COS Intermission in the UK?

[GulPlum]

edisbevan wrote:

<snip>

> There were certainly intermissions in films running more than 2
> hours and some minutes until not so long ago - the film 'A Bridge 
> Too Far' had an intermission when first released I recall, as 
> did 'Jaws'.

I would have hated to have had to rely on whatever cinema you used to 
visit when I was younger. Putting a break in the middle of "Jaws" is 
nothing less than barbarism. Especially considering it's barely two 
hours long.

The first movie I ever saw at the cinema was "The Sound of Music", 
which at 174 mins is 50 minutes longer than "Jaws", and even that 
never had an intermission in my experience (I saw it several times 
during the decade following its release). 

The second movie I ever saw at the cinema and again several times 
later (it was a childhood favourite) was "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad 
World", which had an original running time of 3 hours 8 minutes! I 
guarantee that that film never had an intermission - I even remember 
the support feature which showed with it, called "This is Cinerama", 
which itself was over an hour and a half long. It was a guaranteed 
cheap way of being entertained for an entire afternoon during wet 
school holidays, which is one reason I remember it so well.

If cinemas wherever you grew up really sliced movies up as badly as 
you suggest and treated their audience with such contempt, it's 
little wonder that the UK cinema audiences fell so dramatically 
during the seventies.