This film provides an early record of employees at the Picture House in Doncaster, one of the first cinemas in the region to accommodate the talking picture upon its advent in 1927. YFA has in its collections a number of films showing cinemas in Yorkshire, including a film of the opening of the Cecil Cinema in Hull, which can also be viewed online. Although it is not known who made the film, it is possible that it was shot with the assistance of the Associated British Cinema Corporation...

This film provides an early record of employees at the Picture House in Doncaster, one of the first cinemas in the region to accommodate the talking picture upon its advent in 1927. YFA has in its collections a number of films showing cinemas in Yorkshire, including a film of the opening of the Cecil Cinema in Hull, which can also be viewed online. Although it is not known who made the film, it is possible that it was shot with the assistance of the Associated British Cinema Corporation (ABC), who took over the running of the Picture House in 1926.

The Picture House was the brainchild of Mr A.L. Rhodes and opened on Doncaster High Street on September 28th, 1914. The film that played on its opening was The Sign of the Cross, a drama based on the 1895 play by Wilson Barrett and starring silent movie star William Farnum. The cinema retained a regular orchestra of around ten players to accompany their films until the dawn of the “talkie” in the late 1920s. Indeed, the Picture House (by then owned by ABC) was the first cinema to be “wired for sound” in Doncaster, and possibly even in the whole of Yorkshire. Its audience was treated to the first full-length feature film with sound when Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool arrived in the town on August 5th 1929. The new apparatus was so popular that the queue for the film was sufficiently long that the police had to be called in to help regulate it. This manifest success precipitated a rush for other cinemas in the area to take a similar approach: the Majestic in Hallgate followed suit eight weeks later, with the Savoy at the end of Scot Lane and the Palace in Silver Street also installing the apparatus within a year.

Although at the forefront of cinematographic technology in South Yorkshire, the Picture House was not the earliest cinema to have been built in Doncaster. After a series of film presentations in a canvas tent named “The Coliseum Bioscope” in the early 1900s by Alderman G.T. Tuby – later Mayor of Doncaster – the first permanent construction was erected in 1911 on Frenchgate. Known originally as the Electra, the purpose-built cinema had 630 seats and was owned by the Doncaster Electric Company. The Electra re-opened as The Regal in 1931 before its eventual closure 26 years later. The Picture House, on the other hand, lasted as a cinema until 1967 when it was replaced by the new ABC complex in Cleveland Street. The old building existed as a bingo hall throughout the subsequent decades, with its Egyptian-style auditorium being demolished in 2003.

We are able to date the film accurately to within three days – December 10th,11th or 12th 1931 – as the name of the film playing can just be made out behind the employees. This film was Dreyfus – directed by FW Kraemer and Milton Rosmer and starring Cedric Hardwicke in the title role. A scrapbook of newspaper clippings deposited at YFA includes an advert that bills the film as “the world-famous spy drama”, as well as a review that declares the movie to contain “one of the greatest court scenes the world has ever known”. We also know that the price for the film was split in four tiers, depending on seats:

Lounge: 2 shillings
Balcony: 1 shilling
Back Stalls: 9 pence
Front Stalls: 7 pence

Dreyfus ran from Thursday to Saturday and was replaced the following week by the mystery thriller The Bat Whispers accompanied by The Thrilling Capture of a Deadly Puff Adder, the second episode of the Adventures in Africa serial that would play alongside the main feature.

The star of Dreyfus, Cedric Hardwicke, later became an actor of great renown and worked alongside the likes of Paul Robeson, Spencer Tracy and Bela Lugosi. Hardwicke portrayed Bishop Myriel in the Academy Award-winning Les Miserables of 1935, as well as Pharoah Seti I in Cecil B DeMille’s 1956 epic The Ten Commandments. Only three years after Dreyfus, Hardwicke, aged 41, became the youngest ever actor to be knighted – a record which was broken by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1947. The ceremony did not go off without a hitch, however, as the famously hard-of-hearing King George V reportedly announced him erroneously as “Sir Cedric Pickwick”! Hardwicke died in 1964, but his son Edward continued his legacy by becoming an actor as well, most famously appearing as Dr Watson opposite Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes.

His father’s depiction of Alfred Dreyfus was of course based on real events of only a few decades earlier. Dreyfus, an artillery officer in the French Army, was convicted for treason in November 1894 and sent to a penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Despite the real culprit - Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy - being identified, the young Captain continued to languish in exile while Esterhazy was surreptitiously acquitted. When the new evidence came to light, the case sparked major controversy with prominent intellectuals such as Emile Zola one of many “Dreyfusards” who took up the case of the officer. Zola’s open letter J’accuse castigated the French government as anti-Semitic for its evident framing of the Jewish Dreyfus, an accusation that saw Zola himself convicted of libel and forced to flee to the UK. Eventually, Dreyfus was pardoned and returned to France, where he was re-instated in the Army and finally exonerated in 1906.

With many thanks to Keith Hill, who has supplied a wealth of information and fascinating archival material relating to the history of the Picture House.

Curry, R., Let’s Go to the Pictures (Doncaster, 1987)