Pocono Cinema and Cultural Center
South Courtland Street - East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania
This incredible theater originally opened for business in 1884 as a vaudeville theater and opera house called The Academy Of Music. It was converted into a movie theater in 1913, and it operates today as a non-profit organization which shows new and classic movies and hosts live events.
We came here for the first time last February to see The Poseidon Adventure when the Mahoning booked one of the screens for a winter get-together. Yesterday, we visited for the second time to celebrate Kate and Cary's birthday with all of our friends. Each of the birthday ladies pick a movie to share with us on the big screen, and both were a first-time screening for me.
Kate's movie was the 1992 comedy Noises Off. Now that I've seen it, I can't believe that I never heard of it before yesterday. It has a cast that includes Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, John Ritter, Christopher Reeve, Nicollette Sheridan, Julie Hagerty, Marilu Henner, and Mark Linn-Baker (Larry Appleton from Perfect Strangers). It's also the final movie performance of Denholm Elliott. He had a long and distinguished film career, but I'll always know him best as Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones movies.
This movie is hysterically funny. The way the story was told reminded me a lot of One Cut Of The Dead. It's about a play called Nothing On, and how the actors navigate the backstage drama while in the middle of their performances on stages across the country. The movie wasn't a hit with fans or critics when it was released in 1992, but I can't imagine why. It's very creative with witty dialogue and excellent performances that kept me laughing from start to finish.
Cary's movie was a 1938 comedy called Bringing Up Baby, starring two icons of American cinema: Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. I had never heard of this one before either. My knowledge of the Golden Age of Hollywood is extremely limited. If you don't count the Universal Studios monster films, I've watched maybe twenty movies from start to finish that pre-date the 1960's. It might not even be that high. You'd think I'd make it a point to watch more of them because I end up loving most of the ones that I've seen, and this was no exception.
I deliberately didn't look up any information about either of these films before we watched them so I could go into it with as clean of a slate as possible. The only thing I knew about Bringing Up Baby was its title and the year it was released. Based on those two pieces of information, I figured that this was probably going to be a drama about a husband and wife raising a child, which is so off base that I can't help but to laugh in retrospect.
Katharine Hepburn plays a good-hearted manic tornado of a woman named Susan who falls in love with an overwhelmed museum paleontologist named David (Cary Grant). David is engaged to be married to another woman who he doesn't seem to have too much of a connection to. He and Susan stumble into each other's world while David is working to impress a man into using his influence with a rich benefactor to secure a million dollar donation to his museum. Once she's found her way into his life, Susan keeps him there by roping him into a trip to bring a leopard (Baby) from New York to Connecticut. Like the first movie of the night, this film had me laughing and smiling throughout its entire runtime.
After the movies, a bunch of us headed to a Chinese restaurant in Bartonsville called the East Gourmet Buffet for dinner. I realize this is going to come across as sappy, but I can't express how grateful I am to have met such an awesome group of folks as our friends that we've met at the Mahoning.
