RUSSIA: A Night at the Movies

Moscow's long-suffering moviegoers glowed vindictively: the managers of the city's neighborhood moviehouses were at last writhing under the official knout. Five first-string reporters from Evening Moscow made a swooping inspection of the theaters, pronounced them dirty, cold, ill-operated and "on a very low cultural level."

There are some 50 moviehouses in Moscow, of which ten are magnificent showplaces chiefly reserved for the Soviet elite. The ordinary Muscovite rarely sees these first-run houses from the inside; to him, a night at the neighborhood movies is far from magnificent.

No Popcorn. If the picture...

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