Well at the Englewood Theatre the answer to that would be: Two Bruce Lee Movies!
Yes today we’re taking at brief look at a long forgotten cinema, the Englewood Theatre and it’s manager Hugh Mann. Now I found these pictures on ebay and I’ve not been able to find out much about this place at all, the always amazing Cinema Treasures website only lists one Englewood Theatre, which was in New Jersey, USA, but holds very little information about out, so I’m not sure if it’s the same place.
But what we can say is that it looks like it was a super cool place to watch a movie, specifically Kung Fu flicks! Yes look at the posters behind manager Hugh and you’ll see an amazing Bruce Lee double feature of Fist Of Fury and The Chinese Connection playing, although I’m not totally sure how that works, as The Chinese Connection is a re-titling of Fist Of Fury, so maybe they were playing the same film twice, who knows! Also look at the very homemade looking poster for Dragon Vs Needles Of Death, which I’d not heard of before but looks like it dates from 1976.
But there’s also something else very interesting about those two exterior photos above, if you look closely above Hugh’s head you can see a Fallout Shelter sign on the wall! I’d have loved to have had a look in the shelter there and see what it all looked like.
Now it looks like these photos were taken in the very early 1980s, beyond the Kung Fu films we can see posters for Fort Apache The Bronx (1981), Popeye (1980) and Stir Crazy (1980), which means the interest in 70s martial arts films was still strong enough to be playing them several years after they’d burst onto the screen.
So Kung Fu double-bills, classic 1980s cinema PLUS a fallout shelter – man I really wish we could have taken the Englewood Theatre up on its offer of “See A Movie Today” – we’ll take the full front row!