The Main Attractions At the Neighborhoods
“Gable’s back and Garson’s got him,” was the ad copy for ADVENTURE, the main attraction at the top tier of the Loews neighborhood theater chain on April 18. Greer Garson was one of the decade’s biggest female stars and Clark Gable, a longtime audience favorite, was resuming his screen career after a three-year wartime absence. In this movie he played a rowdy seaman who falls for a mousy librarian (Garson). Here is the trailer. James Agee recommended the film in Time as reasonable entertaining. It had premiered at Radio City, and it was a big moneymaker, but few critics thought it was a high point in either actor’s career. The New York Times film editor Thomas M. Pryor named "Adventure" one of the "seven disappointments" of 1946 in his year-end roundup, writing that Gable and MGM had exchanged harsh words over the film. Garson happened to be in the news that week for almost drowning when a rogue wave swept her off a rock while she was filming “Desire Me” in Carmel. A sardine fisherman, working as an extra, saved her, although she was hospitalized with bruises and a back injury. MEET ME ON BROADWAY, a low-budget musical from Columbia starring Marjorie Reynolds. was the accompanying second feature at most theaters. Co-starring was a top model of the day and the first Miss Rheingold Beer, Jinx Falkenberg, who began a long-running radio and later television breakfast show with her husband, journalist Tex McCrary (see Time magazine story that ran 3/11/46) that week.
THREE STRANGERS (Warner), starring Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Geraldine Fitzgerald, was the main attraction at most RKO theaters. "A triumph of TERROR with the masters of Mystery! All the thrills of the Maltese Falcon!” said the ad copy. Greenstreet and Lorre had co-starred in “The Maltese Falcon” as well as in several subsequent films. The Romanian-born director of "Three Strangers", Jean Negulesco, had previously paired them in “The Mask of Dimitrios.” Fitzgerald was an Irish-born actress who had made a mark in supporting roles in "Wuthering Heights" and "Dark Victory," but whose notable headstrong independence kept her from contention as a major Hollywood star; she was supposed to have the Mary Astor role in “The Maltese Falcon” until she clashed with the studio. John Huston, who wrote and directed “The Maltese Falcon,” wrote the screenplay with Howard Koch for this noir tale of three down-at-luck strangers who meet at the stroke of twelve in front of a statue of a Chinese goddess in hope of changing their fortune. The New Yorker liked it and so did James Agee of Time, although both reviewers found the story silly. Here is the trailer. TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD WOMAN, dismissed by critics as a tired sequel to a formerly popular but now worn-out franchise starring an over-the-hill Johnny Weissmuller, was the second feature, although some newspaper ads and theater marquees reversed the order, perhaps targeting a younger audience that might consider Tarzan a bigger draw than a film noir without a major box office star. The Leopard Woman was played by sultry Acquanetta, known as the "Venezuelan Bombshell" in the Hollywood columns of the time but actually Mildred Davenport of Norristown, PA; in her later life as a Phoenix celebrity she said the Davenports had adopted her from a Wyoming Indian reservation. (Here is the trailer.)
At one RKO theater, the Alden in Jamaica, “Tarzan and the Leopard Woman” was paired as the A feature with a cheapie from PRC, OUT OF THE NIGHT (aka "Strange Illusion"), whose director Edgar G Ulmer has since acquired a cult following. It is a thriller with a plot based loosely on "Hamlet," starring Jimmy Lydon, who in the early 1940s had played teenager Henry Aldrich in the movie series based on a popular long-running radio and later television comedy series.
Some Loews theaters were showing a double feature from Columbia Pictures on April 18. PARDON MY PAST was a lightweight comedy starring Fred MacMurray as a returning GI mistaken for a rich playboy. Here is a clip. Broadway’s Alfred Drake (“Oklahoma!”) in his only film role, Janet Blair, up-and-coming young comedian Sid Caesar and dancer Mark Platt (Dream Curly in “Oklahoma!” on Broadway) starred in the second feature, the musical comedy TARS AND SPARS, about a Coast Guard SPAR who mistakenly thinks Drake is a war hero. Caesar was singled out in reviews as someone with a promising future, and the Photoplay reviewer liked the movie, writing “we think the Coast Guard boys will approve every gay minute of it," but the film failed to draw an audience as a main feature and fell to second billing at the neighborhoods soon after its premiere.
Otto Preminger’s follow-up to “Laura,” FALLEN ANGEL, a noirish murder mystery from Twentieth Century Fox starring Dana Andrews, musical comedy star Alice Faye in her first straight dramatic leading role and scene-stealer Linda Darnell, soon to replace Peggy Cummins as star of Preminger's then-filming adaptation of "Forever Amber," was playing in other Loews theaters.(Trailer here) The surly, but sensitive antihero Andrews, perhaps more an emblem of the decade than any other male star, plays a heel who courts the rich Faye for her money. When his girlfriend (Darnell) turns up dead, he finds that he is the prime suspect. SUNBONNET SUE, a Monogram musical starring their perky star Gale Storm (known to older baby boomers for her 1950s TV series “My Little Margie”) as a singer on the turn-of-the-century Bowery, was the second attraction.
It was another future TV star, Ann Sothern, and John Wayne at some Loews theaters in a double feature matchup billed as two “hits,” that is to say two B plus movies. Sothern and future U.S. senator George Murphy starred in UP GOES MAISIE, the ninth installment in the MGM franchise about the comic escapades of a showgirl (trailer here). Wayne and Vera Hruba Ralston starred in DAKOTA, a mediocre western from Republic. Wayne, popular but not yet the megastar he would become by the end of the decade, had a contract with B-picture maker Republic, the home of Roy Rogers. Republic allocated a bigger budget for his features than their norm and he was free to freelance with the major studios, often playing the second male lead in A pictures such as MGM’s “They Were Expendable” a war drama still playing at scattered locations that week.