Patrick Comerford
Ever since my childhood, I wondered why cinemas had names that evoked the classics. I was born across the street from the Classic Cinema on Rathfarnham Road and a few doors away from Terenure Synagogue. The proximity of those two landmark buildings led the members of the more salubrious Adelaide Road synagogue to jest in the 1950s and the 1960s about the ‘cinema-gogue.’
But, apart from the Classic Cinema in Terenure, other cinemas in Dublin with names that evoked the classics and classic theatre included the Corinthian and the Adelphi in the city centre, and (I suppose) the Stella in Rathmines, recently named one of the world’s 20 most beautiful cinemas.
For people who have grown up in England, the big cinema chain with a classically-inspired name was the Odeon Cinema chain founded in 1928 by Oscar Deutsch (1893-1941), and the London flagship cinema, the Odeon on Leicester Square, opening in 1937.
Words such as theatre, drama and tragedy are derived from Greek and the cultural life of classical Athens. The ancient Greek ᾨδεῖον (ōideion) means ‘a place for singing’, and the original Odeons were the popular but smaller amphitheatres of ancient Greece. They include the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, built on the south slopes of the Acropolis in 161 CE by Herodes Atticus and today it remains the premiere showcase for the performing arts in Athens.
The name Odeon had been appropriated by cinemas in France and Italy by the 1920s. Mel Mindelsohn, a grocery shop owner who was an early business partner of Otto Deutsch, suggested using the name Odeon after spotting it in Tunis. Years later, however, it was suggested the name Odeon was an abbreviation of ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains our Nation’.
Oscar Deutsch made the name his own in cinemas throughout Britain, so much so that people claimed the word Odeon was an acronym for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation.’
Oscar Deutsch was born in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, on 12 August 1893, the son of Leopold Deutsch, a successful Hungarian Jewish scrap metal merchant. Leopold came to England from Hungary in the 1900s with his wife Leah Cohen, a Jewish emigrant from Poland. He went into business with his cousin, Adolph Brenner, and Deutsch & Brenner went on to have a number of strip metal factories and rolling mills.
After attending King Edward VI Five Ways Grammar School, Oscar began working at his father’s metal firm in Birmingham. In 1925, He rented his first cinemas in Wolverhampton and Coventry in 1925 and started exhibiting subsequent runs of films. Then, in 1928, he opened his first cinema in Brierley Hill, Dudley.
Oscar Deutsch had 26 Odeons by 1933 and ‘Odeon’ was fast becoming a household word, used interchangeably with ‘cinema’ in some parts of England until after World War II.
The cinema-opening pace accelerated after Deutsch met the architect Harry Weedon (1887-1970) in 1932. Weedon had been in Birmingham making alterations to a factory run by Deutsch’s father Leopold and the cinema boss hired him to work on interiors for an Odeon in Warley, Staffordshire.
It was the start of a prolific partnership. They opened five new cinemas in 1933, and 16 the year after. Another 33 opened in 1936 – and the same again in 1937. Weedon expanded his team of six staff into an office employing 140. Turnarounds were fast.
Odeons became known for their art deco architecture, first used in the Odeon in Kingstanding to a design by Cecil Clavering, who worked for Harry Weedon. Clavering designed three further Odeons, at Sutton Coldfield, Colwyn Bay and Scarborough. They were seen as ‘one masterpiece after the other’ and they were considered ‘the finest expressions of the Odeon circuit style’.
Clavering stunned Weedon in 1935 when he resigned and moved to the Office of Works. Clavering was replaced by Robert Bullivant and Weedon was then commissioned by Deutsch to oversee the design of the entire chain.
The striking Kingstanding Odeon (1935) was followed by the flagship Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square, London, which opened in November 1937 with The Prisoner of Zenda. By 1937, there were 250 Odeon cinemas, making Odeon one of the three major cinema chains.
Although they went up fast, Deutsch’s cinemas were by no means slapdash. For many of the towns and cities around the Midlands and along the south coast, where most were built, they were the most exciting and modern pieces of architecture in the area.
Odeon cinemas were seen as more comfortable and respectable for middle-class filmgoers than those of the two other chains, Associated British Cinemas (ABC), which also used the Ritz name, and Gaumont-British Cinemas.
In his private life, Oscar Deutsch was also a pious Jew and a highly-regarded Jewish philanthropist in Birmingham and the Midlands. He was the President of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, Birmingham’s main synagogue on Singers Hill, from 1932 to 1940.
From 1935, he had his head office in London from 1935 and lived at the Dorchester Hotel. However each week he came home to Birmingham on Friday afternoons to be with his family, and to worship at Singers Hill Synagogue.
The grand synagogue, now a Grade II-listed building, underwent a refit in 1937 to expand its capacity under the guidance of Oscar Deutsch, who used his own cinema architect to remodel the interior. The synagogue was extended by the architect Harry Weedon, with Oscar Deutsch raising or donating much of the funds.
Deutsch was also a major financial backer of rebuilding and enlarging the Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue. The synagogue was reconsecrated by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Joseph Hertz, on 1 September 1937 and was formally opened by Oscar Deutsch.
As the Nazis tightened their grip on power in 1930s, Deutsch worked on behalf of Jewish refugees from Germany. He was a member of the management committee of Saint Mark’s Hospital, London, and the County Homes for Cancer.
A bomb landed on his home in 1941, he was blown out of bed and Oscar Deutsch never recovered. He died of cancer of the liver on 5 December 1941. Later, his widow Lily sold the Odeon chain to J Arthur Rank and it became part of the Rank Organisation, who also bought, but managed separately, Gaumont-British Cinemas. The Odeon cinema chain he founded remains Europe’s biggest.
Shabbat Shalom
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