News | Cinema St Andrews

New Articles published

I’m pleased to announce that we have a new batch of articles available on the site. These cover more than a century of St Andrews’ rich history. We have a piece from Cameron Mumford, which brings into focus one of the earliest photographs of St Andrews. Audrey McBride examines the little-known history of the New Picture House Cinema Cafe, using newspaper reports and building plans to provide a fascinating account of its establishment as a social centre in 1931. Finally, Brooke Daley takes us back to Christmas Day 1950, examining...

Mapping the town’s cinema history

While the importance of St Andrews in the history of photography is now widely known, there is far less understanding of the early history of cinema in the towns and indeed of the connections between photography and moving images in the 19th century. Sam Mills has investigated some of these links in a series of new posts for the site and, moreover, has created a map highlighting some of the key locations and movements in the cinematic history of St Andrews. You can visit the map...

New articles published

Over the last few months, a number of students have been investigating further parts of our local cinema history as part of the Department of Film Studies’ module, ‘Film and the Archive’. You can read some of the latest findings online. Thee include the unlikely story of two students producing elaborate film magazines during the war, a film star visiting St Andrews to promote her latest ‘Scottish’ production in 1946, the arrival of CinemaScope in the local cinemas in the 1950s and the recent recreation of St...

100 years ago…

This week (Wednesday 4th December) marked the 100th anniversary of the opening of St Andrews’ first purpose-built cinema, The Cinema House. If you wanted to watch films in town at this point, you would have to go to the ‘tin tabernacle’ – a former Roman Catholic Church that was literally dragged a mile across town from The Scores and repositioned in less civilised surroundings next to the slaughter house off James Street – and which since 1910 had shown films three nights a week (and had roller skating the other...

The Birds

The Cinema St Andrews film season concludes tomorrow night with our final screening, which brings together some local footage of St Andrews with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The screening takes place in School 3, St Salvator’s Quad at 7pm and is free to all. The screening will reproduce a film show from The Cinema House in 1963, which marked the 50th anniversary of the cinema’s opening. A further fifty years on (and with The Cinema House now a block of flats), we will mark the centenary of St Andrews’ first purpose built...

The Misfits at the NPH

I am delighted to confirm the final two screenings in the Cinema St Andrews film season. On Sunday 21 April the New Picture House will host a free screening of The Misfits, starting at 4pm. This classic film features the last screen performances of both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (and one of the last from Montgomery Clift). The screening recreates a showing of the film at the NPH almost 50 years ago, as on 12 December 1965 the long-running St Andrews Film Society screened The Misfits as part of its 202nd meeting. Written by Arthur Miller...

Free Screening of The Blue Lamp at St Leonards School (Tuesday 19 February, 7pm)

I’m very pleased to announce that the second screening in the Cinema St Andrews film season will take place on Tuesday 19 February at St Leonards School. The show will start at 7pm. After our first screening in a church, we are now moving to a school to show the classic Ealing police drama, The Blue Lamp, which was co-written by a lifelong resident and University graduate of St Andrews, Jan Read. The Blue Lamp was the most attended film in the UK in 1950 and stars Dirk Bogarde, who was awarded an honorary degree from the University in...

Cinema St Andrews film season – new venues!

We are delighted to announce that the Cinema St Andrews film season, originally scheduled for The Byre, has been rearranged and will now be playing at different venues across town. The original dates still apply. The season is intended as a way of celebrating the town’s rich film heritage and of bringing film to different audiences. In staging the events at a variety of venues – including a church and a school – we will be recreating and recalling significant screenings from the last century. Our first...

From Silver Screen to the 18th Green

For a small town on the edge of the North Sea, St Andrews has long attracted film stars from around the world. While more recently (since 2001) the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship has brought celebrities such as Samuel L Jackson, Bill Murray and Michael Douglas to town, in the first half of the twentieth century Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Astor, and Laurel and Hardy could all be found wandering the streets and fairways of St Andrews. This week, as part of a collaboration between Dunhill and Cinema St Andrews, we are celebrating this history...

The British are coming … again

This summer sees a nationwide re-release of Chariots of Fire to coincide with the Olympics. Dr Tom Rice discussed the legacy of the film within St Andrews in this BBC article. You can read more about the impact of the film on the town here.