The Bible: ... In the Beginning (1966)

 

Movies have always been there for me.

In January 1968, my family buried a revered matriarch. The service was in a funeral home on a busy street in downtown Washington, D.C.

I was not quite 10, but I remember seeing through the window of the limousine that a neighboring movie house was screening The Bible: In the Beginning. Being a good Catholic school boy, I pointed to the marquee and said to a family member that that was a good sign (unaware of the double meaning of what I had said).

It would be 20 years before I actually saw, albeit on video, the picture that I long associated with that solemn occasion. For all of that time, I had assumed John Huston's weirdly uneven but still spectacular epic retelling of the first chapters of Genesis was a '67-'68 release. The picture had actually been in theaters since September 1966.

Studios made many fewer pictures back then, and movie canisters were first released to the major metros' big palatial theaters with names like Orpheum, Loew's and Fox. Features were screened in those houses for months before making their way to smaller cities and towns and eventually the hinterlands and to drive-ins. Small town audiences often saw the blotched and scratched prints that had been pristine in Chicago and New York months before.

Occasionally, fresh prints were released and the cycle begun again years after the initial screening.

Some reels that went to Dixie were edited to remove "objectionable" content -- like Black folks that WERE NOT portraying minstrels. Southern audiences were spared seeing Sidney Poitier kissing Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue. (Cancel culture?)

Today, some motion pictures are edited to suit the sensibilities of international audiences. (https://lnkd.in/g9K9mVmV)

The movie business may have been different in the years before multiplexes, HBO and video streaming but the one enduring aspect is making money.

FWIW, according to IMDB, Huston's movie, which was not particularly religious or inspirational, cost about $18 million to make. It did not recover the cost in ticket sales but movie rentals have helped.