Souvenir Program

         Rare Dali cover program

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         The British program.

         

         

         

         Rare Souvenir Program

         Program for "Special Engagement"

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

       

       

       

       

       

       

         

                           

       

             

                

                

                                       

(ALMOST) ALL THE REST

Judging by Kim Holston’s overly expensive Movie Roadshows, the roadshow section here at NowReViewing has managed to include the vast majority for the heyday period between the mid 1950s and 1972. See Pull Down menu at left. On this page, in the collage above and in the left column, are remnants—frontals of souvenir programs of slipped-from-memory hardtickets and would-be contenders. A few covers are by necessity imagined. As absentees become available, expect updates; if any are worth writing about, comments will appear on this page. The following is free form bavardage.

Just for clarity, The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire, Knights of the Round Table, The Egyptian, High Society and Guys and Dolls weren’t reserved seaters; they were prestige “events,” all in CinemaScope or VistaVision, with programs. Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, the first animation in 70mm, using Super Technirama, was technically not a roadshow, either, but played exclusively in many urban venues specializing in large screen format. (In Chicago, at the Sate Lake, in a 13 week run starting 2/12/1959.) Based on Ernest Hemingway winning the Nobel prize for literature and the Pulitzer for The Old Man and the Sea, the movie version starring Spencer Tracy was treated solemnly as a roadshow in major cities; at left is the American booklet and rollover for the Japanese version. The 1958 British A Night to Remember opened as a reserved seater in New York and L.A. but, in spite of excellent reviews, box office was dismal and promptly relegated to continuous showings. Anthony Mann’s Cimarron opened and quickly flopped in L.A. and N.Y. using the format and while unable to find a matching program, I recently found two internationals, a Danish at the left and, if you rollover, a German booklet. The Grant/Sinatra/Loren travesty The Pride and the Passion and the musicals Gypsy and The Music Man probably had programs in the planning stage, axed when the films failed to get the go. Ordering up one of those Random House-like hardcover jobbies, Hatari! was being prepped for roadshow, augmented by the excitement of the then-exotic Henry Mancini score. Assessing Howard Hawks’s cut as a sloppily scripted vacation, regretting not giving cinematographer Russell Harlan a widescreen process to capture Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and unhappy with John Wayne’s improbable romance with Elsa Martinelli, Paramount correctly sensed the audience would be more lasso cowboys than movie program buyers. Vincente Minnelli’s remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was also a probable go as hardticket until MGM read the results of the first test preview, after which Alex North’s score and Ingrid Thulin’s voice were jettisoned. (12/2020)

Often movie studios would start off pushing biggies such as Giant, The King and I and Vidor’s War & Peace as roadshows in New York and L.A., only to pull the plug in other cities. Chicago ran all three sans hardticket, and wisely exhibited Blake Edwards’ 1965 archaic slapsticker The Great Race at the State Lake with a 35mm print and continuous performance for sixteen weeks, achieving better results than the few cities daring the format with a 70mm blowup. Sometimes there were dumb political considerations for opening reserved seat: Sunrise at Campobello and In Harm’s Way suffered short runs in Washington. After initial poor reviews and poorer box office response, movies like The Hallelujah Trail and Custer of the West were yanked from the format. Conversely, 2001 was building larger if not more stoned audiences with repeaters and word-of-mouth at Chicago’s Cinestage, even after 36 weeks, only to be pulled for the contract-obligated holiday babysitter Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, bounced after 17 weeks. (School night viewings left the theatre half empty.) Sometimes movies opened in Europe as roadshows—for example, Carl Foreman’s The VictorsMary Poppins, The Golden Head, The Great Waltz, Lafayette, The Comedians, Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes—but not in America. Zulu opened posh at the Plaza in London, soon after going wide by popular demand. Cabaret was given an elevated London engagement, with the pleasant option for cocktails during viewing. (Remember having a couple.) Half a Sixpence short-circuited fast, pushing director George Sidney to “voluntarily” retire but kinder hearts understood he couldn’t work around the PSA on Tommy Steele’s frightful adult odontiasis; briefly roadshowed elsewhere, the movie opened continuous performances at popular prices at Chicago’s United Artists. A 70mm blowup, Marooned became the Cinestage’s Xmas ’69 attraction, stranded for thirteen weeks. Another 70mm blowup, Albert Finney’s Scrooge, at cp/pp, opened at the Michael Todd on 11/6/70, lasting 6 weeks. Man of La Mancha (Xmas ’72, 14 weeks at McClurg Court and eleven at Northbrook’s Edens, both with 35mm prints) and Young Winston (Xmas ’72, ten weeks at US 150 in Oakbrook, 35mm print) were considered the last formal hardtickets and falsely blamed for the format’s demise, as the sign of changing times for downtown moviegoing flashed warning neon for at least two years prior. The expensive musical flop Hello, Dolly and the epic nincompooper Ryan’s Daughter, after opening as reserved seat to devastating press, were most likely the beginner catalysts for the acceleration of the shoveling of graveyard dirt: nervous execs switched the movies to special engagement in many cities, granting one or two more viewings per day, having sliced away footage, overture, entr’acte and exit music. The gambit as well as the curiosity over the bad reviews worked for Ryan’s Daughter, becoming the fourth most successful movie in 1971. (There’s this unusual exception: Ryan’s Daughter opened, in 35mm print, at Chicago’s Michael Todd as nonroadshow; seven weeks in, having received a delayed 70mm print, the theatre converted to roadshow until the end of run a mere eight weeks later. By contrast, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia played 36 weeks at the Cinestage and his Doctor Zhivago 38 weeks at the Palace.) The gambit didn’t work for Dolly, notwithstanding the successful hard ticket runs of Funny Girl in downtown Chicago—the United Artists first, the Michael Todd second, the Cinestage third, then closing at the Palace with a first-time 70mm print at cp/pp. Anticipated to be a Xmas attraction at one of the Loop’s major venues in spite of studio panic, Streisand’s gargantuan Dolly opened nonhardticket seven months after the N.Y. premiere, in the suburban venues of the Edens and Oakbrook’s UA 150, where, without publicity, it was reportedly projected via the D-150 process. (Who saw it that way?) Downtown Chicago didn’t see Dolly until the crackerbox UA Marina Towers Cinemas opened in late September, 1970. Another Streisand opus, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was slated for deluxe packaging from inception but by end of filming would be a fashion show Miranda Priestly would have enjoyably savaged; undergoing emergency alterations, eliminating Arnold Scaasi’s atrocities and some musical numbers, it opened off-the-rack at the Michael Todd. (6/2022)

The knolling for roadshows accompanied Man of La Mancha during its nationwide run—acutely at N.Y.’s celebrated Rivoli—and it wasn’t just the flimsy production pretending to be prestige or its nonmusical stars. (Ross Hunter’s 1973 version of Lost Horizon would remind everyone Hollywood has no vaccine to thwart amnesia, providing Bette Midler the chance to quip “I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical.”) The abusive push of mediocrity onto a weary public coincided with several changes: as with other older movie palaces in urban settings, the Rivoli would soon go twin screen to adapt to the latest demographics of downtown audiences by serving up schlocky smut, blaxploitation and X-rated stuff like Deep Throat as white flighters flocked to well-heeled suburbia and technology-laden movie houses such as the UA Cinema 150s, all of which were defunct by 2003. Closing in ignominy, the Rivoli (and Chicago’s McVickers, Michael Todd and Cinestage) became ripe for real estate scavengers. Not to suggest being tagged Adults Only was doom for hardticket or advanced tickets/unassigned seats: back in 1961, La Dolce Vita played 17 weeks at the Michael Todd; James Joyce’s Ulysses had a packed three-day exclusive at the Esquire in 1967; Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris played at the McClurg Court for 17 weeks in 1973. But regurgitation was the prevailing ailment caused by the hype and emptiness of spectacles: Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo was conceived as the roadshow follow up to his gigantic War and Peace, with arty ads and souvenir book readied and Rod Steiger in the title role opposite Christopher Plummer as box office lure, but, repeating history, the epic was a real bog, switching to cp/pps, and surrendering to attrition in a mere 25 days at Chicago’s Roosevelt in April, 1971. When movie going habits changed from formal to casual, facilitated by sex, drugs, rock and an on-going war, the era of reserved seating evolved into “special engagement,” the buzz term to classify prestige movies—like The Godfather, Tommy, Papillon, The Deer Hunter, Reds, Gandhi and Schindler’s List—and still in use. The roadshow format has been resurrected several times. The infamy of Heaven’s Gate includes the shortest reserve seat run in NYC’s history, scrapped after only three days and cancelled in L.A. before opening. In March of 1995 Jefferson in Paris was dared and promptly bombed. The following year Kenneth Branagh’s 70mm “eternal” version of Hamlet running four hours was inexcusably abused by Columbia Pictures’s mishandling of what was a bona fide singular experience needing special attention. In late 2006 Dreamgirls was rolled out as a limited but successful $25-a-ticket engagement in N.Y., L.A. and San Fran to build Oscar buzz. In 2008, Steven Soderbergh’s full length Che was given the same treatment, minus the hefty price tag, for the same reason, unsuccessfully. Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 The Hateful Eight, filmed in Ultra Panavision 70, was deliberately marketed as a quasi-roadshow, its 187 minutes receiving full panoply of overture, intermission, souvenir book. The “n” wordfest also comes in a 168 minute version in 35mm, and a 2019 re-edit as four part miniseries on Netflix with a substantial amount of never-before-seen footage. (5/2023)

About The Big Fisherman, the least viewed biblical epic made during the roadshow heydays, as a candidate for restoration: Disney has repeatedly denied any plans to do a refurbishment, citing the negative as unusable and a decent whole print doesn’t exist because too many cuts were made and discarded during and after its initial run, and little interest by the public to warrant further search & restore. So it’s a waiting game. An extremely poor bootleg copy, with about thirty minutes missing out of the original 184, has been uploaded to YouTube and stays until copyright infringement is enforced, but such a copy reappears quite frequently. TCM airs a slightly better 2:44:45 print on rare occasion and, without TCM association, available on YouTube until being pulled and later re-uploaded. The reviews of the movie were deemed “respectful” but in N.Y. a euphemism for unenthusiastic, and while I could deem unfair to personally comment after seeing it in its current conditions sans widescreen, Newsweek probably sums up the mess: “The acting is properly atrocious, the settings magnificently tasteless, the dialogue a splendid refresher course in the use of the cliché, and the production a study in minor technical errors.” Over at Widescreen Movies, editor John Hayes humorously writes of production designer John De Cuir, “The architect of the sets apparently never learned that in antiquity (as well as in modern times) columns were usually built to hold something up, not to stand alone as superfluous and expensive rows of landfill.” De Cuir’s designs, especially for Herod’s palace, are screamers we’ll see again, more tranquilized, in Cleopatra. As for the painted interior columns, we’ll see those duplicated in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Using Google, I found only lobby cards, available below, capturing De Cuir’s fantasies. These photos are better than anything in the YouTube uploads. True, The Big Fisherman opened as a Panavision 70 roadshow at the Rivoli in New York in August, 1959 and, according to in70mm, ran 23 weeks. In September and October the bummer went wider hardticket at Philadelphia’s Midtown for 7 weeks, Boston’s Gary for 7, Washington D.C.’s Warner for 10, Louisville’s Brown for 6, Minneapolis for 6. What is misleading is it played in these venues and 40 other cities as a successful reserved seater. No confirmation of this other than pressbook copy touting “record-breaking roadshow engagements,” four words defying the short runs and disappointing box office. Most telling is the movie didn’t open in Chicago until February, 1960, at the deteriorating Garrick at cp/pp struggling to survive a 35mm four-week run, unable to cash in on the spill overs from Ben-Hur, already playing to capacity just around the corner at the Michael Todd. (6/2022)

Probably for a while Robert Aldrich’s 1962 Sodom and Gomorrah was considered for roadshow treatment. Certainly the legendary sins of the twins were juicy biblical movie stuff, even when tamed. Adding some heft, one of the producers was Goffredo Lombardo who helped finance Purple Noon and Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard. Dimitri Tiomkin was original choice for the music, later to be replaced by Miklós Rósza. How Aldrich came to helm the project isn’t too clear, except he needed work and having earned a reputation for working on the cheap, accepted the budget of around $2 million for S & G, ending up after ten months of filming in the twin cities of Aït Benhaddou, Morocco, costing about $6 million. It’s Rózsa’s succinct comment about the cardboardy spectacle as “inferior and tacky” confirming someone more than just Aldrich was involved in turning it into schlock: Joseph E. Levine. Associated with it since reading with disdain one of the first drafts, he unconvincingly claimed not much more involvement but, after buying the international distribution rights to Hercules with beefy Steve Reeves back in 1958 which, through Levine’s promotional skills, became the first successful “open-wide,” it seems a sure bet he whispered to Aldrich its economized exploitation as the model for S & G. Upon completion, every facet of the sinfest had the look of late 50s/early 60s chintziness. The movie came in at almost 3 hours but any further consideration of roadshow rendered moot when British and other European censors demanded cuts, slicing away roughly 30 minutes. Those slices inflamed Aldrich to the point of ragging on the movie regularly, only to later, after seeing a decent print still without whatever was cut, saying it wasn’t so bad after all. Two of three pluses: Rózsa’s score (about which the boys at Film Score Monthly cream in their jeans) and a rather good action sequence involving hundreds if not a few thousand horses, stabbings and burning arrows. The third plus is the one guilty pleasure excuse to see it—Anouk Aimée’s queen, exercising scene-stealing flair as an apotheosis of badness. She has a fun time getting la dolce hots not just for torture but also for one of those scantily clad babes in Kresge’s 5 & Dime makeup. A few versions available at YouTube. In Spherical. Time for a remake by Ridley Scott. (3/2022)

After the labors of The Fall of the Roman Empire in Spain, Omar Sharif, Stephen Boyd and James Mason headed to Yugoslavia for the toils of Genghis Khan. Producer Irving Allen likely had some roadshow pretensions—the virus attacked a lot of moviemakers in the early 60s, and the closest he ever got to full blown infection was the 1970 Cromwell. With a meager budget squashing production values but Henry Levin directing, Geoffrey Unsworth photographing and Geoffrey Foot editing briskly, Genghis Khan remains a very amusing Saturday matinée actioner for its blatant miscasting and preposterous fiction, for having the guts to tell the audience upfront the movie is a total crock of shit, seconded by Dusan Radic’s bombastic score. Wasted as a cameo villain in FOTRE, Sharif in good hair reverses to star “protagonist” vs Boyd’s antagonism. Appearing to enjoy their mano a mano combat, they’re only about half-bad. Mason is so bad in Fu Manchu getups and Robert Morley a British chatterbox they’re Laurel and Hardy camp. The movie ads were designed by the same fonts creating the iconic gem for Ben Hur, cloned for Bronston’s King of Kings and El Cid, Anthony Quinn’s Barrabas and in descending degrees Bronston’s 55 Days at Peking and FOTRE. Shooting commenced on Genghis Khan in August, 1963, completed in early December, 1963, and dumped on America in June, 1965, having been delayed by the dread of expected negative reviews and FOTRE’s ruinous box office. GK opened at the Roosevelt in Chicago 8/13/1965, lasting until 9/2/1965, in Panavison; limited 70mm blowup elsewhere. Sharif’s good fortune in fame was being cast as Doctor Zhivago before anyone saw his turkeys. (His contract with Columbia would make him chum for the sharks.) In the quest for a career capper, Cromwell is Allen’s most respectably produced movie, and Ken Hughes, the director, repeatedly proclaimed it the “best thing I’ve ever made.” With a cast including Richard Harris majorly shouting as Oliver, auntie Alec Guinness as Charles I, poof muffins Robert Morley, Timothy Dalton, Frank Finlay, Patrick Wymark, Charles Gray and Michael Jayston, scored by Frank Cordell, Oscar-winning costumes from Vittorio Nino Novarese and nicely photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, the spectacle was positioned to be a deluxer, running at three hours. (Cut to 2 hr. 20 minutes, give or take a few minutes.) But for a director admittedly obsessed with Cromwell, spending years studying him, Hughes’s script contained at least two dozen historical inaccuracies coalescing into consequence—Columbia refused a hardticket rollout in America. A big success in England. In Panavision, with 70mm blowup. (6/2020)

Having sold his Warner Bros. stock to augment an imminent retirement, Jack Warner decided he wasn’t ready to waste away and instead wanted to bring to the screen the musical 1776, paying handsomely to get the rights, as he did for My Fair Lady and Camelot, only to discover the new executives at WB weren’t interested and then made a deal with Columbia Pictures. Didn’t help improve his chances at success and neither did hiring Peter H. Hunt, who won a Tony for directing 1776, hoping to pull off a Mike Nichols’ Virginia Woolf début feat; used most of the original Broadway performers, none of whom could be touted as box office attractions; and with timing everything, filmed and released it in 1972—four years before the bicentennial celebrations. Warner accepted Richard Nixon’s personal advice to edit out the number “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” because the president thought it was more about him than right-wing politics. (Not much difference.) Unknown is if he knew Nixon likely didn’t see the movie in a private screening, only a scaled-down WH production of the stage version. He also cut roughly twenty minutes more of material without Hunt’s imput, consequently reducing the musical as intended “special engagement” presentation to play at prestige venues. (Opened at NYC’s Radio City Music Hall and went downhill after that; costing $6 million to make, the movie earned a mere $2.8 at the box office.) The full Panavision version at 180 minutes might have done better in showcasing—in 1976. But not in ‘72 when the Vietnam War and its expansion into Cambodia and Laos, the shootings at Kent State and then the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, collectively discounted American championship of independence. (Watergate and Nixon’s tapes not yet on media radar.) And yes, a lot of critics and factional audiences were gunning for it. Some of the songs—especially “Sit Down, John,” which gets a brief revival by Martin Sheen on Grace and Frankie, “Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve” and “Molasses to Rum” with John Cullum surprisingly fey in a Ron Moody sort of way—garner an engaging community theatre responsiveness. Less a “movie” than a holiday event for television, where it always belonged. Sony Pictures released a 4K DVD pack, with more than five hours of material, on 5/31/2022. (6/2022)

Locating the souvenir book for 1956’s Helen of Troy at eMovie Poster, it’s got more class than the spectacle itself and somewhat on par with Burton’s Alexander the Great, its Danish program also at left. The very rare program for William Wyler’s 1958 The Big Country is now uploaded and comes with this reminder: Franz Planer’s widescreen imagery and Jerome Moross’s theme promise excitation until we realize four nasties and one pacifist get lost in both. Duplicating Burton’s Hamlet, Olivier’s 1965 Othello was a two-day affair, with London said to be the only venue to get a 70mm blowup. Shot in Panavision, with enlarged theatrical settings, a decent print is available at YouTube, in ways affirming Maggie Smith’s eventual confession of just about losing it over Larry’s ego, his paralysing stage fright and mischief-making during both the run of the play and its filming. The demand to see the “movie,” especially after receiving four Oscar nominations for acting, was encored for several weeks in some big American cities and university towns. Culture got another boost with 1966’s The Royal Ballet: Romeo and Juliet with Fonteyn and Nureyev, lastng five weeks hardticket at the Cinestage. Opening in N.Y. and L.A. hardticket at the Fine Arts Theatres, Tony Richardson’s 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade was quickly diagnosed with arty fartiness quarantining the box office. The program for 1971’s Mary, Queen of Scots recollects producer Hal B. Wallis’s hope Vanessa Redgrave as Mary and Glenda Jackson in a second go as Elizabeth I would be a prestige offering. Only two reasons to see it: the one-on-one showdowns between the queens history clearly says never happened. (12/2021)

The more theatre exhibitors heard about Custer of the West the less enamored they became in bidding. Around the time of Fred Zinnemann winning awards for A Man for All Seasons, 20th Century Fox splashed the news he would follow up with an epic on George Custer’s ballyhooed career in the U. S. military and his end at the Little Bighorn massacre. Estimated costs exceeded what Fox was willing to pay, so Zinnemann moved on and Philip Yordan took over, borrowing the financial schmooze techniques of Samuel Bronston, with whom he worked on King of Kings, El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Circus World, the last three huge flops, and somehow got six million bucks from First National Bank to make Custer and another bummer entitled Krakatoa, East of Java. The vast majority of both were filmed in Spain, with the former using the U.S. West-like landscapes outside of Madrid well known for horse farms which previously supplied Bronston’s needs. Directed indifferently by Robert Siodmak, the shoot was difficult, with violent breaches by actor Robert Shaw, who not only drank heavily but also demanded and received the fateful chance to self-bolster a sagging script. Futile was his false effort to de-savage Custer’s treatment of the Indians and then mythologize his death, as history revealed this irony: in extensive testimony later, neither the Indian tribes gathering to fight against the government nor the hierarchy of the U.S. military really knew if he, otherwise in customarily fearless fashion leading the charge, was actually at Little Bighorn during the massacre, having abruptly altered his original battle plans. And most of the attacking Indians didn’t know what he looked like, and the only survivor among the U.S. contingent was one horse. Recovering his body shortly afterward, there were two rifle bullet entries, one in the left temple and the other slightly below the heart. (Reportedly—and if true suggesting some Indians did recognize him—an arrow was inserted into his penis and an awl in each ear). Photographed in Super Technirama by Cecilio Paniagua and intended to be projected through the “new” Cinerama, Custer failed to convince major metro venues, including those in New York, L.A. and Chicago, to book. Only fifteen theatres in America gambled a reserved seat run, with simultaneous premieres in Dallas and Houston. (The world premiere was at London’s Casino Cinerama, one of the even fewer international bookings.) Sans updating, the total U.S. box office is recorded at $400,000, against a production cost of $4,000,000. YouTube offers a decent print reminding us two of the three “slaloms” designed to showcase Cinerama end in amusing catastrophe. (02/2022)

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Movies shown above and at left: Alexander the Great, Alfred the Great, The Big Country, The Big Fisherman, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Charge of the Light Brigade, Che, Cheyenne Autumn, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Cimarron, Citizen Kane, Cromwell, Custer of the West, Doctor Doolittle, The Egyptian, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, Genghis Khan, The Golden Head, The Great Race, The Great Waltz, The Greatest Show on Earth, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, Half a Sixpence, Hatari!, The Hateful Eight, Helen of Troy, High Society, How to Marry a Millionaire, In Harm's Way, Isadora, Jefferson in Paris, Julius Caesar, Knights of the Round Table, LaFayette, Last Tango in Paris, The Leopard, Lost Horizon (musical), Man of La Mancha, Marooned, Mary Poppins, Mary Queen of Scots, The Music Man, The Night of the Generals, A Night to Remember, The Old Man and the Sea, Othello, Papillon, Richard III, The Royal Ballet: Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, 1776, Scrooge, Sleeping Beauty, Sodom and Gomorrah, Song of Norway, Sunrise at Campobello, Tommy, Ulysses, The Victors, Waterloo, Young Winston and Zulu.

ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com  

Text COPYRIGHT © 2020, 2021, 2022 RALPH BENNER  All Rights Reserved.