The phrase "Banned in Boston" had little to do with movies in Massachusetts--except on Sundays. Even D.W. Griffith's notorious Birth of a Nation--banned in Chicago--was only edited in Boston. But on Sundays the Massachusetts censor held a firm hand. Two early Brattle movies, Miss Julie (from the Strindberg play) and Desires (a German film about morphine addiction) were officially barred from Sunday exhibition. On the second case Brattle went to court, and on July 6, 1955, in the case of Brattle Films v. Otis M. Whitney et. al., the Massachusetts Sunday Censorship Law was declared unconstitutional.

A glance at an old Brattle program reveals that it still shows many of the same movies. Over 21 years, the little theater has rarely shown a movie that is not extraordinary in some way; very few theaters anywhere can match its record. At times its prints are terrible--some of the Bogart festival prints have huge gaps where some of my favorite lines should be ("Rick? He's the kind of man who, if I were a woman, and I were not around, I should be in love with Rick.")--but its consistently good, if repetitious, choice of films seems never to have varied throughout its existence.

The Brattle was firmly enough established by 1960 that it was time for Harvey the businessman to expand his holdings in Cambridge. The old University Theater was beginning to decay; Harvey bought it and had it slightly remodelled--the new "two-speed" chairs were installed, reducing the capacity from 1889 to 1689, the premises were cleaned, and prices were raised substantially. Manager Clarence "Bud" Kramer '56 explained the new philosophy (same as the old): "It will be your Hollywood films with some good foreign films spotted in."

There have been persistent rumors in recent years, though, that this time-honored formula at the Harvard Square is no longer profitable enough to suit Harvey, or sometimes just that the land under the building could be more profitably employed in another venture--perhaps in a taller building of offices or apartments. But the demise of the Harvard Square Theater, seen as imminent by some for the past three years, does not seem likely in the immediate future.

DESPITE THE EXCELLENCE of the Brattle, the American film was still slighted in Cambridge. The Brattle showed Bogart--and a few other period films--but it never went in for American retrospectives, while Harvard Square rarely looked to the past at all. So the coming of the Orson Welles meant an important expansion of coverage and not (as some thought at the time) a duplication of facilities that would divide the movie business and destroy all three theaters.

There were disputes at the beginning, partly because the Welles management seemed confused about what they wanted to do. The original plan, as publicized, was to divide time roughly equally between "such new productions as are seldom seen outside New York" and a program of "repertory revivals." The "new productions" hardly came in droves, nor have they since. Former actor/producer Dean Gitter '56, who founded the theater, always said he wanted to emphasize "American film as art" but he also wanted to show lots of foreign films to round out the program.

Which of course led to duplication with the Brattle. At one point both theaters were running a Jean Renoir film festival at the same time. Eventually Peter Jaszi '68, a student at Harvard Law School who programmed for Gitter, began to restrict the Welles mainly to American films, in keeping with Gitter's original theory. At this point Jaszi began the laudable Welles format of keeping a directorial retrospective going on in at least one of the theaters--the practice that has disappeared today. Jaszi, now a lawyer for the American Film Institute, also began the film appreciation class that grew into The Film School, another Welles project that has since been abandoned.

IN THE BEGINNING, movies in Cambridge were just like movies anywhere else. When movies first appeared, and until the University Theater opened in the middle '20s, the movies weren't in Cambridge at all, so people travelled to Boston to see the latest show.

Like most of the grand theaters across the country, the U.T. combined movies with vaudeville acts to relieve the monotony of watching a flat screen. In the '30s--in Hollywood's golden age--lines used to stretch regularly for blocks. All through the '40s, even into the '50s, the U.T. would sell out completely every Sunday afternoon.

Everyone went to the movies in those days, and by all accounts most people went unselfconsciously and without critical pretense. The movie mania died out all across the country: most people say because of T.V., but there were other reasons as well.

But the movies became more and more important in Cambridge, and became important in different ways. The Brattle and the Welles brought us old movies and, even more importantly, they helped make it seem natural to see old movies. Nostalgic movies like those Peter Bogdanovich makes can be cute and sentimental, but with black and white plastered-on period clothes and period expressions in the color era his movies don't give a true sense of anything but nostalgia.

But when the Welles shows a good movie from the '30s that's set in an earlier era, it helps us appreciate more honest modern period films that aren't covert about their modern sensibilities, such as Thieves Like Us or The Conformist. People can read old books without having to feel nostalgic; showing old movies helps people understand them without recourse to nonsensical critical praise about being "nostalgic" or "camp."

If movies were only an escape--as the old claim went--then when people in Cambridge retreated from political activism they should have gone to the movies more. But the reverse is true, and true because almost without exception the best movies stem from a realistic base that may be transformed, fantasized, or abstracted--they weep in one eye, they may cry in the other, but they are grounded in reality. The Welles's Larry Jackson thinks that the Nixon administration hurt people's interest in good films just as he thinks it crushed the student movement "just after the first moratorium." Since then, he says, "films that accentuate political problems have simply increased frustration over whether conditions can be changed."

Jackson sees the huge success of The Harder They Come as a pivotal point, however, because it pleases people "who want pure entertainment" as well as people who want "substantial political content about third-world nations." Yet there are plenty of other films that manage the same combination. With more students realizing the importance of politics and life outside academia, theaters in Cambridge should soon begin to program adventurously once again