Grand Rex

The Grand Rex occupies the corner of the Boulevard Poissonniere with a tower shaped like a shimmering, stepped wedding cake. Since nineteen thirty-two, this cinema has operated as an Art Deco palace designed to mimic a Mediterranean courtyard. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, German soldiers claimed the venue as a propaganda theater. The projectionists, however, secretly hid Allied airmen in the complex’s labyrinthine basement tunnels, smuggling them out through the cinema's own ventilation shafts right under the soldiers' noses.