The expansive Nausicaá aquarium (pictured above) now stands on the site which once hosted Boulogne's first postwar casino, which in turn housed a cinema for a few short years. Prior to WW2, Boulogne was the home of one of the most beautiful casinos in France but it, like virtually everything in and around the port, was destroyed in the bombardment of the war. Once the conflict ended, the mass rebuilding of Boulogne commenced and the replacement casino, which was situated not far from where its more ornate predecessor had once stood, was completed in the late 1950s.
The new casino had been in operation for just a few years when it was used, fairly prominently, as one of the locations in Alain Resnais' Muriel, or The Time of Return, which was released in 1963; in the same year, Johnny Hallyday played a concert at the venue. Nearly a decade on from Resnais' masterpiece, a cinema was established inside the casino, but the venture was short-lived; back then, there was plenty of competition in Boulogne -- much of it located in the more accessible town centre -- and this was reflected in the beachfront cinema's sparse attendances. The casino itself operated for a good many years following the closure of the cinema, before the entire building was razed in the late 1980s so that work could begin on Europe's largest aquarium, which opened in 1991.
