American Hustle | Wang Theatre — A Gilded Lobby Standing In for the Ballroom

The Metropolitan Theatre opened at 270 Tremont Street in 1925 with 3,500 seats and enough gold leaf to embarrass a cathedral. It is the Wang Theatre now, the larger house of the Boch Center, and its grand lobby — restored between 1989 and 1992 with gilded moldings, murals, scagliola and marbleized surfaces — plays the ballroom where Carmine Polito's night tips from triumph into evidence.

Russell shot the party in a theater lobby rather than a hotel ballroom, and the substitution is smarter than it looks. Nothing happens in a theater lobby. No one lives there, eats there, sleeps there. It exists purely to make the act of arriving feel consequential, and it was built at enormous expense to do only that. The film's entire subject, rendered in plaster and paint.

Buy a ticket to whatever is playing, get there early, and stand under the ceiling before the house opens — it is worth ten unhurried minutes on its own. The Witches of Eastwick used the same room years earlier. Boston keeps loaning it out because there is nothing else like it between here and New York.