To second what Walloon posted, bringing back older movies especially as the bottom half of double or triple bills was much more common than people might remember or imagine. Nowhere moreso than in the many drive-in theaters that used to cover the country. Also, the TV market didn’t kill off this practice in one fell swoop because throughout the '60s watching a film on TV wasn’t completely satisfying; remember, black & white TVs, poor reception (no cable). You could see a star-studded epic like Cleopatra (1963) or an early James Bond movie in some local theater right till the end of the '60s. As Walloon says, look at the movie ads in any old newspaper for the proof.
Looking back at the Washington Post of April 11, 1949 — sixty years ago today — there are theater listings for the movies Mr. Emmanuel (1944), Guest in the House (1944), Captive Wild Woman (1943), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Drums of the Congo (1942), Saboteur (1942), You Only Live Once (1937), and San Francisco (1936).
Drive-in theaters are almost entirely a post-WWII phenomenon. There probably weren’t more than a dozen in the country in the 1930s and the upswing was dramatic only in 1948. Total numbers then were still only a tenth of what they were a decade later. Just about everything we associate with drive-ins today coincided with the television age.
I said that most large cities had theaters that showed these films. The question really is, how do we define large and to what extent were these films available in medium and smaller cities which would have had the majority of the population pre-1950?
I was responding to the OP, which asked if there were “any aftermarket at all”.
But let’s take movies showing in Bridgeport, Connecticut (pop. circa 153,000) on Sept. 3, 1947: Northwest Mounted Police (1940), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Sea Wolf (1941), Mr. Emmanuel (1944) (again!), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
1.) As noted, lots of films got re-released. They continually re-released King Kong, for instance, well into the 1950s. Dracula, too. A lot of horror films didn’t stop getting run in the theaters until syndication packages like the late 1950s “Shock Theater” package brought them to independent TV* Often an old movie would be paired with a new release, or two old movies bundled together.
2.) After syndication, you could catch a lot of old favorites on TV, or on the major networks late at night.
3.) “Classic” movies did run in “art” theaters. Watch the beginning of Woody Allen’s film Play it Again, Sam, where he’s watching “Casablanca” in one such theater. New York had lots of them. When I lived in Boston in the 1970s, there were LOTS of tiny theaters that ran new independent and foreign films, along with a smattering of older flicks. They’re all gone now.
4.) There was a small market in celluloid movies. When I was a kid I had lots of William Castle 8mm shorts excerpted from movies like It Came from Outer Space and This Island Earth.
5.) There was also a business in 16mm sound films. My college library and the city library had small collections of films. I’d rent or borrow a sound projector and watch old 1940s Superman cartoons, or movies like The Man Who Would be King. An article in the magazine The Monster Times back in the early 1970s described a bootleg trade in feature films like 2001. But organizations (and, I suppose, individuals presenting themselves as organizations) could rent such films from movie libraries. Companies like Blackhawk Films had extensive libraries of really old films.
6.) I imagine enthusiasts had pre-casette videotapes and equipment for them.
For got to add the footnote:
*If the “Shock Theater” package didn’t reach TV until the late 1950s, and the bad 1950s monster movies weren’t even made until the late fifties (peaking in 1957) then what the hell was Vampira hosting as a bad-movie hostess on LA TV in the early 1950s? I wondered for a long time, and finally learned the answer from Vampira’s website shortly before she died – they showed the few horror films that they could get, but also showed a lot of non-horror mystery films, or whatever they could get.
List of films shown by The Vampira Show on KABC-TV in 1954–1955.
CalMeacham writes:
> 3.) “Classic” movies did run in “art” theaters. Watch the beginning of Woody
> Allen’s film Play it Again, Sam, where he’s watching “Casablanca” in one such
> theater. New York had lots of them. When I lived in Boston in the 1970s, there
> were LOTS of tiny theaters that ran new independent and foreign films, along
> with a smattering of older flicks. They’re all gone now.
It’s my distinct impression that so-called “arthouse” (or “repertory” or “revival”) theaters were common from about the early 1960’s to about the mid-1980’s. Play It Again, Sam came out in 1972, which was apparently the height of the popularity of those kinds of theaters. I can’t find anything online with a history of them, so I can’t really be sure. Apparently they became popular only after TV started playing old movies in the 1950’s. When videocassette players became popular, people ceased to go to them.
I remember that the student union frequently had classic movie showings, too. Admission was either free or very cheap, making it an ideal “starving student” activity/date. Public libraries had some classic movie showings, as well. The college showings would be in the mid to late 70s, BTW. I guess they would qualify as art theaters, mostly it was art and film students who went to see them, as opposed to the other students who were just looking for something, anything, cheap to do.
The use of color, widescreen, bigger budgets, and location shooting to differentiate movies from television, and a general increase in close-ups.
Interestingly, the percentage of Hollywood films shot in color actually declined between 1955 and 1958, but in the broader view it is hard to deny that color movies became dominant when they did because of TV.
Between 1953 and 1955, 20th Century-Fox, which owned and licensed the CinemaScope process, required that all CinemaScope productions be shot in color. When Fox dropped that requirement, the percentage of color films dropped in 1955–1958, as noted.
An amount of older films had a very brief after-market as explosives in newer movies.
My parents took me to see *Gone with the Wind *in 1954, when I was 9 . . . 15 years after its release. This was in a regular movie theater, not an “art” theater. I must have slept through the entire movie; all I remember is that it was over at 1 am, the first time I was up that late.