Hmm.
In my short novel, Threshold Girl, about my husband's great aunt Flora Nicholson in 1912, I have Miss Gouin, a French Canadian worker at Dominion Textile, ask Flora if they can go sometimes to the Ouimetoscope, as textile workers have Sunday off.
Flora says NO. Miss Gouin walks away.
As it happens, the cinema theme connects Threshold Girl and the play I am currently working on Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927.
Had I not spent 5 years researching the Nicholson family letters from 1910 and learning about the Presbyterians in Montreal, I would not fully understand the context of the Laurier Palace Theatre Fire, that in 1927, was a game-changer with respect to movies in Montreal.
I found this excellent PhD thesis online, A Screen of One's Own, Scott MacKenzie McGill 1997.
Mackenzie describes the contempt the Catholic Church had for the cinema since the earliest days, a contempt tainted with prejudice, he claims, against Jews in particular.
He quotes a Roman Catholic official as saying that the motion pictures are worse than gambling, drink or opium.
He claims that some in the Catholic Church were incensed when the Supreme Court deemed it OK for motion pictures to stay open on Sundays.
All useful to me, as I assumed that Church didn't care that much about the cinema, at least,not in the way the Presbyterians did.
What Mackenzie doesn't seem to know or acknowledge, is that the Protestants, particularly the Methodists and Presbyterians, had a very different view of the Sabbath than the Catholics.
I learned this by studying the mission of Edith Nicholson's school, Westmount Methodist, where Catholics were converted to "The Way."
Catholics didn't know that the Sabbath was a day for quiet contemplation and nothing else. They played cards and played pitch and catch and such on Sunday. Oh My!
It was a strange coalition of the Presbyterians and Big Labour that brought in the 1908 Lord's Day Act.
But the Catch 22 was immediately apparently. If you give people a day off, they need something to do, preferably something social, fun and cheap. The motion pictures fit the bill.
Mr. Ouimet said he couldn't close on Sunday, as that was his best day. At least half of the other motion picture houses stayed open too.
Presbyterians were generally wealthy, middle class or more. Like the Nicholsons, they went to theatre and opera on Saturday. French Canadians were mostly working class.
(My upper middle French Canadian grandmother, a pious Catholic, did not let her daughters go to the cinema. Although they might have gone behind her back. Despite the fact Jules brother, their uncle Isadore was a VP with American Theatre Amusements. She gambled, herself, though, at cards and on the horses.)
That's why Flora can't say "yes" to Miss Gouin's invitation. It isn't necessarily snobbery on her part, or shame at being seen with a working class girl.
Oddy, in the mid twenties, it was the age of the luxury cinema and two such cinemas were being built, the Empress in NDG, that had an Egyptian Theme and the Granada (I think.)
To outlaw movies entirely would have meant to stop construction on these grandiose buildings, so iconic of the era, and most of which are now gone.
I wonder what happened to those outdoor movies at Sohmer Park, also established to separate the cinema experience from its dingy, dirty and dangerous store-front setting.
Were under 16's still allowed to see movies there? Probably not. Indeed, I read, in another McGill thesis about City Parks by Sarah Schmidt, 1996, that in 1927, a group of 5 young couples (teens) were brought in front of the magistrate for having sex in the park. Not sure what degree of sex. They blamed it on the film they had just seen, that it aroused them too much.
I have to get this into my story.
