The intermission comes in the middle of a chapter. But Sony/Columbia made a big mistake in mastering the DVD and Blu-ray. It even rips off Lawrence of Arabia‘s opening sequence. Gandhi (1982, 191 minutes): With its Panavision landscapes, masses of extras, and (in its original release) 70mm prints, no other big film felt like an epic from the 1960s. Reds (1981, 195 minutes): Warren Beatty’s epic about American Communists in the early 20 th century has been largely forgotten. It happens after young Vito commits murder. It was only when I got the Blu-ray that I discover the restored intermission. (1974, 202 minutes): I never saw Coppola’s sequel in first run, and when I finally saw it, the intermission was no longer in the prints. Studio head Robert Evans insisted that the audience had to watch it all the way through. (1972, 175 minutes): Francis Coppola wanted his mafia epic to have a break right after the restaurant scene where Michael kills two men. I’m ignoring the silly, fake, and funny intermission in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’ll mention a few of them, along with pictures that should have had an intermission, but didn’t. Since 1971, only a few theatrical films have been released with intermission. The 3D movies were probably the shortest films with intermissions. For technical reasons I don’t need to explain, these formats could play only about an hour without stopping. In the fall of 1952, Cinerama and 3D came to the big screen. That’s why the opening credits now run twice – at the beginning and after the intermission. Carné and the studio disagreed as to whether to release the epic as one long movie with an intermission or two normal-length movies shown in different theaters. As World War II came to an end, Marcel Carné released his masterpiece, Children of Paradise (1945, 189 minutes). I’m pretty sure it never had one.īut intermissions didn’t only come from Hollywood. I’ve been trying for years to find out if The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, 180) had an intermission. In the 1940s, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943 170 minutes), opened as a roadshow with an intermission. I know of only two Hollywood roadshows in the 1930’s: The Great Ziegfeld (1936, 177 minutes), and Gone with the Wind (1939, 238 minutes). When sound came around, intermissions mostly disappeared. That wasn’t an issue for most movies, but it was for long films like Ben-Hur and Wings. Most musicians can’t play much more than two hours without a break. I’ve already written about the era of big roadshows – when every major movie had an intermission.īack in the silent era, you couldn’t run a movie for more than about two hours without a stop. But I’m skipping over the years from 1954 to 1971. Since I’m not a monarch, I can only discuss long films with and without intermissions. If I was king, I’d insist that theatrical features running longer than 200 minutes would be required to have intermissions.
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