My father first visited the Ritz in 1930, my brother in 1938 or 1939 (to see the Three Stooges in Back to the Woods!), myself in the late 1940s. Had any of us heard of Cesar Ritz and his grand hotels when we first went through its doors? No, of course not, and not for a long time after. Cinema names seemed independent of any history. They may have been intended to suggest luxury, romance, good birth and breeding, foreign parts, ancient history, and therefore to be fitting vehicles for the films shown inside them; escapes images within escapist architecture. But how many among their audiences could have connected the Hippodrome to horse racing in ancient Greece, or the Rialto to Venice, the Alhambra, Granada and Toledo to Spain, the Lido to Mediterranean bathing, the Colosseum to Rome, the Savoy to the Strand, the Odeon to Paris, the Regal to majestic behavior? Not me, certainly. Before they were anything else, they were the names of cinemas. Cinemas were what they described.
Ian Jack, “The Best Picture He Ever Saw,” from Granta 86: Film
