Movies with intermissions

Gettysburg was the only movie I’ve been to that had an intermission.

Dances with Wolves absolutely did. It was the first and only movie I’ve seen in the theater with an intermission. My dad had to explain to me what it was.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang did, and had a good musical interlude, too. The first half of the movie ended with the car going over a cliff; after the intermission, the second half began with just a few seconds of the same footage, and then the car’s wings deployed. Whew!

HELP! is the other comic “intermission” that came to mind for me.

Did you see it in a theatre or on TV?

When I saw Star Wars in 1977, it had an intermission right after Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie fell into the garbage compactor. I’m pretty sure though that was the theater’s doing rather than George Lucas’.

On a related note, I just discovered that the 1933 version of King Kong had a four minute long overture before the movie began. How many movies have had those? I am guessing that there is a definite overlap with the intermission list.

I think they call that “falling asleep at the reel.” :smiley:

That wouldn’t do any good, because everybody would want to use the bathrooms at the same time.

In a theater. Every time we thought it was over it went on some more.

The same when I was in Israel. I was with an American group in a multiplex watching an Israeli film, and halfway through it just stopped and the lights came on. We were all really confused thinking maybe the film broke, but apparently all films have intermissions there.

I remember we would visit the old Ridglea theater in Fort Worth in the 70s. I remember intermissions but don’t recall any specific movie. It’s possible that Superman the Movie may have had one but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Oh yes, I remember overtures for Lawrence of Arabia and Quo Vadis. Ben-Hur didn’t have an overture, but it did have a prologue showing the birth of Jesus, and the arrival of the wisemen, all this before the title and credits.

Its a mad, mad, mad, mad world had an intemission

I remember something similar as a kid. In fact, they clearly used the intermission from Camelot in a contemporary comedy.

The original Cinerama movies had an overture before each half. It was just soundtrack carried on the main film, just black film, then the curtain opened when the overture was over. At least this was true in the first-run, specialty Cinerama theaters.

Didn’t Fiddler on the Roof have an intermission?

I think A Passage To India had an intermission.

It did have an overture, at least in the original run. You can see it here. "Ben Hur" 1959 Overture HQ - YouTube

Nitpick: Cinerama was a 3-strip process, and used three projectors, in three separate booths, in the theaters, but it was filmed with a single camera. Granted, that one camera essentially consisted of three matched camera mechanisms crammed into a monstrous box, but it was a single unit.

Interestingly, each Cinerama frame was 35mm, 6 perfs tall, instead of the then standard 4 perfs, and the frame rate was 26 fps, instead of 24. I suspect this was to prevent the individual strips from being reused in a conventional film or shown in a non-Cinerama theater.