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Looking Back

March 1982

Step back in time to see what area movie theaters were presenting in March 1982. Film titles are linked to the Internet Movie Database.

For more information about these theaters, see Cinema Treasures or Water Winter Wonderland.

In the Detroit Film Theatre's I Sent a Letter to My Love (1980, France), "Simone Signoret plays Louise [a 50-year-old single woman] with a subdued sense of humor—just watching her wonderful face makes this movie worthwhile," wrote Diane Haithman in the March 12, 1982 Detroit Free Press. Haithman also praised Hanna Schygulla's performance as a World War II-era German nightclub singer in director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lili Marleen (1981).

Foreign imports at the DFT also included Heart to Heart (1979, France), The Contract (1980, Poland) and the uncut Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979, Italy). On Sunday evenings, Alfred Hitchcock directed Foreign Correspondent (1940), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), Suspicion (1941), and Saboteur (1942). The Ernst Lubitsch series at the Afternoon Film Theatre of the Detroit Institute of Arts finished with Cluny Brown (1946), followed by the Japanese films The Man Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945), Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) and Gate of Hell (1953).

At the Michigan, the 20th Ann Arbor Film Festival ran March 9-14. Mediatrics sponsored a James Bond Film Festival on March 5-7. The Classic Film Theatre continued its wide variety of films with Seven Samurai (1954), Women in Love (1970), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Red River (1948), and a science fiction double feature of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and THX 1138 (1971). Live entertainment included musical comedian Anna Russell and classical pianist Michael Ponti.

Marilyn Monroe showed why Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Redford on March 5-6. Jane Russell also starred in this 1953 comedy that was directed by Howard Hawks. On March 19-20, moviegoers joined the Marx Brothers for A Day at the Races (1937) and A Night at the Opera (1935). Music lovers enjoyed the March 27 concert by organist Hector Olivera, who returns to the Redford on Oct. 13, 2007.

In a March 28, 1982 Detroit Free Press article about repertory film theaters, Jack Mathews wrote about the growing influence of home video: "You can talk about cable and pay TV, VHS, Beta and laser discs all you want, but you'll never convince me seeing movies telescoped onto a screen the size of a frying pan in a living room within earshot of a refrigerator door or an occupied bassinet is anything like seeing them in their natural habitat."

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