The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Good-Bye Old Year
The glitz and glamour of 1930s Hollywood is evoked in this short film, wishing cinema audiences a Happy New Year, ushering in what proved to be the very dark year of 1939.
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Overview
In the style typical of the Hollywood films of the 1930s, with the top hats and champagne glasses evoking the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, cinemas wish their audiences a Happy New Year, sang to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, for that inauspicious year of 1939.
There is no information on this film other than that it was donated by a Mr Smith. He also donated a cinema advert from around the same time for Fan Fare magazine: “The Pocket Magazine for All Filmgoers”. Presumably this cine short was made for any cinema to use, as there isn’t anything to indicate a link to a particular cinema or cinema chain. Brought over by emigrating Scots, Auld Lang Syne had been popularised as an anthem for New Year by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadian Big Band who played it on his American radio and TV shows from 1929 onwards. Perhaps fittingly, a nine-year-old Shirley Temple sang the song to a dying soldier in the 1937 John Ford film Wee Willie Winkie.
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