Cinema: Bust Becomes Bonanza

For five years, while Producer Howard Hughes and film censors played put & take with certain shots in The Outlaw, Jane Russell was only a box-office bust. Last week she became a bonanza.

In its first week, the unmitigated Outlaw took Atlantans for $22,413—$3,091 more than Atlanta’s own Gone With the Wind, according to Russell Birdwell, Hughes’s pressagent. In Chicago it topped the Oriental Theater’s alltime record by $21,749.

Variety’s high box-office scores (for March): 1) Adventure (M-G-M), 2) Road to Utopia (Paramount), 3) The Bells of St. Mary’s (RKO Radio), 4) The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (Columbia).