Who remembers the Brandt chain? Few, if any. There's rarely any loyalty to chains themselves, and it always seems a little presumptuous when they run the promo spots before the movie. As if you give a fig. If the floors are clean, the prints are fresh and the popcorn doesn't taste like packing peanuts, they could call themselves General Cinema or Cinema General or Loosely Specific Cinema for all you care. Just show the movie, and send some pimply kid in livery around to shush the talkers. That's all we ask.

Joe Brandt was one of the founders of the Columbia movie studio. I'm guessing this was his baby, but I can't be certain; Google was unhelpful, and Mr. Brandt seems to have slipped into the mists of history. This matchbook (and when was the last time you saw matchbooks for a movie theater, or thought of asking the clerk for one?) suffers from slogan overload - there's two mentions of "always a GREAT SHOW", a sentiment that could easily be disproved by the audience. And there's needless acronomizing here as well, with that America's Best Candy hoo-haw on the back. It's probably an echo of an ad campaign that didn't penetrate the national magazines - I've never seen it before. But be assured that those winged ABC chevrons were distributed to all Brandt theaters, and right now as we speak one sits undisturbed in a bureau drawer of a 78-year old woman in New Jersey who ran the candy stand in the summer of '49. She didn't keep it because she thought it was special. She kept it because the theater was the place where she met her first husband.

He was an usher. But then he went to Korea, and, well - she could never quite throw it away. Maybe the kids should know why she kept it, because they'll probably get rid of it after she's gone; that wasn't their dad -

Then again, maybe it's best that they don't know. If they sell it, they sell it. Just as well. Maybe it'll mean something to someone else, too.