Second Chain

When the soldiers at Camp Barkeley, Tex. saw a clinch interrupted in the movie Forest Rangers, they yelled "As you were!" Hedy Lamarr's sinuous maneuvers against Richard Carlson in White Cargo brought forth wolf howls in low register. When Charles Boyer laid hands on Rita Hayworth in Tales of Manhattan, only to unhand her and start over again, one impatient soldier yelled, "For crying out loud! Stop wasting our time!" The U.S. fighting forces take active pleasure in the motion picture.

The U.S. Army had its 1,000th movie theater opened last fortnight--at Camp Hood, Tex. To celebrate the event, Army Motion Picture Service* Director R. B. Murray was given a surprise party with a monster ceremonial cake in Washington, D.C.'s Tower Building lobby. During World War I, soldier movies were provided by the War Department and welfare agencies. When the AMPS was founded in 1921 it had only "a woefully small sum of money ... a few buildings which were theaters in name only." Today it operates in all 48 states plus Alaska, Newfoundland, Bermuda, Trinidad, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Panama. Army theaters in the U.S. are now built in three sizes, seating 364, 602, 1038, and have an annual attendance of 225,000,000. They rent standard-size films from the producers at an estimated annual cost of over $10,000,000.

The soldiers' pictures are chosen by civilian AMPS officials, are designated M (mature) and F (family). These initials have been known to confuse girls on the post, who have expressed a preference for the pictures marked Male over those marked Female. The AMPS judges that its clientele prefers, in order: 1) musicals with girls; 2) comedies; 3) service films. Adds one AMPS man: "Even the colonels like Disney." Army favorites for May: Lady of Burlesque, White Savage, More the Merrier, The Human Comedy.

* World's second largest cinema chain. Largest: Paramount, with about 1,400 theaters.

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