(Second entry today)Not for the first time, and I'm sure not for the last, one of the empress's entries has inspired me to tell you a story.
I remember watching movies on TV when I was very young. One of the local TV stations ran something called "Million Dollar Movie" -- I'm sure TV stations everywhere used the title -- that was one every morning and every afternoon. It was cheap programming, really cheap, because the morning movie was the same Monday through Friday for a whole week, and the afternoon movie was some other movie that was the same all week. There was also this theme song that you could never get out of your head. I had the flu when I was about four -- I think that one was called the Asian flu -- and I was in bed for about ten days; my parents moved a portable TV into my bedroom for the duration. I watched something called Bundle of Joy every morning for a week in there. It's the first movie I remember watching on TV, something about a young woman who was mistaken for an unwed mother. Needless to say, I didn't get it. But I watched it.
Of course, there was The Wizard of Oz every year, but somehow that didn't count as a movie. I don't know if I knew it was a movie, or that the little girl in it was alredy a grown-up in real life. I know that I had no idea that any of it was in color until years later. TVs in the fifties were black and white, you know.
By the time I was five or six, I was allowed to go to the movies on Saturday with my big sister and a couple of other kids. I remember seeing Sink the Bismarck! and being scared by the noise and once again, not really having any idea of what it was about. I also remember seeing Operation Petticoat, curiously, a different submarine movie, but one that I adored. I didn't understand the sexual bantering in that one either, but I thought "the old guy" was charming. At six, I was already falling in love with Cary Grant.
At some point, I came to realize that my mother adored movies and always had. She grew up in the Bronx during the Depression; there was a movie palace on every corner and it was cheap, a wholesome way for Shirl and her brother, Sol, to spend a Saturday afternoon, and they regularly did. Even years later, she remembered movies that she had seen only once, and told me about them. The most important one was Make Way for Tomorrow. It had tremendous impact on her, and consequently on me. It fired her life-long fear of nursing homes (of all things), and was the reason that we avoided her having to go one at all costs, no matter how sick she became. The power of film.
The first "Saturday Night at the Movies" that I remember I was allowed to stay up and watch on TV was a John Wayne comedy called Donovan's Reef. I'm hardly a John Wayne fan, but I've always had a soft spot for this goofy movie. I always think of it as the first grown-up movie I watched on TV.
The big movie treat was when we would go, as a family, into New York, to see a movie at Radio City Music Hall. Complete with stage show. We would go every year for my mother's birthday -- September 2 -- and possibly once in the spring. This was a big deal, wear your best clothes; Jack even put on a tie. I remember several of the films we saw -- The Yellow Rolls Royce stands out in my memory for some reason, and The Thrill of It All -- but every so often, I'll see something on TV and remember that I saw it as a kid at Radio City.
However. Like the empress, what really fueled my love for old movies and my obsession with watching them was babysitting. The kids went to sleep and I turned on "The Late Show." (It would come on after the Saturday night rerun of a Johnny Carson episode, as I recall.) Sometimes, the parents would come home in the middle, and I would watch the end when I got home. Once, I remember, the father said he would drive me home in ten minutes or so, and I said No, thanks, and I walked home. I ran, in fact, the two short blocks in the middle of the night. I didn't want to miss the end of the movie. (But I don't remember what that one was.)
Then I started to seek them out, the old movies on TV. One local station showed a Tarzan movie every Sunday at noon. Once I got to college, there was a DC station that showed a Shirley Temple film every Sunday morning at ten. The same station showed a Marx Brothers movie every Saturday night, at midnight, I think. You can't even imagine how good a Marx Brothers movie is when you're watching it in a college dorm in the 70s.
For years, the only way to see an old movie was to catch it on TV, to hope that someone had the rights and would show it, maybe in the middle of the night. Now ... we must be in heaven, man! Not only are there whole cable channels devoted to old movies, we can record them, or time-shift them, or, in a pinch, buy almost any of them on DVD. I have to say, if for that reason alone, DVDs are so much better than VHS. There's just so much more available now, because they can fit so much more on a disk, and I imagine that they are cheaper to make or sell or something.
I haven't even gotten into my all-time favorite category of movies, which is the light romance. (I'm fond of the heavy weeper romance, but not all of them. Still, if I want a good cry, I go for An Affair to Remember. It has the power.) What's better than cuddling under a blanket on the couch and watching Murphy's Romance? The Goodbye Girl? Okay, The Philadelphia Story?
(That theme song, btw, for Million Dollar Movie? It was "Tara's Theme", the main theme music from Gone With the Wind, but I didn't know that when I was four. Gone With the Wind .... possibly the best ever.)
I. Love. Movies.
