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Movie Theaters of Lowell…and Beyond….

July 23, 2025 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Movie Theaters of Lowell…and Beyond….

By Leo Racicot

My lifelong love of the movies began when I was a boy; every Friday night in summers, my father and I would pile into his old, green Plymouth and head for Lowell Drive-In Theater or Chelmsford Drive-In Theater to see the latest war picture or Western. Friends still poke good-natured fun at my lasting penchant for John Wayne, Robert Ryan and Andy Devine. I’m such a complete movie nut, my sister, Diane, who kept an eye on these things, told me she estimated I’ve seen over a thousand films. And I’m not picky; I’ve watched everything from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians to the almost four-hour director’s cut of Apocalypse Now (twice!).

As I got a little bit older, my mother allowed me to walk downtown by myself (the city was safer then) to RKO Keith Theater on Bridge Street, The Strand Theater on Central, and the notorious Royal Theater on Merrimack, up the street from Pollard Memorial Library (notorious because it was rumored to have rats scampering around as patrons watched the show). I never saw a rat there but when I went to see the great Vincent Price in William Castle’s The Tingler, there was a shock; Castle was famous for the gimmicks he inserted in all his pictures. It was called “Percepto!” and involved interjecting some sort of physical aspect into his movies. In the case of The Tingler, theater seats were wired such that whenever the creature (a lobster-like, centipede-like creepy- crawler) appeared on screen, a jolt of electricity was sent through the seats, and of course through the moviegoer. When the shock jolted me, I was sure it was one of The Royal’s resident rats and jumped a mile, nearly making a pudding in my pants. Very effective, Mr. Castle.

The ’60s were the days of Vincent Price’s reign as King of the Horror Movies, and I have vivid memories of going to see his pictures at The Keith and The Strand (I never went back to The Royal): Sitting there in the dark of the wonderfully ornate, red-velvet-ed old movie palaces, I thrilled to Price’s particular talent for terrorizing audiences in The Pit and the Pendulum, The Abominable Doctor Phibes, The House of Usher and The Raven. Wasn’t I amazed when, years later, while staying at writer, M.F.K. Fisher’s place, I picked up the phone for her and heard Price on the other end of the line; they’d become culinary friends, and he had turned an old Santa Fe Super Chief railroad car into a dining car and installed it at the beach, inviting his many Hollywood friends as guests.

I never could decide which theater was my favorite; I liked both equally but if I have to pick, I’d say I was fonder of The Keith. I strode down there about a gazillion times to see 1965’s Major Dundee, one of Sam Peckinpah’s best movies. I still run it now-and-then, as a treat.

Next door to The Keith was Edna’s Candies and I always imagined my mother (whose name was Edna) secretly owned it and just wasn’t ready to tell Diane and me she did lest we beg her to let us eat all the chocolates in there.

What I’ll never forget is when our school, Saint Patrick’s School, decided it would be beneficial for us students to see The Ten Commandments as a

group. Picture a fleet of nuns (dressed in full 1960s religious habit) marching a horde of kids from the school through the housing projects all the way down Market Street to Central Street to The Strand where the Charlton Heston-Yul Brynner epic was playing. We were excited but embarrassed to be put on display like that. Imagine what motorists must have thought seeing a steady stream of uniformed children parading down busy Market Street, mid-day. The nuns repeated their success when they brought us not too long after that to see a movie about Saint Maria Goretti, the poor girl whose virtue was taken by a boy who wanted more from her than chaste caresses in the moonlight. Oh….dear…We kids came away from that story not knowing what exactly had been taken from Maria until Margaret Hopkins explained to the class, “It must have been Maria’s marble set.” Through the years, I’ve looked and looked for that movie and can’t find it. It would be interesting to watch it again after all these years…

The 1967 construction of the Route 3 Cinema on Chelmsford Street ushered in a new era in area movie going; the old movie palaces were becoming more and more difficult to maintain and were slowly losing business. The “modern” Route 3 Cinema was sleeker, streamlined, and patrons fell for it instantly. I saw The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a giallo by Dario Argento there, also Franco Zeffirelli’s glorious Romeo and Juliet (the first time David McKean, Anthony Kalil and I had ever seen nudity on the screen). My most memorable experience though at Route 3 Cinema was seeing Love Story there. I’ll never forget it — Valentine’s Day, 1970. “Love Story’ hit like a ton of bricks and, total movie nut that I was and still am, I was so eager to see it, I walked the two miles from my house to the Route 3 Cinema, in a snowstorm, no less! The line to get in wrapped around the whole building, lots of waiting outside in the cold. The crowded theater smelled like wet blankets and I’m sure a lot of us caught colds the next day. But I loved this movie and its two stars so much, I still run it every couple of years. I’ve taken a lot of ribbing from friends and family about how hokey, icky-sweet, dumb it is but no one’s going to ever convince me it’s not a winning piece of filmmaking. And Ryan O’Neal at the very height of his beauty, although in What’s Up, Doc a couple of years later, he’s looking none too shabby. I mean, total eye candy. (About three, four years ago, I got to see them both here at The Wilbur in Boston in a touring company of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters — perfect vehicle for them. You can argue with me about their acting skills, or lack thereof, but who cares ?!! These two are GORGEOUS to look at and they and Love Story take me happily back to a time when I would trudge through a storm to see a movie I love…

Sometimes, for a special treat, my Aunt Marie or Joe’s sister, Janie, or his dad would drive us to Lawrence Showcase Cinemas. It boasted a mini-museum and before the movie started, patrons liked to go up to the second floor and browse the paintings. Fancy. We saw Funny Girl and were blown away, like everybody else, by the sheer power of Barbra Streisand’s talent. We also saw her remake of A Star is Born, and Rocky, made even more thrilling because it was New Year’s Eve and as the hero strides the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the clock struck midnight and the audience jumped up, blasting whistles, horns and throwing confetti in celebration of Stallone’s ascent but also of the new year.My sister, Diane, worked for Lowell Showcase Cinemas for 26 years.

One of the perks of her job was free movie passes. She never used them. Would give them to me so for all 26 years, I got to see dozens and dozens of movies. What a great blessing! And what a great sister!

One last movie memory, if I may…

Some places evoke for us a time in our lives we yearn to return to. The now-legendary Brattle Theater is for me one such place. I was a French major in college, a devout Francophile and saw my first foreign films in this plain, unpretentious clapboard house. There, in the dark shadows of The Brattle, I felt very international and cultured. I felt “hip”. This was “Art” and helped me, setting off on my Siddhartha-like journey, to shake off my provincialism and discover “the world”. The Brattle offered me my first exposure to Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen and Cassavetes, to Claude Chabrol, Deneuve, De Sica, anything Pasolini. It gave a young man and his young eyes an education only movies and exposure to them can give at that age when movies (and books) are mostly all you know of the world.

I still can conjure with Proustian clarity the thrill of standing in The Brattle’s long lines among its exciting and excited audiences sporting berets, smoking Gauloises, waiting to see the latest Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Anna Magnani. The Brattle’s stories are the stories of our lives. When I am there now for a movie, or just happen to be passing by, warm waves of memory wash over me and I am 19 years old again…22…25…and it is Play it Again, Sam, La Nouvelle Vague, Neo-Realism and Casablanca. Most of all, it is The Brattle Theater. God, those were glorious times!