Randan at the Roxy

It was an unseasonably hot night. At the Wallace rally in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, William S. Gailmor, a onetime radio commentator who now rattles the tin cup for Henry, boomed at the 19,000 faithful: "A few blocks down the street they are going to show a picture which should be boycotted by every right-thinking person. So you know what to do . . ."

The faithful knew. When the revival meeting was over, about a thousand right-thinkers--Wallaceites, Communists, fellow travelers and troubled innocents--clumped determinedly two blocks east to the huge Roxy Theater. They lugged picket signs and clutched bundles of leaflets, which had been prepared in advance. They were out to boo the opening of The Iron Curtain, the anti-Soviet propaganda story* of Russian atom spies in Canada. (TIME, May 17).

Union Square on Broadway. Their advent was not unexpected. For four hours a group of Catholic War Veterans had been trickling up with signs of their own, to picket the pickets. In strength they about equaled the opposition. Thousands of expectant bystanders choked the streets. Some 100 policemen, 15 on horseback, were also on hand.

Both sides picketed, sloganeered, glowered. Then a woman shook her leaflets, shrilled with nice irrelevance at a veteran: "I'm for Wallace." He rumbled back: "I'm an American." She conked him with her handbag; a policeman, moving beefily forward, got it in the face on the rebound. The randan was on: for the next half hour the Roxy's sidewalk was busier than Union Square on an old-time May Day.

Swinging two-foot-long nightsticks like polo mallets, the mounted cops rode the mob into the gutters. Their allies on foot clubbed away with professional impartiality. In the garish, winking light men & women in agitated clumps struggled, groaned, desisted, fled. A news photographer was roughed up. Picket signs were splintered, leaflets shredded, clothing ripped. A cop shoved a matronly lady. "Sir," she murmured reproachfully, "I'm an innocent bystander." "Lady," he answered in sweaty exasperation, "if you was innocent you wouldn't be here." Five men were arrested.

Surrender in Denver. Inside the Roxy all was serene. The Iron Curtain wasn't even playing that night. Six weeks before, the management had decided not to hold a preview, neglected to tell anybody about it. The picture opened uneventfully the next morning while four Pinkertons, hired to beef up the ushering staff, twiddled their thumbs in the aisles.

Before the week was out, The Iron Curtain had also opened at some 380 other U.S. and Canadian theaters. Some were picketed, some were not; nowhere else were there fights. In Denver the woman manager of the Esquire sympathized with a lone picket: "You must get pretty discouraged. Come on in and see the show as the guest of the management." Said he: "I guess I might as well." And he did.

* Soviet composers Khachaturian, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Miaskovshy begged a New York court to cut their music from the sound track: it might make them look like traitors at home, their lawyers argued.

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