While crime films have been popular on Vancouver theatre screens since films were first shown in the city, it’s occasionally the theatres themselves that became crime scenes.
This year’s Vancouver International Film Festival went off without a hitch, but on Aug. 10, 1959, the Vogue Theatre — host of the then-Vancouver Film Festival — was the scene of a robbery that could have been a scene in a heist movie.
News of the story broke that day when a building engineer at the Vogue (then almost exclusively a motion picture cinema) arrived in the morning, entered the basement office and found the safe had been blown open by a safecracker.
Vancouver police investigated and found that a total of $2,742 (about $15,000 today) had been stolen — the amount being the total box office and theatre concession profits from the weekend’s film festival showings.
In a time before credit or debit cards, when people commonly carried hard cash for a night out, the potential box office take at a theatre or cinema after a busy weekend made for the kind of low security target that Vancouver hold-up men and safecrackers found a favourable target.
And it wasn’t the only time the Vogue had been struck. In February 1954, safecrackers hit the theatre, leaving the morning staff to open the office to find the safe tipped over and smashed. On that occasion the loss had been just $200 to $300.
In another bizarre incident, on Nov. 28 1954, Dunbar Theatre doorman Peter Clark was closing up after the evening screening of the just released film The Caine Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart, when Clark saw a figure slide through the front door and into the manager’s office. Clark followed and the man turned and pulled a gun on him. It was then he noticed the man was wearing a pair of joke shop eyeglasses.
Clark moved in to grapple with the gunman, and in a frantic struggle Clark knocked the gun out of the man’s hand. As soon as the robber lost his weapon, he fled out the front door and down Dunbar Street. It is not known if a suspect was ever arrested in the incident.
However, there are few crimes that actually took place inside a Vancouver theatre that rival the shooting at the Golden Princess Theatre on East Broadway in 1987.
On a Friday night double feature, the action on screen was shattered by the sound of a real gunshot when William Yeung, a 16-year-old member of the Viet Ching street gang eager to prove his loyalty, walked down the theatre aisle to the seat of 14-year-old rival gang member Tony Hong and shot him in the head at point blank range.
Hong lost an eye in the attack, and Yeung was convicted in an adult court and given an eight-year sentence.
The Golden Princess Theatre is The Rio Theatre today. During the well-publicized battle last year by Rio General Manager Corinne Lea to obtain a liquor license for the theatre, one disapproving neighbour of the theatre raised the spectre of the 25-year-old shooting as the kind of incident the community would surely see again if a liquor license was granted. She needn’t have worried — so far the only shots have been the ones from behind the bar.
Today the kinds of theatre robberies that Vancouverites are more likely to see are the theft of the theatres themselves. With the Pantages Theatre being demolished in 2011, the Red Robinson Theatre’s name being removed and rebranded “The Joint,” the wrecking ball that took down the Ridge Theatre this year, or the uncertain future of the Hollywood Theatre in Kitsilano, it’s perhaps eager property developers and a public going less and less to the single screen cinemas that make for the usual suspects in the challenges that these historic buildings face.
And what of the $2,742 stolen from the Vogue in 1959? The Vancouver Sun announced the day after the robbery the arrest of a 24-year-old man had been made. That man today would be 78 years old. I wonder if he still goes to the movies?
