Before the opening of The Lincoln Theatre in the small town of Marion, Virginia, locals had to travel far to experience a brand new form of entertainment: talkies.
Motion pictures that featured sound date back to the 1890s, when Thomas Edison experimented with filming a scene while also recording the sound onto a wax cylinder. This never caught on and it took until 1927 for sound film to become successful. Yet, it remains an important part of film history. It shows how people always wanted to make movies bigger, better, and more realistic.
The Lincoln Theatre opened on July 1st, 1929. The place was at max capacity, holding nearly 800 people. At the time segregation was strong so when the standard theatre seating got full, many white locals poured into the balcony; this area was the "colored" section up until the late 1950s. Everybody wanted to experience sound film.
Opening night was a huge success. The night began with a screening of the short film Melancholy Dame (Arvid E. Gillstrom, 1929). This two-reel talkie was released by Paramount Pictures and featured a predominately black cast. This is one of the earliest surviving examples of a "race film." These were movies starring black actors that were targeted at black audiences. That being said, there are still many controversial aspects of "race films," and The Lincoln Theatre even went as far as promoting the film as "all talking, singing, dancing, laughing, blackface."
Following those two-reels was a screening of Close Harmony (John Cromwell & A. Edward Sutherland, 1929). This musical comedy was also released by Paramount Pictures but unlike Melancholy Dame it is mostly lost. Online you can find the first and last reels equaling to about 20 minutes of footage. No efforts have been made to locate any other surviving copies. Many early talkies have suffered this same fate and a good portion of films released before the 1940s have been lost to time.
The same two films would be screened again on July 2nd, and The Lincoln Theatre would solidify itself into the community. We began as a hub for art in Southwest Virginia and still hold those same values today.
To learn more about the history of film, join us at our Film Freaks program on the first Friday of every month.