by Alex Rock
published in Post Script (vol. 30 no. 3, 2011), forthcoming.
Sidney Clift, a First World War veteran and Birmingham solicitor, began converting live theatres into cinemas in the... more
Sidney Clift, a First World War veteran and Birmingham solicitor, began converting live theatres into cinemas in the Twenties before being bought out by John Maxwell’s rapidly-expanding ABC chain. The ABC deal proved lucrative, as, soon after the sale of Clift’s portfolio, he commissioned Satchwell and Roberts to design a 3,000-seater purpose-built cinema in Wolverhampton. However, the plans were soon dropped, and the site of the proposed cinema was sold to ABC. ABC were also given a five-year lease of a nearby theatre conversion of Clift’s, and the generosity shown by Clift towards ABC appears to have set in motion a unique agreement whereby ABC provided certain first-run films for the Clifton chain ahead of their own cinemas.
Using original, recently-released source material from the National Archives alongside press coverage obtained from regional archives, ‘Super Cinemas in the Suburbs’ tells the neglected story of Sidney Clift, one-time Cinema Exhibitor’s Association National Chairman and integral figure in the growth of British cinema exhibition, and his attempt to build a successful cinema chain with the capital from ABC’s purchase of his second-hand cinema portfolio in the late Twenties. Through his management company, Cinema Accessories Ltd, Clift began constructing his Clifton chain in 1934, building six purpose-built cinemas in the Midlands and managing 24 more, including monopolising film exhibition in Leamington Spa and acquiring cinemas in locations as diverse as Somerset, Ludlow and London. His business model proved the inspiration for Oscar Deutsch, a close friend of Clift’s, and his insistence on building purpose-built, 1,000-plus capacity super cinemas with car parking and restaurants in village locations between Birmingham and Wolverhampton demonstrates the level of his ambition; Clifton cinemas intended to serve the increasingly mobile middle-classes of suburbia whilst tempting urban patrons away from the city centres. War, and the exhibition duopoly of Rank and ABC, meant that his ambitions were not to be realised.
Through researching the growth and subsequent decline of the Clifton chain, the paper assesses the effects of the Rank-ABC duopoly alongside the British exhibitor’s quota and entertainment tax upon independent exhibitors, using the programming data for the Clifton chain in the post-war period. The vertical integration of Rank and ABC made it difficult for independent exhibitors to acquire British first-run material to fulfil their quota obligations; the paper looks at the programming of the chain to demonstrate the importance of the agreement between ABC and Clifton, and maps the decline of the chain following Clift’s death in 1951. The effects of the new craze for bingo, television and the failure of government interventions into the British film industry begin to take their toll following Clift’s death, and the majority of the Clifton cinemas were sold off for redevelopment or demolition in the early Sixties. By 1958, Clifton is no longer recognised as a chain by the Kinematograph Year Book. By using the chain as a case study of an independent exhibitor, the paper analyses the difficulties of independent cinema exhibition in Britain over the period of thirty-two years.
Download (.pdf) 
