LEFT: A long run of Doctor Zhivago in the 60s with advance booking available from the office to the right of the entrance.
Photograph Scottish Screen Archive Collection.
 

How the West Was Won benefited from an advance box office, special promotional material and separate performance times and was a great success. Over the next few years The Coliseum showed the new Cinerama films although in the late '60s as Cinerama production declined the films shown were frequently 70mm single strip films "presented in Cinerama".

Nevertheless, even these films while not true Cinerama were a wonderful cinematic experience - imagine 2001: a space odyssey on the largest plasma TV and then picture it on a screen 90ft wide - breathtaking!

War films were especially popular in Glasgow and some of The Colly's biggest successes were Battle of the Bulge, the Alistair MacLean yarn Where Eagles Dare and the long running The Dirty Dozen, a film which cinema managers all over Glasgow would book, confident of good audiences when other films let them down.

Other favourites at The Coliseum which had patrons queuing down the lane to the right of the main door were The Exorcist and The Godfather, indeed such was the affection for The Coliseum that, although ABC

concurrently ran the big films of the day at the more centrally - located ABC1 in Sauchiehall Street, many patrons preferred the short walk or subway trip across the river to The Coliseum.

By the early '70s The Coliseum has reverted to normal programming but in 1979 ABC quadrupled the ABC1 in Sauchiehall Street which, with the ABC2 gave then a five screen cinema in the city centre and The Coliseum became surplus to requirements. A Glasgow Council Compulsory Purchase Order in connection with the M74 motorway sealed The Colly's fate and it closed on October 11th 1980 after a performance of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

The motorway plans were subsequently shelved, the road stopping abruptly at West Street and The Coliseum was saved from demolition, becoming County Bingo who managed to place even more hideous metal across the front than the Cinerama logo had done.

County Bingo itself closed in 2003 and The Coliseum - which brought talkies and Cinerama to Glasgow now lies derelict.