BAMBRIDGE (Tony), proprietor.
Irrevocablement! La Direction du Theatre Moderne Presentera pour la Derniere fois Charles Boyer & Gaby Morlay dans: LE BONHEUR! ce soir jeudi 21 Avril 1938.
A RARE TAHITIAN FILM POSTER
A wonderful piece of social history and very rare.
This early cinema poster is in printed in both French and Tahitian. The film Le Bonheur (Happiness) was first released in 1934. The plot concerns an anarchist cartoonist, played by Charles Boyer, who shoots Gaby Morlay's film star on aesthetic and political grounds.
The Theatre Moderne was owned by Tony Bambridge (1895-1964) and was the first cinema on Papeete. Bambridge was not only the proprietor of the cinema, but collaboted in a number of films including White Shadows, Tabu, and the first version of Mutiny on the Bounty released in 1935. A stalwart of the Tahitian community, he was a member of the privy council, ran a successful import-export business and in 1930 he began showing films at the leper colony in Orofora.
"New Cinema in Tahiti" in Pacific Islands Monthly, Vol. XIV, No. 3 (18 October, 1943), p.36.
