Roaring off the Streets of Lawrence: NOW PLAYING: Sept. 26, 1962

Two golden anniversaries today, one on the big screen, one on the small. For one day, the center of the cinematic universe is Lawrence, KS. Here's a page from this day's Lawrence Journal-World.

And here's a close-up of the big ad.

It's probably more of an event in retrospect than it seemed at the time, but the film really is one of the classics of a classic year.

On the home front, so to speak, this ad could have run anywhere. As for what it advertised, its success was more immediate.

A cultural milestone in its own right, alas.

There's also this, opening in Washington D.C.

I watched Pressure Point last week. Hubert Cornfield's picture makes some interesting efforts to visualize its racist madman's delusions and twisted memories, but singer Bobby Darin is oddly dull as the madman -- the issue isn't juvenile delinquency, as the advertising suggests, but an American avowing Nazism during World War II, and the meat of the movie is surrounded with a lame framing device in which powdered-haired Sidney Poitier mentors novice headshrinker Peter Falk. It's worth a look, though, for its more fantastical moments and as a document of the time.