I have just been re-reading an earlier article I did about the late, great Gerald Parkes – Cinema Owner, Entrepeneur and a man with an unrivalled knowledge of films and the cinema over many decades.
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He became one of the youngest Cinema Managers in 1969 at the Ritz Cinema in Keighley
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THIS view of Keighley’s Ritz Cinema can be dated to a week in mid-April of 1952 when it ran the “best film of the year”, the Academy Award-winning An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, with music by George and Ira Gershwin.
A special showing was put on for Easter Monday, starting at 10.40 in the morning.
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The Ritz opened in 1938 and the first Film shown was the classic ‘Lost Horizon’ with Ronald Colman
Seating 1,526 and provided with a Compton 3Manual/5Rank organ and small variety stage the Ritz Cinema was the most luxurious theatre in the area and it even had the facility of a café-restaurant which seated 100. It was designed by the well respected firm of Verity & Beverley with Sam Beverley acting as the chief architect for the scheme.
It was renamed ABC on 30th July 1971 and showed its last film on 2nd February 1974
A stage and dressing rooms were intended for variety shows. Indeed, the Ritz would later accommodate productions of the Keighley Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society.
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