the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, cinemas wish their audiences a Happy New Year, sang to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, for that inauspicious year of 1939.
There is no information on this film other than that it was donated by a Mr Smith. He also donated a cinema advert from around the same time for Fan Fare magazine: “The Pocket Magazine for All Filmgoers.” Presumably this...
In the style typical of the Hollywood films of the 1930s, with the top hats and champagne glasses evoking the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, cinemas wish their audiences a Happy New Year, sang to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, for that inauspicious year of 1939.
There is no information on this film other than that it was donated by a Mr Smith. He also donated a cinema advert from around the same time for Fan Fare magazine: “The Pocket Magazine for All Filmgoers.” Presumably this cine short was made for any cinema to use, as there isn’t anything to indicate a link to a particular cinema or cinema chain. Brought over by emigrating Scots, Auld Lang Syne had been popularised as an anthem for New Year by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadian Big Band who played it on his American radio and TV shows from 1929 onwards. Perhaps fittingly, a nine-year-old Shirley Temple sang the song to a dying soldier in the 1937 John Ford film Wee Willie Winkie.
