Old movie magic

Decades ago, movie stars were exhibited on giant posters, which added color and grandeur to the beautiful buildings and the bustling street.

By BARRY DAVIS
A World War II-era poster featuring actress Ann Sheridan at the Mograbi Cinema. (photo credit: EPHRAIM ERDE)
A World War II-era poster featuring actress Ann Sheridan at the Mograbi Cinema.
(photo credit: EPHRAIM ERDE)
Anyone who goes along with the postmodernesque tenet that “nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” should get themselves along to the Eretz Israel Museum, in Ramat Aviv, to catch an eyeful of the new Allenby and Mograbi exhibition. The show is subtitled Film Posters on the Façade of Cinemas, 1931-1959, which basically gives the thematic game away. And a delightfully alluring lineup it is too.
The titular building fronts in question relate, in fact, to just two of Tel Aviv’s leading cinemas. During the 28-year period in question, the Allenby and Mograbi movie theaters, which were a stone’s throw from each other in Tel Aviv, were run by Yeruham Vardimon whose family had lived in Palestine for five generations and, judging by the display at the museum, he pulled out all the stops to bring the public in from the street and on to the wooden folding seats in the auditoria.
Much of Allenby and Mograbi is taken up with enlarged monochrome prints of the advertisements Vardimon displayed at the front of the cinemas which, to put it mildly, could not possibly be missed by passersby. Tel Aviv residents and visitors to the city, for example, would no doubt have gawked at the getup Vardimon laid on, at the front of the Mograbi cinema when 1940 musical Tin Pan Alley, starring Alice Faye and Betty Grable, ran there. The giant faces of the two leading actresses, plus the appealing countenance of actor John Payne, beamed down on pedestrians making their way along Allenby Street, to the sea or the shuk, or heading for nearby Ben-Yehuda Street.
“In those days, the facades of the movie theaters were spectacles,” notes exhibition curator Guy Raz. “The movie stars were exhibited on giant posters, which added color and grandeur to the beautiful buildings and the bustling street.” According to Raz, the cinema honchos of the time not only pulled off movie advertising stunts; they also enhanced the aesthetics of the city’s main thoroughfares, and they had one person to thank for showing them the way. “This creative marketing approach was conceived by the cinema owner, Yeruham Vardimon.”
By all accounts, Vardimon was quite a character. He was multitalented, and used his natural and developed skills in various channels of enterprise. He was a trained electrical engineer, at Yale University and in Berlin, and also qualified as a teacher, teaching Hebrew in Jerusalem, where he lived before he moved into the cinema management sector. He spent several years in Australia, where he also worked as a Hebrew teacher. He was clearly a resourceful character. “He established an enormous choir, of 100 people, in Jerusalem,” recalls Vardimon’s 79-year-old son, Reudor Vardimon. “He was a member of the Hagana, which had an underground firing range next to the headquarters of the CID [British police force’s Criminal Investigations Department] in Jerusalem. He had the choir sing very loudly in order to muffle the sound of the firing.”
The Mograbi cinema was originally designed for great and eclectic cultural things when Ya’acov Mograbi, an affluent Jewish merchant who immigrated to Palestine from Damascus, put the building up in 1930, and it filled most of its initial remit. In addition to the cinema, the spacious edifice also provided space for some of the first Hebrew-language theaters, including Hamatate, Ha’ohel, Habima, and the Cameri.
In its final lease of life, the ground-floor smaller side venue housed the Studio cinema. But, when Mograbi first proposed to establish the movie theater, then Tel Aviv mayor Meir Dizengoff asked the new oleh if he could incorporate an opera facility in the plans. For some reason that never worked out, but the building still bore the name the Mograbi Cinema Opera.
When Vardimon Sr. moved into the movie theater business he quickly set about upping the aesthetics ante. “My father had a studio behind the building,” says Vardimon. “That’s where they made all these lovely things.” This was a serious marketing venture. “These weren’t just posters, this was actually scenery,” adds Vardimon with undisguised pride. Most of the early Mograbi and Allenby cinema posters were made by Israel Hirsch. That was up to 1935, after which a more American style ruled local movie theater fronts.
Many of the large images in the exhibition, which also incorporate movie excerpts from way back when, were sourced from the close to 200 black-and-white prints Vardimon managed to salvage and store for over half a century. A large number of the photographs were taken by Ephraim Erde, whose sunny disposition – naturally with a camera slung around his neck – is also displayed at the museum.
Shortly after taking over the running of the Mograbi cinema, Vardimon Sr. put his electrical skills, not to mention his inventive streak, to good use. “It was an open-air cinema when my father took it over,” explains Vardimon.
“My father installed an electric roof, you know like they have at [famed London tennis center] Wimbledon, although of course not so sophisticated. So, when it rained in the winter, people could still watch movies.”
Some of Vardimon’s earliest memories are of climbing up to the roof of the building and watching the movies from his lofty perch. “I could see the screen, and also look at the audience from above,” he recalls with a chuckle. “In the summer, that was the best place to be, where there was a breeze. You could say I was like the kid in [1988 Oscar Award-winning] Cinema Paradiso.”
“Look at this,” says Vardimon, pointing to a giant-sized hoarding with an alluring image of actress Ann Sheridan. “That was taken during World War II. And look at this one of Boris Karloff.” The latter was the English actor who is best remembered for his portrayals of Frankenstein’s monster in movies that spanned the 1930s.
“These were all my father’s ideas,” says Vardimon about the cinema fronts. “He put a lot of work into these creations.”
Amazingly, all that effort quickly went by the board. “In those days, if a movie was really successful it maybe ran for two to three weeks,” Vardimon points out. So his dad was kept busy, and not just with the actors’ images. “Aesthetics were very important to my father, and he paid a lot of attention to the shapes of the letters in the advertising backdrops he made. He tried to make each letter as distinctive as possible. My father’s true love was the Hebrew alphabet.”
Vardimon says his father’s Hebrew teaching skills also came into play. “My dad liked to produce creative Hebrew equivalents of the original movie titles.
He often didn’t just translate them word for word, and used all kinds of word games to convey something of the spirit of the movie.”
Vardimon Sr. was clearly also a cinephile, and his homespun visuals, in addition to his movie selection and attention to linguistics and calligraphy, left their mark on generations of moviegoers in these parts.
Allenby and Mograbi closes on February 28, 2016. For more information: (03) 641- 5244 and www.eretzmuseum.org.il