Coventry Cinemas

This sounds like Magnificent Obsession (1954). "The Blind Girl" was played by Jane Wyman.

The Empire strikes back Well, not really - this is the old Paris Cinema in Far Gosford Street, and is now a "multi use, music and club venue" It looks like a cinema from the outside - but it's not Their website is here, and if you check on the news tab you will see that, on 30 May, there is a special event celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Coventry City's FA Cup Final victory

The film 'Gone With The Wind' was the most hyped up film to come to Coventry at the time. My elder sister had planned to take me. Some films kids were not allowed in without a grown up. Jokes were made about gone with the bombs but we should have been counting our blessings. A few years later in either Belgium or Holland a Rex Cinema was showing 'Gone With The Wind' to a packed house, it received a direct hit from a runaway V2 Rocket, nearly three hundred people were killed.

Wikipedia reports it was in Antwerp. The death toll of 567 was the highest ever from a single rocket attack.

mcsporran. It was somewhere near the beginning of April 1945, in Aldershot, I was talking to another Coventry soldier about if we had seen the last of the V2 rockets over London, one had killed a number of people in London a few days before, when he told me about the one in Belgium, so facts were a little hazy in those days.

. . . when did the Rivoli take over or when did they show Asian pictures . . . Edited by Midland Red, 19th Aug 2017 2:44 pm (Partly copied from post to 'Longford' thread)

Hi Kaga, I reckon that the Ritz cinema began showing Asian films in the early 1960s. I remember going there in about 1962ish. It had always been called the Rivoli before the Ritz, when we, as kids, started going there in the 1950s.

johnwright, hi, I think the first of my visits it was still the Dovedale, early thirties, then the Rivoli, so you would miss Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, Margwa the Red Indian, and early forties, Spencer Tracy in the Northwest Passage, now that was some film for kids, human head in a bag and they were all starving hungry. 'Wow'.

Does anyone remember the Astoria cinema in Earlsdon? It was on the l/h side before the traffic island coming from The Butts college. I saw "Island in the Sun" starring Harry Belafonte in the 60's (boring film). Strangely I can vividly remember exactly at which cinema I saw the different movies I went to see back in the 50's & 60's. Yet I can't recall where I put my car keys yesterday. Weird or what?

The Astoria is still there: It's now the Nexus music academy.

A later version

Midland Red. Yes I believe it to be the first cinema in Coventry in the fifties, with French films - Wages of Fear, Fernandel in many pictures, his face and expressions more than Frankie Howerd, he was so funny. The first films of Brigitte Bardot, opened the eyes of many Coventry girls and much more? Curt Jurgens, U-boat captain in The Enemy Below. Yep the Standard was a favourite cinema of mine. I seem to recall it could have been the first cinema with double seats, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The Empire in Hertford Street had double seats at the back of the circle!

I second that!!