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Looking Back

January 1957

Step back in time to see what our movie palaces were presenting in January 1957. Also included is interesting history about other area movie theaters. Film titles are linked to the Internet Movie Database.

Box office attractions at the Redford included Love Me Tender (Elvis Presley) and the controversial The Bad Seed. A Jan. 12 Detroit Free Press ad for the Redford read, "SPECIAL KIDDIE MATINEE SATURDAY, 'SHARKFIGHTERS' and 'WAGONS WEST', plus Extra Cartoons—Note: 'Bad Seed' Not Shown at Kiddie Matinee". Long before IMAX movies, a Redford double bill promoted the VistaVision and color of The Mountain and the CinemaScope of Teenage Rebel.

"Your patronage and personal comment have demanded a 2nd week holdover," read a Jan. 19, 1957 Ann Arbor News ad for Giant, which played at the Michigan Jan. 11-24. The new year at the Michigan started with the last Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin movie, Hollywood or Bust. Then came Doris Day in the dramatic Julie (with the 1948 Tom and Jerry cartoon, Old Rockin' Chair Tom). After Giant's two-week run, the screen lit up with Alfred Hitchcock's "first real-life thriller!"—The Wrong Man, with Henry Fonda and Vera Miles.

Years before blockbuster movies opened everywhere, ads appeared in the Jan. 1957 Ann Arbor News for exclusive Detroit runs of Michael Todd's Around the World in 80 Days at the United Artists Theatre and The Ten Commandments at the Madison Theatre. Anastasia (Ingrid Bergman) opened at the State in Ann Arbor and the Fox in Detroit.

Detroit area art film fans lined up at the World and Studio theaters to see the highly publicized La Strada (1954). "They know about juvenile delinquency in France, too," wrote Detroit Free Press Movie Critic Helen Bower about Fruits of Summer (1955), at the Coronet and Surf. Films at the Krim included The Loves and Death of a Scoundrel (1956, with George Sanders, Yvonne DeCarlo and Zsa Zsa Gabor). In Ann Arbor, Orpheum movies included Frisky (1954), with Gina Lollabrigida, and a film about childhood, Lovers and Lollipops (1956).

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