Also in Sub-Run

Billy Wilder’s LOST WEEKEND, the story of an alcoholic that had won a host of Oscars in March including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (shared) for Wilder and Best Actor for Ray Milland, was playing an exclusive return engagement at the Brooklyn Paramount. The trailer is here.

GILDA, the erotic noir classic starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, was playing at the Brooklyn Fox, paired with BLONDIE’S LUCKY DAY, the seventeenth installment of the movie series based on the popular comic strip. ["Gilda" trailer here and clips from TCM here]. "Gilda" was fresh off its Radio City Music Hall run.

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, which had been playing wide on the RKO circuit at the beginning of the week, was still in a few theaters on the 18th. Dorothy McGuire won critical accolades for her performance as a mute serving girl at the mercy of a psychopathic killer in this Gothic suspense thriller directed by Robert Siodmak, one of the refugees from Nazi Germany who helped create film noir. Ethel Barrymore was nominated for an Oscar in a supporting role. George Brent also starred. The film was paired with a Leon Errol comedy, RIVERBOAT RHYTHM. ["Spiral Staircase" clips at TCM]

MGM’s Technicolor musical hit THE HARVEY GIRLS, starring Judy Garland, John Hodiak, Angela Lansbury and Ray Bolger, which had hit the Loew’s neighborhood theater in March was now playing at several third tier Manhattan theaters, paired at most of them with TERROR BY NIGHT, one of a series of Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone. ["Harvey Girls" trailer and featurette and "Terror By Night" trailer at TCM]

A number of other films that had played the major circuits were still on scattered screens in the the city. Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent starred in the romance MY REPUTATION, (trailer here), about a war widow who scandalizes a town by becoming romantically involved too soon after her husband’s death It was paired with RED DRAGON, starring Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan, the latest Caucasian actor to play the inscrutable Oriental detective in the movie series, this time looking for a stolen formula for an atom bomb. “My Reputation” was one of Photoplay magazine's movies of the month for April.

Fading ingenue Deanna Durbin, an over-the-top Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone starred in BECAUSE OF HIM, a romantic comedy with music about Broadway that also was a Photoplay recommendation. At some theaters the B feature was A GAME OF DEATH, a low-budget thriller directed by future Oscar-winner Robert Wise early in his directing career and starring John Loder and Audrey Long. At other theaters the second attraction was the Sherlock Holmes movie TERROR BY NIGHT. ("Because of Him" clip here).

In Time, James Agee recommended both films in the pairing of THE SAILOR TAKES A WIFE, (see Loew's State entry) and VACATION FROM MARRIAGE, two movies about wartime marriages that would get wider release in later weeks. The first was a romantic comedy, starred Robert Walker and June Allyson, two of MGM’s new crop of stars, as a couple who marry hastily then have a hard time adjusting to life together when the groom is unexpectedly discharged from the Navy right after the wedding. The second film, a British romantic drama which won an Oscar for original screenplay, starred an emerging young actress, Deborah Kerr, and Oscar-winner Robert Donat, as a lower-middle class couple who find that the war provides unexpected relief from their dull lives and stale marriage. ["Vacation From Marriage" trailer]

Beefcake pin-up John Payne, Maureen O’Hara and theater veteran Cedric Hardwicke starred in a critically deplored, three-hanky tearjerker, SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY, about a dying woman, an orphan and the man who loves them both, screening in tandem with JOHNNY COMES FLYING HOME, starring Richard Crane as a test pilot. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times eviscerated “Sentimental Journey” in his review.

Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed starred in THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, directed by John Ford, one of the few war pictures still on theater screens that week. It was paired with LIFE WITH BLONDIE, a 1945 installment in the long-running comedy movie series. ["They Were Expendable" trailer]