Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946

Notes

Notes 1. Standing Room Only 1. Film release dates are noted in the index. Apart from instances in which dating contributes to an understanding of our argument, we note in the text only those dates that fall outside our 1945–46 exhibition window. 2. See Leo A. Handel, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience: A Report of Film Audience Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 118–27, 126. 3. Susan Peters, who had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Random Harvest (1942), and had just finished her costarring work on Keep Your Powder Dry (1945), would, confined to a wheelchair, make only one more movie, The Sign of the Ram (1948), before her death at the age of thirty-one. 4. Variety, 1 Jan. 1947. 5. Variety, 6 Dec. 1944; Motion Picture Herald, 30 Sept. 1944; International Pictures press book for Casanova Brown (1944), New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter NYPLPA); Movie Story, Feb. 1944; Universal press book for Christmas Holiday (1944), NYPLPA; Movie Story, Oct. 1944; Paramount press book for Frenchman’s Creek (1944), NYPLPA; Motion Picture Herald , 7 Oct. 1944; Exhibitor, 24 Jan. 1945. 6. Film Daily Year Book (Reading, UK: Research Publications, 1947), microfilm, 59. 7. “Neighborhood theatres were sometimes palaces, such as Lee’s Fox Florence [Los Angeles, 1931], and sometimes smaller nonpalaces, depending on the plan. Located in residential rather than commercial areas, they were usually considerably smaller than downtown theatres, though just as opulent, and sat as few as three to four hundred people” (Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994], 55). 8. Poughkeepsie’s movie theatres and seating capacities: first-run (Bardavon 1,196; Stratford 1,443); subsequent run (Rialto 1,600; Liberty 750; Juliet 579); “flea pit” (Astor 600). 9. Film Daily Year Book (1947), 59. 10. Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk, 95. 11. In September 1945 there were seventy-three drive-ins in the United States, concentrated in the warmer zones (Motion Picture Herald, 15 Sept. 1945, 37); by January 1, 1947, the number had reached 155 (Film Daily Year Book [1947], 55). 12. In 1944 the average running time for “first-string features” was 105 minutes; twenty-three movies released that year exceeded two hours (Frank S. Nugent, “How Long Should a Movie Be?” New York Times, 18 Feb. 1945). 13. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 59. 14. Motion Picture Herald, 30 Dec. 1944. The war years were palmy ones for the newsreel. Television broadcasting had not yet reached the living room, and the public was avid for moving images of the conflict. The newsreel theatre, a small movie house devoted exclusively to screening hour-or-so-long programs of news and shorts, could be found in many big cities, sometimes in their railroad stations. 15. Motion Picture Herald, 6 Jan. 1945, 24. 16. Life, 12 Nov. 1945, 46. 17. A couple of Saturday’s heroes and heroines, “Secret Agent X-9” (Lloyd Bridges) and “Lothal, the Jungle Queen” (Ruth Roman), eventually freed themselves of the semaphoric dialogue and the action situations to pursue successful careers in A movies. 299 ■ Notes to Pages 4–11 Notes to Pages 13–26 ■ 300 18. After a decline during the Great Depression, stage shows had a resurgence during the war years (Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 73). “A bill at the Roxy featuring Danny Kaye, Beatrice Kaye and Tommy Tucker’s band cost management $37,000 a week; still it showed a profit and other big theatres such as the Capitol, Paramount and the Strand engaged in fierce competitive bidding for big bands and top entertainers” (Richard Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941–1945 [New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003], 284). 19. Film Daily Year Book (1947), 948. 20. Handel, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience, 131. The ARI study reached a paradoxical conclusion: “Theater owners have long known that most people say they prefer single features; yet when individual exhibitors have changed from a double to a single policy, their business has declined” (ARI report, August 1940). See Susan Ohmer, George Gallup in Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 91–119, for a discussion of the ARI poll and the various ways in which it was interpreted. 21. We rely on the...