Across The Balcony

The auditorium of the Marina Picture Palace at 409 Gardeners Road, Rosebery, still holds its tiered wooden benches, each row running toward the stage end of the room with a low handrail marking the right aisle. Three decorative wall panels line the far wall, two finished in red patterned plaster and one in dark floral relief. Rectangular window openings cut through the brickwork and throw hard daylight across the floor below. Above, red-painted timber beams and corrugated iron span the ceiling, and a circular moulded medallion sits on the upper left wall. The Marina Picture Palace opened on Saturday 28 May 1927 with a programme that included Mary Pickford in Sparrows, John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue, a film on the birth of Canberra, and a live performance by Bill Mason. The building was designed by architect William de Putron in 1925, the same year he left the partnership that had produced Babworth House in Darling Point and the Vanderbilt in Potts Point. De Putron was not simply hired for the job. He was a consortium member alongside builder William Henry Rumble and cinema pioneer Eric Christensen, who placed a gold sovereign in the brickwork during construction. Ownership of the building passed through several hands across the following decades. Mascot Theatres Pty Ltd, the local entity of Snider and Dean, acquired the freehold in January 1939 and carried out renovations including new seating and updated projection equipment. In 1967 Chris Louis of the Louis Film Company purchased the theatre in honour of his wife, whose name was also Marina. The Louis family specialised in continental and Greek-language films in the era before SBS television and continued to operate the building for 35 years. The Marina closed as a cinema for the final time on 8 February 1984. It is the only surviving pre-World War Two theatre in the former Botany Bay local government area and one of only three known surviving examples of the Inter-War free-classical cinema style in suburban Sydney. This photograph, made in 2019, records what remains.