In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Big Picture Boston, January 1, 1946 ■ Forever Amber Best Years ■ 142 Front Pages On the first two days of 1946 the front pages of the Boston Daily Globe featured columnist Walter Lippmann’s three-stage proposal for global peace: “pacification, international cooperation, and the formation of a world state.” A related article voiced optimism that the city’s bid to bring the United Nations Organization to Boston had been braced by revised specifications for the permanent site of the world body. Yet a third, a communication on Britain’s angry charge of a Soviet double cross on Iranian elections, spoke to the urgency of settling on a blueprint for deflecting conflict, as Lippmann had urged. From Germany the Boston paper cited reports that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s party deputy on trial in absentia at Nuremburg, had been caught by British intelligence, while a letter from Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Führer’s foreign minister, offered a new version of Hitler’s “last political will.” As the Globe put it, “Beaten, bitter Adolf Hitler flamboyantly prophesied a week before his ‘death’ in flaming Berlin that ‘my spirit will arise from my grave and one will see that I have been right.’” From the Far East came news that “[Gen. George C.] Marshall Parley Holds out Hope of China Peace,” a hope soon dashed by the continuation of hostilities between the warring Communists and Nationalists. The headline of the day’s column signed Joseph and Stewart Alsop ran, “Gen. MacArthur OK’d Principle of Jap Control ,” which, translated, meant that MacArthur had acceded in principle, after much publicized resistance, to the “establishment of an international body to watch over his work.” The national news on January 1 and 2 was economic for the most part. Harry Big Picture Truman was in the process of selecting fact finders for the steel industry labor dispute . A nationwide strike had dragged on since late November in spite of the president ’s repeated warnings that the unending succession of walkouts would jeopardize U.S. standing internationally. More rosy were the prospects surrounding the trying matter of rationing. Increases were predicted for the tightly controlled sugar supply; in general, the new year would bring better and more abundant food. Tires would go off the ration list. Federal taxes would be lowered. Of local interest was the front page reportage on the New Year’s merrymaking, a joyous celebration of peace: “BOSTON BLOWS LID, HAILS ’46,” read the headline. The festive mood was dampened neither by the weather nor by the defeat of Holy Cross by Miami’s final eightynine -yard play. New Englanders among the forty-three thousand disappointed troops who had not made it home for Christmas were, by New Year’s Eve, reunited with family and friends. And finally, the front page, in respectfully discreet coverage, described local religious services in what promised to be the “Churches’ Great Year of Peace.” Now Playing During the holidays Bostonians crowded the Keith Memorial to see Crosby and Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s. At the Metropolitan, the largest movie house in the city, Betty Hutton starred in The Stork Club; Betty Grable and June Haver were The Dolly Sisters in subsequent run at the small Exeter. At the Majestic, two comedies promising more sexual humor than they delivered, Getting Gertie’s Garter and Kiss and Tell, vied with the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None at the RKO Boston, where The New Earl Carroll Vanities of 1946 were onstage. Confidential Agent was on the decidedly second-run screens of the Scollay and the Washington Street Olympia. Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit represented the cause of British cinema at the Tremont and the Old South. Newsreel theatres featured “Justice Comes to Germany” in the March of Time series. John Ford’s They Were Expendable, at the Orpheum and the State, dramatized a much earlier, desperate face of World War II: the U.S. defeat in the Philippines. On a double bill with radio spinoff People Are Funny was Otto Preminger’s noirish Fallen Angel, in which Linda Darnell performed her specialty, the sultry, tough-talking dame, here the object of four men’s desires and the murder victim of one she spurns. Darnell would go on to star in one of the era’s big pictures, Forever Amber. The long story of Amber’s preproduction, production, and release began when Kathleen Winsor’s novel made its flamboyant entrance onto the literary scene...

Share