Saturday, March 3, 1917
When a judge lifted the temporary injunction protecting the Broadway Theatre from police raids, it looked like the end of Sunday movies in Saratoga Springs. But Broadway manager Sam Newton intends to open his theater tomorrow unless the city makes an active move to stop him.
While Sunday movie shows have long been assumed illegal under New York State’s law against public amusements on the Christian Sabbath, enforcement had been selective across the state until last November. Exploiting arguments that the Sabbath law didn’t cover movies because they hadn’t been invented when the law was passed, city officials in Saratoga Springs, Troy and other cities permitted Sunday shows, while other cities, including Albany, forbade them.
An Albany test case led to an Appellate Division ruling that movies were covered by the Sabbath law. Subsequently, Saratoga Springs mayor Walter P. Butler ordered city theaters closed on Sundays. Following the example set by Schenectady exhibitors, Newton went to court and won an injunction for the Broadway on December 27. The other Saratoga Springs theaters have stayed closed on Sundays.
The city challenged the injunction almost immediately, but Justice Henry V. Borst didn’t get around to vacating the injunction until this week. Despite that decision, The Saratogian reports that Newton “has planned a program of carefully selected films, and today assured patrons that they could witness the entertainment without fear of interruption.”
The Broadway ad in today’s paper promises that the theater “will be open and run under [the] same conditions and principles as it has the last seven Sundays. Rumors contrary to this are erroneous.”
Newton has a reprieve, at least for this weekend, due to an apparent technicality. A reporter describes it as “a legal defect in the service of the order” that apparently will keep the police from taking action against the Broadway. Whether Mayor Butler would take action if he could is unclear; no city sources are quoted in today’s frontpage story.
While “It is probable that the usual crowded house will be present tomorrow,” Newton admits that “his plans for Sundays after tomorrow are indefinite at present.”
Tonight, the Broadway presents “The Eminent Event of 1917,” Herbert Benon’s production of “War Brides,” starring Alla Nazimova. This “Stupendous Work With A World War Back Ground” is based on a popular 1915 play, also starring Nazimova, in which the heroine, a pregnant war widow, publicly commits suicide as an act of protest.
At the Palace, Virginia Pierson stars in the Fox Film production “The Bitter Truth.” The theater ad calls this picture “A story of a Woman’s Realization of Love.”