THE advertising around the entrance to a Broadway movie theatre seems designed to catch the eye of a nearly blind person walking several blocks away, to satisfy bargain-conscious movie fans, to appeal to the mind and wishes of a delinquent, and it is to be trusted as little as you can manage. The signs over the marquees are usually four or more stories high and sometimes as wide as the Gotham’s, which extends over the theatre and beyond, to cover stores for jazz records, fruit drinks, magic supplies, men’s clothing and cigars. Some of the houses carry two or three of these signs. This advertising creates the illusion that the movie will keep you in an unending state of the most violent emotion, that the show won’t have one slow scene and that you won’t see a better picture anywhere, any time. The statements of critics who liked the movie or whose reviews can be edited to show liking are generally presented on painted images of gun blasts, or the theatre owner thinks up his own exclamatory sentence. The aim, like a sideshow barker’s, is to hold your attention while keeping you from using your own judgment.
The main subjects for exploitation are sex, murder and actors, but it seems that something can also be got out of technicolor, the acclaim of critics and columnists, large quantities of cataclysmic events and the number of weeks the movie has run. There are occasional exceptions, but in general the film’s idea is never exploited, and a director or writer only if he had something to do with making “Going My Way” or is as famous as Pearl Buck. As far as I could see last week, the movies that contained moral love affairs and moral people were exploited for having just the opposite; if there was little or no sex, is was suggested that there was lots; details in the posters, such as guns, the fright or cruelty in a character’s eyes, the hands of a strangler, the texture and highlights of a dress, were done with the greatest care and emphasis; actors were generally seen in an embrace, or about to kill or be killed. The most popular words were “thrill,” “shock” and “suspense.” The billboards had exploding, eerie or hallucinatory effects.
Just the deceit practised in these signs is breathtaking. The following are some theatre-front displays within three blocks on Broadway. Underneath the marquee at the Criterion, as an advertisement of “Counter-Attack,” is a large shot of the heroine in black negligee, leaf-patterned brassière and pants, chained to a dungeon wall. Nearby she is seen in the costume of a circus bareback rider, lying comfortably on a white satin divan, guarded by a Nazi with a bayonet. This illustrates “The suspense-filled drama of one woman and eight men trapped underground,” though the movie is actually without sex, the heroine is never seen in less than the full outfit of a Partisan, and the movie shows how she and Paul Muni guard six Nazis. Two huge billboards over the Astor Theatre are combined to suggest the plot of “The Enchanted Cottage.” In the top one is a message that the whole town whispered about these two. The message is enclosed in the kind of balloon used in comic strips for dialogue; the tail of the balloon drips down to the sign below and points to the kiss shown there between Dorothy McGuire, whose head is pillowed on pale clouds, and Robert Young, whose head is shown against a touch of orange sunset. Both seem to be asleep. The kiss is actually in the movie, but there is no whispering or anything irregular enough to be whispered about. The scene that is reproduced in seven or eight places around the Gotham Theatre, advertising “Colonel Blimp,” shows the blonde an aged Tory is thought to dream of, a duel, and explanations like “a fighting fool about women,” “a lusty lifetime of love and adventure.” In the film there is no lust, no fighting over women, no blonde, no fighting fool, and the Colonel’s movie lifetime is extremely quiet. The rest of Broadway seems to be covered with posters of people with guns and people running from them or from some nameless horror. It seems to me that even a hopeless delinquent would have a sense of degradation while buying his ticket under these signs.
June 4, 1945