Greenfield Garden Cinemas is inviting its visitors to travel back to a time of double-features and single-screen theaters in its series, “Fabulous ’40s Films with Jonathan Boschen.”
The series kicked off on Sept. 1 with “Casablanca” and will continue with “Arsenic and Old Lace” on Oct. 6, “Mildred Pierce” on Nov. 3, and “The Man Who Came to Dinner” on Dec.1, with five more ’40s films slated for the winter and spring seasons.
After the success of last year’s series, “Talking Talkies” with 1930s classics, Garden Cinemas co-owner Isaac Mass said he reached out again to local film historian Jonathan Boschen. Together, they decided to expand the series into the next decade.
“So many people have never seen these films on the big screen,” Mass said. Instead of streaming the decade’s films at home, Boschen will pull audiences back in time to the moment the movies first played at Garden Cinemas. The movie expert will brief the audience with 15 minutes of cultural context, behind the scenes fun facts and glimpses into the films’ showtimes in Greenfield “so that you’re in the time and place,” Mass said.
“We’re now in an era where everything is available, but you don’t know what to look for,” Mass said. “There’s nothing curated for you … If you just go and watch it on Prime, you don’t know what you’re watching.”
With the “Fabulous ’40s” series, Mass said viewers can watch these classic films on the big screen with a full theater. “I think [going to] the movies is a communal experience,” Mass said. “It’s so much better when you’re watching it with lots of other people, and they’re laughing at the same lines or jumping at the same scares.”
Mass and Boschen hope Boschen’s background on the movies will let viewers drift back to the 1940s together, when going to the movies was a community event and locals visited Garden Cinemas’ single-screen outdoor theater several times a week for a full program of films.
A Greenfield native, Boschen grew up in the Garden Cinemas’ theaters. “My parents kept going on about how there used to stars in the skies, and a village, and I could never visualize what it was,” Boschen said. Until, in middle school, he spotted a picture of the cinema’s theater from its start in 1929 inside a library book.
Boschen said the “sense of community” in the theater charmed his curiosity. “[Garden Cinemas] was meant not just to be a place to see movies, but definitely a whole experience,” he explained. From then on, “I was determined to learn about the different theaters in town.”
Since then, Boschen has published research on theaters in Greenfield and beyond, including the Jam Handy, a venue in Detroit and the subject of an article he wrote for the Theatre Historical Society of America.
While he described Garden Cinemas’ first theater as “this New England village theme” with its interior modeled after a colonial home, he described Athol’s early York Theatre as an ornate palace where “you felt like a king and queen.” On the bench inside Garden Cinemas, Boschen said, “It was a completely different culture and experience that I just fell in love with.”
The movie theater expert said Mass even reminds him of the “classic showman from that era that knows how to really promote and make something fun.”
Boschen described October’s showing, the 1944 film “Arsenic and Old Lace,” as a “dark screwball comedy,” one of his favorite genres of film beside animated and cartoon films. Although “Arsenic and Old Lace” follows Cary Grant and Priscilla Lane’s characters on Halloween night, Boschen said the movie is not the holiday’s typical horror.
“I love Halloween, but one thing I don’t like about Halloween are the slasher movies,” Boschen said. “I’m grossed out by them, they’re not fun. I want something that’s going to make me feel happy.”
Boschen will start setting the scene with his introduction at 6:30 p.m., and the film will immediately follow. Tickets are $10.50 for adults and $8.50 for children, seniors and students.