Another Time Around

Despite the summer doldrums, a slump in good new pictures and the British tax scare (TIME, Sept. 22), some box offices were enjoying a brisk little boom on reissues.

Broadway marquees took on a nostalgic glow. Gone With the Wind--all four hours of it--was in its fourth Manhattan week (MGM cheerfully estimated that it would take in another $5 million to add to its already prodigious $32 million). For five midsummer weeks, the Palace advertised "a repertory of memorable motion pictures," including Love Affair (1939), Top Hat (1935), Gunga Din (1939), The Informer (1935), The Spanish Main (1945) and The Bells of St. Mary's. Elsewhere in Manhattan, moviegoers could see Charles Laughton in Henry the Eighth (1933), Fredric March in Les Miserables (1935), Bette Davis in Marked Woman (1937), Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941).

M-G-M began the reissue cycle last fall with the re-release of the indifferently successful Rage in Heaven (1941) starring Ingrid Bergman and Robert Montgomery. Surprisingly, it took in more money the second time around than it did in the original release. M-G-M followed up by reissuing Boomtown (1940), The Great Waltz (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Warner Bros, dusted off King's Row (1941), The Sea Hawk (1940) and The Sea Wolf (1941), and 20th Century-Fox tried another round of Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938).

This year Hollywood plans to reissue at least 68 pictures, twice as many as last year. Moviegoers are already seeing, or will see, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford in The Women (1939), Walter Pidgeon in How Green Was My Valley (1941), Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart in Destry Rides Again (1939), Ingrid Bergman and Leslie Howard in Intermezzo (1939) and Paul Muni in Scarface (1932).

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