Edmund Goulding's "Grand Hotel" was named the best picture of the year in 1932, but in Kona it likely shared top billing with Yasujiro Ozu's silent classic, "Otona no Miru Ehon -- Umarate Wa Mita Keredo."
That's because three of the major movie theaters in Kona at the time -- the Tanimoto, the Marumoto and the Holualoa, were all owned by Americans of Japanese ancestry.
All three are still standing some seven decades later, but only one -- the Tanimoto, now known as the Aloha Theatre -- is still used as a theater.
Construction of the Aloha Theatre as a movie house began the same year the stock market crashed. When it first swung open its doors it was known as the Tanimoto Theatre, after the major theater operating family on the Big Island at the time. It showed American motion pictures with sound as well silent Japanese films. While silent films had largely disappeared in the United States by that time, the art form endured in Japan well into the 1930s.
With few automobiles during the depression, neighborhood theaters, including those in Kona, thrived. Still, there was competition between the Tanimoto Theater and the Marumotos, owners of the Kona Theater. Wendell Marumoto, grandson of Tamajiro Marumoto, who built and operated the Kona Theater, said his grandfather would literally drum up customers during the 1930s by driving a truck with a taiko drum on the back calling out what was being shown that night.
The Tanimoto Theater came up with its own unique attraction, a stage upon which plays could be performed. An early production, "Who Wouldn't Be Crazy," was put on by the Kona Lions' Club in 1939.
The Hawaii plantation-style Aloha Theatre, which stopped showing Japanese movies shortly after the start of World War II, also withstood the Great Kainaliu Fire of 1948. According to one resident, it was acquired by the Consolidated Amusement Co. and its name changed, likely in the 1950s, and finally shut down in the 1970s.
But it was reopened a short time later and has operated mostly as a playhouse and concert hall, and is the only old theater in Kona is still in operation.
