Film / News
Curzon Cinema’s Heritage Open Day
Clevedon’s historic Curzon Cinema flings open its doors once again on Sunday September 13 as part of Scalarama and Heritage Open Days. There are guided tours of the magnificent fleapit and for just £20 you can make a racket on their Christie pipe organ for a full 30 minutes.
At 2pm, you can also catch a screening of D.W. Griffiths’ silent classic from 1919, Broken Blossoms, which is set on the mean streets of inner city London. In this early interracial noir, idealistic Chinese immigrant Cheng Huan (the not conspicuously oriental Richard Barthelmess) falls in love with beautiful waif Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish) with inevitably tragic consequences. The screening includes live piano accompaniment from Andy Quin.
If you’ve not been before, the Curzon is well worth a look. With its original art deco features, steeply raked seating and traditional cinema organ, this is one of our region’s great hidden treasures. The oldest continually operated cinema in the world, it flung open its doors way back in 1912, just after the RMS Titanic went down. In fact, the cinema’s very first screening was a special charity matinee for families of victims of the disaster. Today, celeb patrons include Terry Gilliam, Alan Rickman, Tony Robinson and all three Aardman bigwigs (Nick Park, Peter Lord, Dave Sproxton). Paul Merton even brought his family here for a rare screening of his short film, The Suicidal Dog.
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