Algren at the Uptown?

From the desk of Robert Loerzel

Nelson Algren did not like the 1955 movie based on his novel The Man With the Golden Arm. He made that hatred clear to photographer Art Shay.

In Shay’s 2007 book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, the photographer recalled: “One night we were driving by a North Broadway movie house where Golden Arm was playing and I gingerly asked Algren if he’d pose in front of the marquee. ‘What’s the movie got to do with me?’ he asked icily.”

When I first saw this anecdote recounted in Mary Wisniewski’s 2017 biography, Algren: A Life, I wondered: Was this story about the Uptown Theatre, the giant movie palace on North Broadway (which I coauthored a book about)?

Checking the Chicago Daily Tribune’s movie ads from 1955 and 1956, it does look very likely that the Uptown was the theater where Shay suggested taking Algren’s photo.

When director Otto Preminger’s film version of The Man With the Golden Arm—starring Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, and Kim Novak—opened in Chicago on December 28, 1955, it was an exclusive engagement at the Woods Theatre, located at Randolph and Dearborn Streets in the Loop. And for the next two months, that was the only theater in Chicago showing the movie.

But on March 9, 1956, The Man With the Golden Arm opened in several other theaters, including the Uptown—which appears to be the only cinema on Broadway that showed the movie.

It’s understandable that Algren didn’t want his photo taken with the marquee, but it’s too bad it didn’t happen. It would be cool if we had a photo of him at the Uptown.

The Man With the Golden Arm shows at 9:15 p.m. this Friday, September 4, at the Music Box, as part of the annual Noir City festival (which I reported about in 2024).

And here’s a Q&A I did with Art Shay in 2007 for Pioneer Press.

From the desk of Robert Loerzel

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