nostalgic
"Swing High, Swing Low" may not be Carole Lombard's finest film for Paramount (though it has its charms), but it may have been her most popular vehicle at the studio. In fact, it was Paramount's top moneymaker for all of 1937.
Some of that money may have been made at a theater in Albany, N.Y., named the Madison, shown below not long after its opening in May 1929:
A Madison program from almost precisely 75 years ago, featuring "Swing High, Swing Low" among other films, is now available through eBay.
Note the Madison showed films from a variety of studios -- while the Madison was a Warners house, its fare also came from MGM, 20th Century-Fox and Paramount. It featured a special children's matinee on Saturday afternoons and that old '30s staple, "Bank Night," on Thursdays. (And the films -- the William Powell-Joan Crawford "The Last Of Mrs. Cheyney"! Tyrone Power and Loretta Young in "Love Is News"! Dick Powell, Madeleine Carroll and Alice Faye, with Irving Berlin songs, in "On The Avenue"!)
The program has a minimum bid of $7.99, with bids closing at 5:48 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday. If you're interested, visit http://www.ebay.com/itm/CAROLE-LOMB
The Madison is still around today with relatively low ticket prices, although it's been subdivided and has relatively little resemblance to its original self:
Oh, and congratulations to Ginger Rogers, who beat Lombard 141-94 in the finals of the Silents/1930s bracket of the 2012 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tourney. Other winners include Grace Kelly in the 1950s bracket (she beat Elizabeth Taylor 48-40) and Natalie Wood, who trounced Jean Simmons 45-25 in the 1960s bracket.
This week's LiveJournal header commemorates the start of baseball season with Carole Lombard actually playing baseball, in a two-strip Technicolor sequence from the 1928 Mack Sennett short "The Campus Vamp." Batter up!
