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7 Imports Philadelphia, April 25, 1946, and June 5, 1946 ■ Open City 165 ■ We locate this chapter in Philadelphia, one of a handful of American cities capable of drawing an audience of any size for imports, foreign-language imports in particular . The engagement of Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945) began on April 25, 1946, as a benefit for war orphans sponsored by the Philadelphia Committee for Italian Relief, and closed a remarkable six weeks later, on June 5. The April date marks a turning point in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western powers over the Adriatic port city of Trieste, an early salvo of the cold war. On the June date, Italy was declared a republic following the referendum in which, with Italian women voting for the first time, the monarchy was rejected by a five-to-four margin . For Philadelphia viewers, many of whom had deep familial ties to Italy, Roberto Rossellini’s film, shot in substantial part in the streets of Rome, had an immediacy that the East–West clash over Trieste and the drama of the national referendum only intensified. Open City defined neorealism, the most radical and influential film style to emerge from postwar Europe. Its extraordinary success prepared the way for the extended vogue of the foreign film in U.S. urban and university centers and, with it, the expansion of the art house circuit. Two Swiss films had already stirred audiences and critics: The Last Chance (Die letzte Chance) and Marie-Louise. Two Soviet films, The Rainbow (Raduga) and Zoya, had played in large cities. So had the French It Happened at the Inn (Goupi mains-rouges, 1943). Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis) had been trade-showed and would open to an admiring reception in early Standing Room Only Best Years ■ 166 1947. The Mexican Maria Candelaria (1943) had been released in a dubbed version entitled Portrait of Maria. Nineteen forty-five and 1946 also saw the emergence of the British film industry as a force to be reckoned with in the world market. Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra were prestige exportations of Shakespeare and Shaw to American screens. David Lean found a warm reception among U.S. viewers for British middle-class romance in Brief Encounter. James Mason, a new “man you love to hate,” was seen in no fewer than four widely distributed movies (The Man in Grey, They Were Sisters, The Seventh Veil, and The Wicked Lady). We conclude this chapter with data on the importation of foreign films into the United States and with a consideration of the favor these productions found as measured by rankings and prizes. Exhibiting Imports in Philadelphia Foreign-language films were projected in downtown Philadelphia in 1945 and 1946 exclusively at the Studio, one of sixteen movie houses that lined an almost equivalent number of blocks on Market Street, from 3rd to 20th. The Studio was a small house near 16th, with a maximum capacity of 416. It had opened in 1913 as the Regent, a subsequent-run movie theatre; by 1976 it was a porn house; by 1977 it had disappeared from the city’s movie roster. When the building came down in the 1980s, Philadelphia’s nostalgic buffs would look back fondly on a tumultuous past that, thanks largely to the theatre’s central location and modest size, included several stints as an art house. The chronology of the theatre’s fortunes charts a trajectory typical of similar downtown metropolitan houses. In 1916, three years after it opened, the Regent was taken over by the Stanley Company of America, a chain that operated first- and subsequent -run sites in Philadelphia and elsewhere. In 1929 it was bought by Symon Gould, whose International Film Arts Guild programmed at two New York houses, the Cameo and the Greenwich Village. Gould changed the Regent’s name to Film Guild Cinema (the first film shown, March 1929, was a Ukrainian feature, followed soon after by Aleksandrov and Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World) and, when “business proved slack,” to Cinema Art.1 He promoted the enterprise ’s continental image with the addition of a “coffee lounge” carved out of a space that had earlier been the back rows. The coffee lounge failed to arrest the downward spiral. For one thing, audiences proved indifferent to foreign products; for another, sound had decimated the market for silent movies whatever their provenance. The [18...

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