Also in First Run
The other movies playing in the first-run that week were in smaller theaters, although these were much larger than today's multiplex auditoriums. All reported decent business for their venues over the Easter weekend. Several of the movies had been playing for weeks or in some cases for months. The Rialto was noted for premiering horror and crime dramas while the Gotham was where B-movie maker Republic premiered its bigger budget movies. Loew's State often, as this week, showed movies that had already played elsewhere but not yet hit the neighborhoods, but also presented a stage show. The other theaters in this list had no shows.
SARATOGA TRUNK at Warner's Hollywood in its 21st week took over as longest-running movie in Manhattan. Bergman starred in this one as well, opposite Gary Cooper, who had been her co-star in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in 1943. The costume drama was based on an Edna Ferber novel. "Saratoga Trunk" was among the top moneymakers of 1946 and was going strong nationally, but this week it had faded to an only okay $18,000 in New York. Bosley Crowther of the NYT dismissed this historical romance about a Creole gold-digger and a Texas gambler set in the time of the robber barons as “gaudy junk.” On the other hand, contrarian James Agee of Time found it to be “a glamorous double portion of consistently entertaining entertainment,” noting that “Ingrid Bergman is wonderfully bewitching in a black wig and bustle, and Gary Cooper drawls and sprawls in his best skin-tight cow-pants.” John McCarten also recommended it in the New Yorker. Bette Davis was moving into the theater next with “A Stolen Life.” Built in 1930 as the first theater specifically designed for talkies, the Hollywood had a deco entrance and ornate 1500 seat auditorium. It had alternated between motion pictures and stage shows. At the end of the decade it was renamed the Mark Hellinger and became home to some of the biggest musical hits of the second half of the twentieth century. It is now used as a church. Here is the movie's trailer at TCM
THE BANDIT OF SHERWOOD FOREST at Loews Criterion was in its fifth week. This was something for the boys, a swashbuckling adventure about Robin Hood's son. But star Cornel Wilde had his female admirers as well, having been nominated for an Oscar in 1945 for his portrayal of Chopin in “A Song to Remember” and having been Gene Tierney’s co-star in the recent hit “Leave Her to Heaven.” The Columbia Pictures Technicolor action picture also starred Anita Louise. The Loew’s Criterion was a relatively modest 1700 seat theater built in the Art Moderne style.
TOMORROW IS FOREVER at the Winter Garden was in its ninth and final week The RKO weepie starred Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles at his hammiest and George Brent, as well as a young Natalie Wood in her first billed screen role. Although Bosley Crowther moaned ““tomorrow seems forever coming” in his review for The New York Times, the film was a hit with a good $25,000 reported in this its final week. It would be making way for “So Goes My Love,” a comedy starring Myrna Loy and Don Ameche. The theater, built in 1911, had alternated between theatrical productions, mostly musical revues, and movies; “The Jazz Player” had premiered there. It had only recently returned to movies after playing host to long-running revues like “Hellzapoppin’.” An article in the March 31 Sunday magazine of The New York Times in 1946 paid tribute to its illustrious theatrical history and bemoaned its loss to the legitimate theater. It soon after returned to being home to Broadway musicals, which it still is. Here is a scene.
DEADLINE AT DAWN closed April 18 at the RKO Palace but was already playing second-run engagements elsewhere in the city. Up-and-comer Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas and Bill Williams starred in the RKO release, based on a pulp novel by William Irish, one of several pen names used by Cornell Woolrich, a grandmaster of hardboiled crime stories whose life was a noir story itself. This was the only film that noted theater director and critic Harold Clurman ever directed. His colleague from New York’s Group Theater, Clifford Odets, wrote the idiosyncratic screenplay. ”Whatever else it may be,” John McCarten wrote in The New Yorker, “’Deadline at Dawn’… is not an ordinary picture. It’s characters are all very peculiar people, and they speak an argot so strangely tricked out that you have to listen carefully to realize what they are saying.” Although French film theorists would not invent and popularize the term “film noir” until the summer of 1946, this tale virtually defines the genre. At this time to New Yorkers they were simply crime pictures or thrillers. Williams plays a gob who wakes up in an alley with a wad of cash in his pocket. Then he finds a dead girl in the room that was the last place he remembers being. Hayward plays a dance hall girl and Lukas is a sympathetic cab driver, both of whom accompany the sailor on a desperate prowl through late night New York back alleys, seedy rooming houses and bars to find out what had happened. Actually, McCarten noted they “wander amid eerie sets purporting to be New York, and at any provocation they break into long discussions about the mysteriousness of urban existence.” James Agee found the movie “pretentiously unpretentious” and bemoaned the “pseudorealism” in his column for The Nation but all in all he thought it was a “likable movie.” Speaking of Odets and Clurman’s Hollywood sojourn, McCarten warned “All things considered, it might be a good idea for the two of them to get out of that sunshine before their brains are baked to a crisp.”
“The Academy Award winner of ‘Suspicion’ in another superb performance,” crowed the ad copy for FROM THIS DAY FORWARD, an RKO release that opened April 19 at the RKO Palace, the former crown jewel of the vaudeville circuit. Based on a 1936 novel “All Brides Are Beautiful,” this was an early version of the kitchen-sink domestic dramas that became popular in the early 1950s. In the eyes of many critics, Joan Fontaine was unbelievable as a working-class Bronx newlywed struggling to keep her household afloat on her meager income from a job as a book clerk. Newcomer Mark Stevens was given high marks for his performance as her artistically inclined husband who has trouble finding a job when he returns from the war. The ads quoted favorable reviews from the New York entertainment listings magazine Cue; Liberty, which was a Saturday Evening Post clone; and Redbook, which had chosen the film as movie of the month. James Agee of Time and The Nation thought it a respectable, serious effort that rang true in some of its grittiest scenes but was also at times patronizing and guilty of a slick pseudo-realism “rather special to New York” which he wrote could also be found at time in the Group Theater and “the more serious New Yorker stories.” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found it “pointless” and John McCarten of the New Yorker thought it “oppressive.” One problem was the updating of the film's setting from the Depression era to postwar New York when employment was much less of an issue. The full page ad in April’s Photoplay, misleadingly positioned the film as a romantic comedy. “From This Day Forward” had a more than satisfactory opening weekend take of $38,000 at the theater but was not a box office success.
Loew’s State, despite its live stage show had not had a first-run attraction since “Colonel Effingham’s Raid” early in the month. At the beginning of this week it featured a one-week return engagement of THE SAILOR TAKES A WIFE, an MGM comedy starring Robert Walker and June Allyson, that did mediocre business. Here's the trailer. On April 18 MISS SUSIE SLAGLE’S came in for a one-week revival engagement. Veronica Lake and Sonny Tufts were the romantic leads in the sentimental Paramount drama about medical and nursing students at a boarding house early in the 20th century. The critics found it mildly diverting. Pretty blonde screen newcomer Joan Caulfield, a New Jersey girl who had modeled and appeared on Broadway, drew positive attention as did former silent screen star Lillian Gish as the boarding house proprietor. Here's the trailer. The Easter weekend stage show was headed by Herbie Fields and his orchestra. A returning serviceman, Fields had played clarinet with Duke Ellington and recently had left Lionel Hampton to front his own band. He was named “New Star of the Year” by Esquire magazine in 1946 but despite several tries he never successfully broke out on his own. The diminutive Fields was a musician rather than a showman in the opinion of Billboard. The Variety reviewer found the band’s playing fine but faulted Fields for his overly frenetic fronting as well as his uncool, exaggerated, dated posturing while playing. Billboard thought they played music that was "strictly for the hep trade," noting that the opening jump number "almost blew everybody out of the house." They played "Hey, Ba-Ba-Re-Bop," almost a requirement for bands that week, as well as "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Lady's Lullaby." The show also featured “rube” sound-effects comedian Rufe Davis who sang "Sioux City Sue" as well as performed barnyard imitations, and the comic magician Roy Benson, who lately had played the Latin Quarter nightclub. "Cute" blond Barbara Perry did a ballet-tap routine that the reviewers felt started well enough with a folk dance in taps but ran out of gas as she segued into a Spanish-Harlem number and a jitterbug, then ended with a "hoofing take-off of a lazy Mexican on a horse" that lost the audience according to Billboard. The dance trio of Lynn, Royce and Nitza performed a comedy dance routine that Variety found unfunny but Billboard deemed excellent and a near showstopper. The movie and show underperformed at $22,000.
Another romantic drama but with a more refined setting was the tearjerker A YANK IN LONDON, a Twentieth Century Fox release of a British production starring Anna Neagle, Rex Harrison, Dean Jagger and Robert Morley, which opened at the Victoria on April 19. Neagle played a British aristocrat who falls in love with an American airman in wartime London. British pictures, mostly modest dramas, were doing well enough in the US since wartime that the US studios were looking at them as potential competition. Neagle was a big star in England and starred in three musicals for RKO in the early 1940s. Harrison, who played Miss Neagle’s fiancé, a candidate for Parliament, was in Hollywood at this time filming "Anna and the King of the Siam," the movie that would make him familiar to American audiences. American character actor Jagger was the romantic lead. The cast also included Americans Jane Darwell and Irene Manning. Twentieth took out big newspaper display ads announcing the premiere with the copy “In the boldness of a Yank's kiss...the thrill of his embrace...a girl overseas finds herself living the heart story of our times!" It had some decent reviews but the picture had a somewhat disappointing opening of $14,000 at the Victoria and would have a very limited subsequent release. With 800 seats the Victoria, formerly the Gaiety, which had operated as a burlesque house until Mayor LaGuardia’s crackdown, was a smaller, less prestigious venue that hosted premieres only when none of the bigger houses was available. More often it played second runs and revivals. “A Yank in London” was coming in on the heels of a premiere engagement of Monogram’s “Joe Palooka, Champ,” a B-picture based on a popular comic strip. It launched a decades worth of “Joe Palooka” movies (there had been an earlier series in the 1930s) starring champion golfer Joe Kirkwood Jr. as Palooka and veteran vaudeville and screen comedian Leon Errol as his manager, Knobby Walsh.
Also opening on the 19th was BEDLAM, starring Boris Karloff and Anna Lee, at the Rialto. This was the last film produced by RKO’s low-budget horror movie unit headed by the now iconic producer Val Lewton. Monster movies had fallen out of favor in 1946. Universal, home of many classics of the genre, also pulled out of horror that year in an effort to upgrade its image. But the atmospheric elements that were the stock in trade of Lewton's films were now increasingly seen in the big-budget psychological suspense movies and Gothic romances that had become very popular. “Bedlam” had no supernatural monster; it derived its horror from its depiction of the conditions at London’s notorious 18th century insane asylum. Crowther gave the film a decent review. Agee, who was one of Lewton’s champions, was disappointed. He wrote in The Nation that "few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half as much about movies or human beings" as Lewton but that he found the movie "a careful, pretty failure." The Rialto had been a silent movie palace named the Victoria in the twenties, but it fell into decline when its then owner Publix (Paramount) moved its top productions to newer, grander showcases. In his 1953 memoir Arthur Mayer, the colorful veteran of Publix who took over the theater, boasted that he had made a success of the venue by catering to the lowest common denominator. The Rialto was where many horror films and low budget gangster movies of the day premiered, often screening on a continuous 24-hour-a-day schedule. "Bedlam" was not a big hit with audiences at the time but it pulled in $12,000 this week at the Rialto, which was good for the venue where tickets were relatively cheap (35 to 85 cents rather than the $1.20 top at other first-run houses). One of several scenes at TCM. THE FALCON'S ALIBI was the latest in a series of detective mysteries from RKO featuring the character of the Falcon. George Sanders originally had played the role but by this installment it had passed to his brother, Tom Conway.
The Gotham, another lesser first-run house, was home to premieres of B pictures from Republic. On this week the attraction was MURDER IN THE MUSIC HALL. “Ice Star in Mystery Film,” the headline for The New York Times review, about says it all. The ice star in question was Vera Hruba Ralston, who was Republic’s main leading lady of the day, as well as the girlfriend of the studio’s 66-year old head, Herbert J. Yates. She plays the star of an ice revue who tries to clear herself of suspicion of murder between her routines. The film and its star received passable reviews. It did an okay-for-the-venue $7,000.