DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze has posted an interesting screen capture within a review of an upcoming Bluray of Arthur Penn‘s Mickey One. It’s a shot of Warren Beatty walking in front of Chicago’s Wood theatre while Otto Preminger‘s The Cardinal was playing there. Preminger’s low-tide drama opened on 12.12.63 so you’d have to figure this was captured in February of ’64. (Or maybe a bit later to judge by the Woods’ “nominated for 6 Academy Awards” proclamation.  As The Cardinal began playing on a reserved-seat basis and was therefore regarded as a high-prestige film, it wouldn’t have been unusual to linger at the Woods for a few months.) But Mickey One didn’t open until 9.27.65, which obviously indicates a prolonged and difficult post-production period. Under routine circumstances it would have opened in late ’64 or at the latest in early ’65.

Warren Beatty, 26 at the time, striding under the Woods marquee, mostly likely in early ’64.

The Cardinal billboard in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 1964 — the arrival of the Beatles and the beginning of the general turning of the culture was only a month and a half away.

“Prefer Bass Art To Fit,” posted on 4.25.14:  “There’s an allegedly cruddy-looking German Bluray available of Otto Preminger‘s The Cardinal (’63), which I have no interest in seeing. The Cardinal was one of Preminger’s plodding auto-pilot films. But I’ve always loved Saul Bass‘s poster art.

“Bass presumably hated the rote, dreary sound of the title. How do you make a film called The Cardinal seem interesting or exciting? So Bass created a new film called THE Cardinal. I never want to see this mediocrity again (N.Y. Times critic Bosley Crowther wasn’t the only one to feel this way) which turned out to be a kind of simultaneous summit-and-death blow to Tom Tryon‘s career, but I’ll always love that big THE.