The House That Shadows Built (1928)

THE COMEDY THEATRE 119 heavily advertised, drew great crowds to the Arcade at “collection hours” — five in the afternoon and nine at night. As the “moving-picture craze” increased, Kohn and Shauer leased the floor above and opened a fivecent cinema show. You mounted to it by an iridescent and illuminated glass staircase, under which ran a constant stream of water. In normal circumstances Zukor might justly have quarrelled with relatives who set up opposition next door, but at the moment he welcomed the move. Already the Comedy was packed at every performance; he was turning so many people away as to injure the reputation of his house for comfort and accessibility. Presently, the company into which he and Brady had faded Hale’s Tours was returning dividends of twenty per cent. What were the Comedy and the Penny Arcade giving the public by way of entertainment? Of late I have seen some of those old films. To draw a comparison with a thing infinitely more dignified, it is as though a habitual patron of the Globe Theatre, in the days when Shakespeare and Jonson wrote the play, Burbage and Kemp acted it, should have met by accident a team of mummers reciting a clownish dialogue at a country fair. Here were the roots from which grew the Globe, the Blackfriars, Bartholomew Fair, Hamlet; but to the eyes of a more sophisticated generation they were merely grotesques. Taking conservatively a cue from The Great Train