Boom

CiNEMA

The U.S. people are going to the movies more than they ever did before.

--Nationwide cinema attendance is up 25% from a year ago; in the major cities, 40%.

-- Last week one film, Random Harvest, broke all records for a single house: in an eleven-week run (one week longer than Mrs. Miniver) at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, it had played to more than 1,550,000 people. Another Manhattan record: Star Spangled Rhythm finished an eight-week run, longest in the huge Paramount Theater's history. Yankee Doodle Dandy ran 27 weeks on Broadway; Casablanca was in its 15th.

-- In San Francisco Howard Hughes's The Outlaw (TIME, Feb. 22), despite the roughest handling any film has had from cinema critics in years, was in its fifth record-breaking week.

--RKO's sleeper, Hitler's Children, made by an unknown producer, Edward A. Golden, with a starless cast, on a small budget ($170,000), has already grossed $1,000,000 and broken attendance records almost everywhere it has been shown.

-- In many a defense center theaters were on a 24-hour day, to accommodate swing shifters.

--Throughout the U.S. cinema houses did away with Bank Nites, Dish Nites and bingo games and upped prices. The customers still came in droves.

--Theater managers found audiences the rowdiest in their memory: they howled, hissed and booed at pictures, demanded Westerns, carved their initials on seats, sometimes even fired buckshot at the screen. War workers brought alarm clocks, set them to go off when they had to leave for work.

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