The little town i grew up in had a small theater right next to my mom's beauty parlor: and would show non-first run flicks Friday night and Saturday afternoons for a few years.
I got to see movies while mom was having her hair done, in the indestructible bouffant lacquered by Aquanet hairspray (and can still remember how Mary's Beauty Parlor smelled.)
The first film I can recall is 101 Dalmatians: and can pull out random images: Cruella's demon faced telephone, her cigarette ashes fouling Nanny's tea cakes, the fat puppy squeezing under a gate...
I know we saw a John Wayne movie but have no actual memory of it.
I have dutifully watched parts of John Ford movies in service to his reputed greatness, even a whole one just to be fair, but John Wayne makes my flesh crawl.
Awesome. 101 Dalmatians is a great way to come in (I was old enough at that point to go 'oh, Rod Taylor'' - not yet 'oh, that's J. Pat O'Malley').
And wow, the smell of Aqua-Net. BAM and I'm back to, well, anytime Mom was primping. And the amount sprayed! ('twas only later, pre-Blues Brothers by years, but later, it had an alternate use (bear in mind, I'm a pyro)),. Oh c'mon it's self-evident.
John Wayne movies are pretty much fungible, unless Dino is in it, in which case it is a unique masterpiece....
I think the first movie I saw was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But the first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Oliver! and I don't know what my parents were thinking, I was only about 4 or 5 years old and Oliver Reed was terrifying as Bill Sykes. He murders a woman! I think that film made me a feminist, lol.
I was still fairly young and had not often been to the movies when I saw Oliver! on its first run and, even as obscured as it was, the murder of Nancy Sykes horrified me. The musical makes child labor and organized crime look almost benign, but there was no prettifying that.
I just consulted Wikipedia and gotta admit, it takes balls to challenge a bunch of young sailors to a drinking competition when you're 61. "Menace" is exactly right. He always looked like the kind of guy who'd throw a punch with no warning.
It has been said that Oliver Reed and Richard Harris had a long-running rivalry/feud of the kidding-on-the-square variety, in the course of which Harris arranged for delivery of a pair of crutches to Reed, one labeled “Glenda Jackson” and the other “Ken Russell.”
Release of Disney's "Sleeping Beauty". Taken by the only cousin who meant/means anything to me. Can't recall how I felt other than scared by witch from feeling comfortable in my home's basement or the basement of any home I was in--going downstairs by myself by myself, I mean. The witch was there to get me, I was sure.
Did you have one of those "Octopus" furnaces? Big round thing, with large tubes coming out the top? Part of something called "gravity" hot-air heating, where there are no fans so the tubes had to be BIG, large enough to swallow a small child.
That you had an age appropriate reaction? Tells me, yeah that checks. Maleficent scared the hell out of me. That dragon business? Hell yeah I'm under the seat. This is a Disney movie?
And, a just me thing, I cannot hear Elanor Audley without THAT image coming to mind.
I'm sure the first film I went out to see was at a drive-in. I have clear memories of the Harryhausen Jason in the Argonauts, and strangely enough, Shirley Maclaine in What a Way to Go. Drive -Ins were a almost a weekly thing. I remember more about things like trying to get comfortable with my 3 brothers in the back of a nine passenger staionwagon and Mom popping a big brown grocery bag full of popcorn because the refreshment stand popcorn was too expensive.
The first indoor theatre experience I remember was seeing Mary Poppins at the brand new Northland Mall in Columbus Ohio.
I remember standing in line to get in the theatre. The line ran out of the theatre and right down the center courtyard of the mall. We had dinner at some restaurant in the mall. I remember the pattern on the table top - Frenchmen in shirts with horizontal stripes and those French caps and the woman dancing the Can- Can. All very faux Lautrec. I don't remember what we ate. The theatre was packed and I had to stand up next to my seat and look around and through the people in front of me to see the screen.Mostly what I remember about the movie was the rooftop scenes and the scenes in the chalk drawings. I liked Dick Van Dyke on TV and he was also in What a Way to Go.
Goodness, we could have a whole separate FF on drive-ins. I had inferred from overhearing my mother talk about how the blacks had ruined Newark that they were bad and dangerous, but then one helped her back our 1950 Ford woody station wagon into a parking space was kind and helpful. Afterward, I expressed surprise at the interaction, and was told that most of them were quite nice. It was my first lesson about racism. I was about five, and don't remember the movie, probably because I fell asleep.
For my eleventh birthday by older brother and his wife took me to a James Bond double feature in their 1964 Corvair. My three-month old niece slept in the little space behind the back seat. The image of Dr. No's leather-gloved hand slipping inexorably down the pipe into the vat of acid is seared in my memory.
When I was 10 I watched the first 4 James Bond films on after the other one afternoon at the the local air force base with some neighbors. I came home and went to the drive-in with my folks and saw Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra.
That may have been the high point of my life right there.
I saw ASSAULT ON A QUEEN in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in 1966. I definitely get the feeling that I’m the oldest person in this discussion.
I was a big Frank Sinatra fan, unlike most of my friends, largely because of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. The movie was about the only real break we got towards the end of basic training. A lot of the other guys went to a movie about Hans Christian Anderson with puppets. They were incensed. “F——in’ PUPPETS!!” 😄
I've been watching Tony Rome in bits and pieces late at night recently. There is a clean copy on Youtube. It's kind of run of the mill. Gordon Douglas directed.
Late sixties Miami is great to look at and It's got Jill St. John. That's worth it right there!
Much respect to Sinatra, who could have easily done an Elvis and just played himself in silly movies. But he seems to have really taken acting seriously, and he was quite good! There's a movie called Suddenly where he play a psychopath hired to shoot the President, a gutsy move for a former matinee idol.
I got to go to the base hospital at Lackland when I broke my elbow. We had to drive up from Del Rio (my dad was stationed at Loughlin AFB) because the Loughlin hospital couldn't figure out how to fix a 3 year old's arm.
They used to move families overseas by boat. We were on the ol' S.S. UNITED STATES and first movie we saw in its theatre was OUR MAN FLINT... forever after, James Coburn could do no wrong as far as I was concerned
A friend sent this to me last year. He remembers it clear as could be. He was watching the show with his Mom , a huge JC fan. It's the only time he remembers her staying up late -
I think you will find that the pit was full of radioactive boiling water, not acid. Dr No was an evil man and deserved to be treated like a lobster. Hey, I’m a regular Jordan Petersen!
Bond films are an interesting part of my youth, being recalled not so much as a consistent plot as of a set of scenes that were memorable (Scaramanga's funhouse, the space stuff in Diamonds Are Forever, the gadgets) somehow strung together. Didn't help that the damn things were like three hours long in the TV version. I have a recurring dream about a movie I can't stay awake through, and I never know what's going on in the last half, and I'm fairly sure it tracks back to Bond films.
Hey, I saw the first half of Das Boot four times before I made it to the end, and I liked that movie. But I was raising kids in those days, so I had a good excuse for nodding off.
"The Trouble with Harry"... at the Dent Drive Inn in Mack, Ohio. Maroon Ford station wagon, three kids in their pajamas with pillows and, yes, a big brown paper bag filled with home-popped popcorn. Also, cold Cokes in the bottle. Now that I'm thinking about this, my parents were going to this movie (Hitchcock!) and had to take the children along or pay for a sitter. Good for them. I do have a vague memory of it being funny that Harry was dug up and re-buried over and over again but... why?
I always liked Andy Devine. I don’t remember that show with the frog, but my older brothers did and would quote that all the time. But I do remember him in some cowboy show where he played a sidekick character named Jingles. I don’t remember the name of that show or who the main character was or who played him. I just remember Andy and his voice, which wasn’t scary to me.
I grew in time to appreciate him but as a child I was just aware of his freakish voice and ebullience -- it was like someone cheerily waving their stump.
Guy Madison played Wild Bill Hickock . I think a lot of the “sidekicks” on early TV derived from B movies. Comic relief in movies seriously marred some otherwise cool early horror movies, as did romantic subplots.
Ah, the weirdness from childhoods experienced farther north than mine. I know about Froggy because the b-i-l from the Bronx will quote that line. He seems to have found it enjoyably wacky (and I think he's said he once got to be in the studio audience). Having found clips online, I expect it would have been traumatizing if I'd seen this at the target audience age.
As it was, I had my early TV trauma in Baltimore, thanks to "Paul's Puppets." Not the boring puppets, but the celesta on "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies," played over a hypnotic kaleidoscope pattern.
Good question. My mother would drag me to weird hippy happenings when I was in her charge so she could meet her friends, so I 'experienced' a lot of experimental Stan Brakhage-type glop before I was old enough to even know where I was... but the first titled movie I saw in a theater was either The Red Balloon with my grandfather - whom I vaguely remember getting unusually emotional about it, but he might have been high - or Yellow Submarine, being that was already Beatle-crazy by the time I was grown-up enough to know what was happening on screen.
I was probably also taken to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, by some adult who thought I needed to see it (I didn't).
OH! My mother also dragged me to see Ring of Bright Water when I was far too small and (SPOILER ALERT) in her usual cack-handed way to try to hip me to things like environmentalism left me traumatized for years over the clubbing of an innocent river otter. Damn I'm scarred! 😆
No doubt. Yeah it was an accident because man interfering with nature, yadda yadda. I was more moved by the messaging of Frogs and Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster (the scene where Godzilla falls in a pit and the Monster literally shits on him was very powerful).
Out of every ridiculous prediction of drastic social change, the writers got a couple of things about right. The jerk who takes over the country "puts computers and prodigies in charge of the gross national product... and becomes the leader of 'the most truly hedonistic society the world has ever known'".
1st in theater (also a matinee, and like Roy, I do not consider whatever it was I saw previously on the telly): 𝘛𝘦𝘯 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘯. Burt Lancaster, Gilbert Roland, Mike Mazurki(!), Jody Lawrance(!!!).
I think I've written about this before. Mom dropped several of us off at the theater on her way to doing something else; I think I was maybe 6. I remember almost nothing about the show – story, actors, nothing*. My memory was it was a western. Wikipedia says this about that:
"It was originally a Western story by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck which concerned conflict between the US cavalry and Apaches. Producer Harold Hecht and star Burt Lancaster then decided that "John Ford and other Hollywood operators have so effectively decimated the Apache population" that they hired writer A.I. Bezzerides to reimagine the story with a Foreign Legion setting[5] which wound up involving the Rif War (1911–1927). Roland Kibbee and Frank Davis were hired to rewrite the script to make it more comedic."
*The single impression that remains is the weird feeling I had that it was somehow directing me to live an exemplary life – go to Ft Zinderneuf, be a hero and gain the acceptance and adoration (and a dame!) due me.
I don't think it was the very first movie I saw — I think that was probably the Burt Lancaster movie where he was in a circus — but the first one that really made an impression on me was Pollyanna. The daring tree-climbing bit was heroic, and it was a little girl! And she took a risk and fell! but everything was all right in end! And she changed her whole town for the better, including her mean old aunt who came to really love her!
Clearly I still think of her as a role model. Did you know that after the book was published, groups of men in prisons formed clubs where they played the Glad Game and supported each other a la Pollyanna?
When I was in sixth grade they showed Pollyanna in the school auditorium. I don’t remember anything about the plot but I do remember that as the movie went along we collectively came to hate the girl and the auditorium erupted in loud cheers when she fell off the roof. I teared up a bit but cheered as loud as anyone to cover up my embarrassment. The administration was outraged and there was some kind of collective punishment, the details of which I don’t recall. In retrospect, maybe I wasn’t the only one acting like an asshole to cover up delicate, good human feelings? I doubt it though. Small town America, Midwest version anyway, is a horrible place filled with horrible people.
Nah, you weren't the only one. I remember coming in from recess and being told that JFK had been shot. Everyone was shocked, some kids cried, and some of the boys mimed shooting people and laughing nervously. The teacher put a stop to it, and the rest of us thought the boys were creeps, but later I realized they were covering up by acting like assholes. (Place: small factory suburb near Detroit.)
It's entirely possible that not all of those boys were covering up - some of them may well be working in the present administration.
My partner and I were watching some show that had a scene from when the JFK assassination happened, and she asked if people really freaked out and were sobbing on the street like that. In my experience (young as I may have been), yes.
Early tv was full of terrifying presentations designed by adults with no concept of childhood. Froggy, Clarabell (who lived in our town, I found out later) and the Quaker Oats cannon. Since we didn’t have a set, I only watched in my grandmother’s third floor living room and only what she deemed acceptable. (Lots of Liberace and Lawrence Welk.) As for my first movie, I don’t remember which Disney theatrical cartoon my parents took me to at our local movie theater - possibly Fantasia - but it scared the shit out of me and gave me nightmares for weeks. Like I said, adults with no concept of childhood.
My first flick was definitely 𝘍𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘢, probably ca. 1956—Disney used to re-release titles from its catalog to theatres at intervals—and yes, the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence reduced little Rand to whimpering, near-incontinent terror.
Supposedly, Nelson Rockefeller griped that he had to reupholster Radio City Music Hall because so many kids weeing themselves in terror because of the witch in Snow White
Our first was Bambi, at the dollar theater, and when his mother was killed my sisters and I collapsed into one big puddle of inconsolable disbelief. Our mother, who I recall as infinitely kind and soothing, let us all climb into her lap for the rest of the movie. But we carried that sadness away with us, each in our own way. Then again, we did the same when ET had to go home, so maybe it wasn't the adults who were insensitive so much as the kids who felt too deeply and without knowing why.
Great writing! I could picture the little boy "glued to the tube" as described.
I don't remember the first movie I saw. My mom told me I lost it when Herbie the VW Bug fell into the ocean in the Disney sequel: _Herbie Rides Again_. Was it a coincidence the first car I bought was a 1968 sky-blue Beetle? I remember my dad taking me to the first movie we watched together when it came out: the sci-fi ecology flick, _Silent Running_. Of course, I now have a squadron of drones with the names, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, named after the bots in the Bruce Dern movie actually played by people with physical disabilities.
We lived in a rural area in Massachusetts and moved a lot, in what I much later realized was a series of tiny places close together. None of them had a movie theater but there was a drive-in somewhere. About once a year my dad would say, “Let’s go to a movie,” and we would drive down tree covered winding roads to what was basically a pasture with a screen, and cows going in behind it as we waited for it to get dark. I’m pretty sure they didn’t go to see a particular movie, because they were pretty random, from some “Ma and Pa Kettle” to “The Brothers KARAMAZOV.” I don’t remember any of the movies’ content. I remember previews but not cartoons. I remember being tucked in the window well of our Chevy convertible, an unaccountable extravagance we had for many years. We didn’t have a television until I was in fifth grade, but I saw kiddie shows and movies at other people’s houses. I remember Smilin’Ed on Buster Brown Theater with Froggy the Gremlin. Andy Devine was the sidekick on “Wild Bill Hickok”
and he seemed like an interloper when he turned up with Froggy and the gang after Smilin’ Ed ceased to be. (Robert Crumb mentions Smilin’ Ed’s death in “Ducks Yas Yas” in ZAP # 0, and Kim Deitch wrote a graphic novel about @The Search for Smilin’ Ed.”) I didn’t watch any of these shows regularly except “Superman” and “Disneyland.” I think the first movie that made a big impression” on me was @Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which, for some reason, was on television at somebody’s house right after it came out. That was a real mindbender in the Fifties.
Yeah. I watched that on the sly one night when the parents went out. Mom specifically said "No scary movies!" so of course Body Snatchers it was. The pod reveal in the greenhouse is etched – Ah Say ETCHED! – in the little kid brain bits that persevere today.
There are a few drive-ins still extant, and there was one in South Carolina when I was living down there that I always wanted to go to but never made it to. Now I watch video compilations of intermission films and still want to go, but I'm sure it wouldn't be anything like I imagine it.
I can't even remember the first movie I saw because my parents used to take us to the drive-in and I'm sure they started way before I would be old enough to form any memories. The first movie I remember seeing in an indoor theater, which was notable for its being a lot more expensive than a drive-in, was Lady and the Tramp. I also have vivid memories of the 1965 TV special, Cinderella.
From Cinderella I remember the music, of course, and that during "Impossible" (what a beautiful song) they showed the pumpkin carriage flying though the air -- just a chroma-key of the thing rocking gently as stars rushed by, but i loved it.
The first movie I saw was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas. I was maybe 4. I don’t remember it at all but apparently the submarine scared me. I told my mom that Superman was gonna spank the Nautilus. That made me feel better!
I think 20,000 Leagues was the first movie I saw at my request, at an indoor theater in a nearby town. It was fantastic. At a Fourth of July picnic that summer I drank some adult’s glass of beer and clam juice, climbed on a table, and sang “Got a Whale of a Tale” as sung by Kirk Douglas in the movie. I was eight. That’s when the family realized I would come to no good.
I think it was “The Conquest of Space” (1955) but the only thing I remember about it is the title, an image of a wheel-shaped space station, and that my dad took me to see it—and he just about never went to movies. I just looked it up and honestly it sounds like a pretty scary story for an 8-year-old’s first movie*. Which may connect somehow with the various pathologies manifest in my dad’s parenting.
The first one I actually remember at all was “No Time for Sergeants” in one of those old grand movie theaters with ushers, a place so wondrous that I remember its red carpet runners and popcorn smell and the giant curtains that opened to reveal the screen better than I remember the movie. That would have been when I was around 11.
*I know that seems weird now, but this was the early ’50s, we were poorish, my folks were fanatically frugal depression-era kids, and I think they thought movies were a frivolous expense. But I first started regularly going to movies sometime in my early teens after, shockingly, those same parents gave me a book of tickets to the local theater for my birthday. I think I used the first one for “Spartacus.”
Another child of a father damaged by the Depression (among other things) here. My mother had grown up at the same time -- with a widowed mother and several siblings -- yet she didn't have the same phobias about spending money. Between living in the boondocks and Dad's stinginess, theater movies were a rarity.
I always felt my parents must have had no memory of being children, and that accounted for their usual lack of sensitivity toward us. But sometimes there were hints of caring. Gestures I remember as out of the ordinary, and reasons to accept that they sort of tried. It may have been something similar with your parents, that without your expecting it, they picked up on something that led them to give you the book of tickets.
Yeah, they weren’t *horrible* parents, they cared, but the depression and the war gave them plenty of trauma. I remember my mom, tearing up, telling about the piano her mom had bought being repossessed. She never talked much about her family before the depression hit, but from the surprising number of photos, going back to the days when photography wasn’t so simple or cheap, I gather her family was comfortably upper-middle class before they must have lost it all in 1929 (when she was 9).
Obviously, you are a little younger then I (me?) whatever. I never saw Andy Devine and his frog (we only had 1 and later maybe 2 stations and he wasn't on them). But when I was in the AF I was stationed with a guy who would for no reason I could figure out, shout: "Twang you magic twanger Froggie. I'll be good, I'll be good, I'll be good." We were usually drunk or high, so it seemed pretty funny at the time.
I'd say the first partial memory I have of a movie in school was one about flies and how they are disgusting and how they grow. The only part I remember is where a fly is hatching and then having to dig itself out of the shit it was born in before something got too big and it couldn't dig any farther. I was rooting for the fly to make it. Oh well.
Aside from the drive-ins my family didn't frequent, in my earliest memories, movie theaters were still something found in the city or inner suburbs. My mother was overall culture-deprived, and it must have been a big deal when she somehow got to take me and my sister to a theater.
The earliest movie I can remember is The Wizard of Oz, in a theatrical run sometime before showings became an annual event on TV. I think I was 8 or 9, which would have made my sister 2 or 3 (talk about possible viewing trauma). The shock of the sepia scenes turning into technicolor was visceral, but also hinted at what aesthetic pleasures could be like. I was charmed by the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion; entranced by the strangeness of the Emerald City; seriously terrified by the Wicked Witch and flying monkeys. I didn't identify with the characters at all, and of course, the story ends up with Dorothy back home and realizing she had no real reason for discontent. But, the whole idea of movie magic on the big screen had been offered up.
A few years later, I resented being taken to 101 Dalmatians, supposedly a wholesome Disney movie for my sister, at 6. My insistence that I was too old to see this did me no good, and I squirmed through the whole thing. It was years before I recognized Cruella de Vil's name as a pun.
We were driving through the Bayview district of SF yesterday (Sat), where there's a bunch of auto repair shops. One of them was called "Emerald City Auto Body", and I said that that was an appropriate place for the Tin Man to work.
The little town i grew up in had a small theater right next to my mom's beauty parlor: and would show non-first run flicks Friday night and Saturday afternoons for a few years.
I got to see movies while mom was having her hair done, in the indestructible bouffant lacquered by Aquanet hairspray (and can still remember how Mary's Beauty Parlor smelled.)
The first film I can recall is 101 Dalmatians: and can pull out random images: Cruella's demon faced telephone, her cigarette ashes fouling Nanny's tea cakes, the fat puppy squeezing under a gate...
I know we saw a John Wayne movie but have no actual memory of it.
John Wayne was probably being an asshole. That's pretty much all his roles.
I have dutifully watched parts of John Ford movies in service to his reputed greatness, even a whole one just to be fair, but John Wayne makes my flesh crawl.
Best represented in this medium?
https://slaterbarron.com/wordpress/2011/06/16/lint-portraits-vii-detail/
Awesome. 101 Dalmatians is a great way to come in (I was old enough at that point to go 'oh, Rod Taylor'' - not yet 'oh, that's J. Pat O'Malley').
And wow, the smell of Aqua-Net. BAM and I'm back to, well, anytime Mom was primping. And the amount sprayed! ('twas only later, pre-Blues Brothers by years, but later, it had an alternate use (bear in mind, I'm a pyro)),. Oh c'mon it's self-evident.
John Wayne movies are pretty much fungible, unless Dino is in it, in which case it is a unique masterpiece....
I think the first movie I saw was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But the first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Oliver! and I don't know what my parents were thinking, I was only about 4 or 5 years old and Oliver Reed was terrifying as Bill Sykes. He murders a woman! I think that film made me a feminist, lol.
I was still fairly young and had not often been to the movies when I saw Oliver! on its first run and, even as obscured as it was, the murder of Nancy Sykes horrified me. The musical makes child labor and organized crime look almost benign, but there was no prettifying that.
I miss Oliver Reed, all that tormented menace (see Women in Love). He died doing what he loved best.
I just consulted Wikipedia and gotta admit, it takes balls to challenge a bunch of young sailors to a drinking competition when you're 61. "Menace" is exactly right. He always looked like the kind of guy who'd throw a punch with no warning.
Well, he had a lot of experience on them.
Correct. They call us, I mean they call them 'professionals'.
It has been said that Oliver Reed and Richard Harris had a long-running rivalry/feud of the kidding-on-the-square variety, in the course of which Harris arranged for delivery of a pair of crutches to Reed, one labeled “Glenda Jackson” and the other “Ken Russell.”
Ouch!
Took the word outta my mouth
That was him!
Release of Disney's "Sleeping Beauty". Taken by the only cousin who meant/means anything to me. Can't recall how I felt other than scared by witch from feeling comfortable in my home's basement or the basement of any home I was in--going downstairs by myself by myself, I mean. The witch was there to get me, I was sure.
That explains everything about me, no doubt.
She still is.
Only had the problem for a couple of decades.
"Geez, when is that kid comin' downstairs? I can't wait forever, you know."
Now you bring it up: *who* first had the bright idea of putting basement light switches at the *bottom* of staircases?!
Ours was at the top. But it didn’t turn al the lights and there were shadows and a weird sort of crawlspace thing…
I had nightmares about the furnace thumping on, and then coming up the stairs to get me.
Did you have one of those "Octopus" furnaces? Big round thing, with large tubes coming out the top? Part of something called "gravity" hot-air heating, where there are no fans so the tubes had to be BIG, large enough to swallow a small child.
The first house we owned had an old, originally coal furnace like that. I remember thinking it was big enough for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Why basements and not, say, apples?
An excellent question!
Not apples because that’s the way it was: The old dark basement thing.
That you had an age appropriate reaction? Tells me, yeah that checks. Maleficent scared the hell out of me. That dragon business? Hell yeah I'm under the seat. This is a Disney movie?
And, a just me thing, I cannot hear Elanor Audley without THAT image coming to mind.
The trauma was just Maleficent. And her visual!!
I'm sure the first film I went out to see was at a drive-in. I have clear memories of the Harryhausen Jason in the Argonauts, and strangely enough, Shirley Maclaine in What a Way to Go. Drive -Ins were a almost a weekly thing. I remember more about things like trying to get comfortable with my 3 brothers in the back of a nine passenger staionwagon and Mom popping a big brown grocery bag full of popcorn because the refreshment stand popcorn was too expensive.
The first indoor theatre experience I remember was seeing Mary Poppins at the brand new Northland Mall in Columbus Ohio.
.https://www.wosu.org/2022-05-05/the-history-of-columbus-first-shopping-malls
I remember standing in line to get in the theatre. The line ran out of the theatre and right down the center courtyard of the mall. We had dinner at some restaurant in the mall. I remember the pattern on the table top - Frenchmen in shirts with horizontal stripes and those French caps and the woman dancing the Can- Can. All very faux Lautrec. I don't remember what we ate. The theatre was packed and I had to stand up next to my seat and look around and through the people in front of me to see the screen.Mostly what I remember about the movie was the rooftop scenes and the scenes in the chalk drawings. I liked Dick Van Dyke on TV and he was also in What a Way to Go.
Goodness, we could have a whole separate FF on drive-ins. I had inferred from overhearing my mother talk about how the blacks had ruined Newark that they were bad and dangerous, but then one helped her back our 1950 Ford woody station wagon into a parking space was kind and helpful. Afterward, I expressed surprise at the interaction, and was told that most of them were quite nice. It was my first lesson about racism. I was about five, and don't remember the movie, probably because I fell asleep.
For my eleventh birthday by older brother and his wife took me to a James Bond double feature in their 1964 Corvair. My three-month old niece slept in the little space behind the back seat. The image of Dr. No's leather-gloved hand slipping inexorably down the pipe into the vat of acid is seared in my memory.
When I was 10 I watched the first 4 James Bond films on after the other one afternoon at the the local air force base with some neighbors. I came home and went to the drive-in with my folks and saw Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra.
That may have been the high point of my life right there.
I saw ASSAULT ON A QUEEN in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in 1966. I definitely get the feeling that I’m the oldest person in this discussion.
I saw that again a fews ago - It didn't suck! Rod Serling did the screenplay and Verna Lisi was hot. Solid drive -in fare.
I was a big Frank Sinatra fan, unlike most of my friends, largely because of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. The movie was about the only real break we got towards the end of basic training. A lot of the other guys went to a movie about Hans Christian Anderson with puppets. They were incensed. “F——in’ PUPPETS!!” 😄
I've been watching Tony Rome in bits and pieces late at night recently. There is a clean copy on Youtube. It's kind of run of the mill. Gordon Douglas directed.
Late sixties Miami is great to look at and It's got Jill St. John. That's worth it right there!
Much respect to Sinatra, who could have easily done an Elvis and just played himself in silly movies. But he seems to have really taken acting seriously, and he was quite good! There's a movie called Suddenly where he play a psychopath hired to shoot the President, a gutsy move for a former matinee idol.
I got to go to the base hospital at Lackland when I broke my elbow. We had to drive up from Del Rio (my dad was stationed at Loughlin AFB) because the Loughlin hospital couldn't figure out how to fix a 3 year old's arm.
Nah, I was in basic in 1965 so I beat you by a year.
They used to move families overseas by boat. We were on the ol' S.S. UNITED STATES and first movie we saw in its theatre was OUR MAN FLINT... forever after, James Coburn could do no wrong as far as I was concerned
A friend sent this to me last year. He remembers it clear as could be. He was watching the show with his Mom , a huge JC fan. It's the only time he remembers her staying up late -
https://youtu.be/aB1-sLGUmpo?si=C-jE4Pv-HWL0dQbS
There was one sure way to tell real from fake JC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZfdbnhJiDc
Coburn was also great in The President's Analyst. A weird, wacky movie.
Also on my list as an old favorite for NYC locations. And Severn Darden's Russian character, and Godfrey Cambridge still being with us.
We may be the last generation to understand the hilarious finale.
You don't think Gen Z would identify with "Evil Phone Company"?
Godfrey Cambridge lives on, embodied in a bus driver on the MTA's M60 shuttle from la Guardia to Harlem. BUT DON'T MAKE HIM WAIT
Yes! But “weird” is doing some very heavy lifting
A line I remember is William Daniels saying to his wife, "No, that's my CAR gun, it goes in the CAR."
The ethnic slurs wouldn't fly these days, I know that.
There are people who see that as a great tragedy, the precursor to The Fall of Western Civilization.
P.S. The incident with the Ford was an important, early indicator that my mother might not be a reliable narrator.
Pivotal!
Speaking for myself, but that first inkling of what you come to know is "racism" is kind of unnerving.
We used to go up to Yonkers to the drive-in. I think the biggest thrill was getting to wear my pajamas and bring a pillow in the car!
Yes! That's how I got to see a double bill with MCHALE'S NAVY JOINS THE AIR FORCE and IN HARM'S WAY (which I thought was never gonna end)
I think you will find that the pit was full of radioactive boiling water, not acid. Dr No was an evil man and deserved to be treated like a lobster. Hey, I’m a regular Jordan Petersen!
The Jordan Petersen Irregulars await orders, Suh!
CLEAN YOUR ROOMS AND STOP SLOUCHING!
Suh, No Suh!
David Foster Wallace's unpublished ms.: CONSIDER THE LOBSTER AS DR. NO
Bond films are an interesting part of my youth, being recalled not so much as a consistent plot as of a set of scenes that were memorable (Scaramanga's funhouse, the space stuff in Diamonds Are Forever, the gadgets) somehow strung together. Didn't help that the damn things were like three hours long in the TV version. I have a recurring dream about a movie I can't stay awake through, and I never know what's going on in the last half, and I'm fairly sure it tracks back to Bond films.
"...can't stay awake through, and I never know what's going on in the last half"
This is a pretty good description of life in general
My issue is I don't know what happened in the first half, and it's too painfully obvious what's happening in the second
Hey, I saw the first half of Das Boot four times before I made it to the end, and I liked that movie. But I was raising kids in those days, so I had a good excuse for nodding off.
"I remember the pattern on the table top..." memory sure is funny, isn't it, and picky
I wish I could say we had eaten madeleines dipped in tea.
Yeah, you'd remember that...
"The Trouble with Harry"... at the Dent Drive Inn in Mack, Ohio. Maroon Ford station wagon, three kids in their pajamas with pillows and, yes, a big brown paper bag filled with home-popped popcorn. Also, cold Cokes in the bottle. Now that I'm thinking about this, my parents were going to this movie (Hitchcock!) and had to take the children along or pay for a sitter. Good for them. I do have a vague memory of it being funny that Harry was dug up and re-buried over and over again but... why?
Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!
If that ain't (evidence of) childhood trauma I don't know what is
I always liked Andy Devine. I don’t remember that show with the frog, but my older brothers did and would quote that all the time. But I do remember him in some cowboy show where he played a sidekick character named Jingles. I don’t remember the name of that show or who the main character was or who played him. I just remember Andy and his voice, which wasn’t scary to me.
I grew in time to appreciate him but as a child I was just aware of his freakish voice and ebullience -- it was like someone cheerily waving their stump.
"like someone cheerily waving their stump" is possibly the single greatest phrase in the history of film criticism.
Von Busack – beat that!
Guy Madison played Wild Bill Hickock . I think a lot of the “sidekicks” on early TV derived from B movies. Comic relief in movies seriously marred some otherwise cool early horror movies, as did romantic subplots.
Fuck Smiley Burnette. - I'm a Dub Taylor kind of guy.
I remember Smilin' Ed's Gang. I am told I called him Smilin' Head. When Smilin" Ed McConnell died, Andy took over. Yes, I am that old.
Hopalong Cassidy. Jingles called him "Hoppy".
In Brasil, they pronounced it “Oppy Longy Cassidgee”.
But I think it was the Wild Bill Hickock as Mark Morey pointed out above
Ah, the weirdness from childhoods experienced farther north than mine. I know about Froggy because the b-i-l from the Bronx will quote that line. He seems to have found it enjoyably wacky (and I think he's said he once got to be in the studio audience). Having found clips online, I expect it would have been traumatizing if I'd seen this at the target audience age.
As it was, I had my early TV trauma in Baltimore, thanks to "Paul's Puppets." Not the boring puppets, but the celesta on "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies," played over a hypnotic kaleidoscope pattern.
He could make people tell the truth!
Froggy went to court in handcuffs
Ahem: https://youtu.be/VkwToyFf4EQ?si=hwCLVN0tKbTmxrA2
Good question. My mother would drag me to weird hippy happenings when I was in her charge so she could meet her friends, so I 'experienced' a lot of experimental Stan Brakhage-type glop before I was old enough to even know where I was... but the first titled movie I saw in a theater was either The Red Balloon with my grandfather - whom I vaguely remember getting unusually emotional about it, but he might have been high - or Yellow Submarine, being that was already Beatle-crazy by the time I was grown-up enough to know what was happening on screen.
I was probably also taken to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, by some adult who thought I needed to see it (I didn't).
OH! My mother also dragged me to see Ring of Bright Water when I was far too small and (SPOILER ALERT) in her usual cack-handed way to try to hip me to things like environmentalism left me traumatized for years over the clubbing of an innocent river otter. Damn I'm scarred! 😆
They club the otter? Shit this is worse than Nancy Sykes!
No doubt. Yeah it was an accident because man interfering with nature, yadda yadda. I was more moved by the messaging of Frogs and Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster (the scene where Godzilla falls in a pit and the Monster literally shits on him was very powerful).
It is worse! That otter was so sweet!
If we're doing Movies That Terrified You (whether they were your first or not) I'd like to submit Wild in the Streets.
Knew of it, but had to see wiki's description.
Out of every ridiculous prediction of drastic social change, the writers got a couple of things about right. The jerk who takes over the country "puts computers and prodigies in charge of the gross national product... and becomes the leader of 'the most truly hedonistic society the world has ever known'".
That's just America Today, until America Tomorrow comes along.
If?
How about "Werewolves on Wheels"? I doubt it'll terrify you - more like mystify you.
https://youtu.be/YQDDGbSJN0o?si=46iKngUHprSkOxzx
There's a writeup by several people who watched it and do a blow by blow of the film here - pretty entertaining.
https://www.pointhorror.com/werewolves-on-wheels-1971/
That poster! Like to see AI try to come up with something even half as crazy as that.
1st in theater (also a matinee, and like Roy, I do not consider whatever it was I saw previously on the telly): 𝘛𝘦𝘯 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘯. Burt Lancaster, Gilbert Roland, Mike Mazurki(!), Jody Lawrance(!!!).
I think I've written about this before. Mom dropped several of us off at the theater on her way to doing something else; I think I was maybe 6. I remember almost nothing about the show – story, actors, nothing*. My memory was it was a western. Wikipedia says this about that:
"It was originally a Western story by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck which concerned conflict between the US cavalry and Apaches. Producer Harold Hecht and star Burt Lancaster then decided that "John Ford and other Hollywood operators have so effectively decimated the Apache population" that they hired writer A.I. Bezzerides to reimagine the story with a Foreign Legion setting[5] which wound up involving the Rif War (1911–1927). Roland Kibbee and Frank Davis were hired to rewrite the script to make it more comedic."
*The single impression that remains is the weird feeling I had that it was somehow directing me to live an exemplary life – go to Ft Zinderneuf, be a hero and gain the acceptance and adoration (and a dame!) due me.
Wait, that's only four tall men.
Wise guy. Jody Lawrance was a DAME.
Well, don't blame Roy, she didn't give us her pronouns!
If'n you'da checked the studio stills you wouldn'ta needed no pronouns!
"they hired writer A.I."
That explains it, somebody count the fingers
I don't think it was the very first movie I saw — I think that was probably the Burt Lancaster movie where he was in a circus — but the first one that really made an impression on me was Pollyanna. The daring tree-climbing bit was heroic, and it was a little girl! And she took a risk and fell! but everything was all right in end! And she changed her whole town for the better, including her mean old aunt who came to really love her!
Clearly I still think of her as a role model. Did you know that after the book was published, groups of men in prisons formed clubs where they played the Glad Game and supported each other a la Pollyanna?
Wow!
!
Yeah.
When I was in sixth grade they showed Pollyanna in the school auditorium. I don’t remember anything about the plot but I do remember that as the movie went along we collectively came to hate the girl and the auditorium erupted in loud cheers when she fell off the roof. I teared up a bit but cheered as loud as anyone to cover up my embarrassment. The administration was outraged and there was some kind of collective punishment, the details of which I don’t recall. In retrospect, maybe I wasn’t the only one acting like an asshole to cover up delicate, good human feelings? I doubt it though. Small town America, Midwest version anyway, is a horrible place filled with horrible people.
Nah, you weren't the only one. I remember coming in from recess and being told that JFK had been shot. Everyone was shocked, some kids cried, and some of the boys mimed shooting people and laughing nervously. The teacher put a stop to it, and the rest of us thought the boys were creeps, but later I realized they were covering up by acting like assholes. (Place: small factory suburb near Detroit.)
It's entirely possible that not all of those boys were covering up - some of them may well be working in the present administration.
My partner and I were watching some show that had a scene from when the JFK assassination happened, and she asked if people really freaked out and were sobbing on the street like that. In my experience (young as I may have been), yes.
I will never look at Pollyanna as a metonym the same way again.
"Small town America, Midwest version anyway, is a horrible place filled with horrible people."
Michael, maybe we went to school together?
Early tv was full of terrifying presentations designed by adults with no concept of childhood. Froggy, Clarabell (who lived in our town, I found out later) and the Quaker Oats cannon. Since we didn’t have a set, I only watched in my grandmother’s third floor living room and only what she deemed acceptable. (Lots of Liberace and Lawrence Welk.) As for my first movie, I don’t remember which Disney theatrical cartoon my parents took me to at our local movie theater - possibly Fantasia - but it scared the shit out of me and gave me nightmares for weeks. Like I said, adults with no concept of childhood.
My first flick was definitely 𝘍𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘢, probably ca. 1956—Disney used to re-release titles from its catalog to theatres at intervals—and yes, the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence reduced little Rand to whimpering, near-incontinent terror.
Supposedly, Nelson Rockefeller griped that he had to reupholster Radio City Music Hall because so many kids weeing themselves in terror because of the witch in Snow White
Rocky was good for it.
Our first was Bambi, at the dollar theater, and when his mother was killed my sisters and I collapsed into one big puddle of inconsolable disbelief. Our mother, who I recall as infinitely kind and soothing, let us all climb into her lap for the rest of the movie. But we carried that sadness away with us, each in our own way. Then again, we did the same when ET had to go home, so maybe it wasn't the adults who were insensitive so much as the kids who felt too deeply and without knowing why.
The thing I felt at the death scene I could not articulate then. I realize now it felt like "Aii, yi yi..."
Great writing! I could picture the little boy "glued to the tube" as described.
I don't remember the first movie I saw. My mom told me I lost it when Herbie the VW Bug fell into the ocean in the Disney sequel: _Herbie Rides Again_. Was it a coincidence the first car I bought was a 1968 sky-blue Beetle? I remember my dad taking me to the first movie we watched together when it came out: the sci-fi ecology flick, _Silent Running_. Of course, I now have a squadron of drones with the names, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, named after the bots in the Bruce Dern movie actually played by people with physical disabilities.
Yeah, that one stayed with me.
I'm not sure I could listen to the soundtrack without tearing up a bit even now.
Soundtrack to Herbie Rides Again?
You can hear Joan Baez sing (with Peter Schickele, conducting) on the soundtrack from Silent Running on YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=MFtFR101lwY&list=OLAK5uy_l5jh3GpsWV-hVqoQ-iSFbPxmG-AhlozTU
INFRAMAN LIBELS
We lived in a rural area in Massachusetts and moved a lot, in what I much later realized was a series of tiny places close together. None of them had a movie theater but there was a drive-in somewhere. About once a year my dad would say, “Let’s go to a movie,” and we would drive down tree covered winding roads to what was basically a pasture with a screen, and cows going in behind it as we waited for it to get dark. I’m pretty sure they didn’t go to see a particular movie, because they were pretty random, from some “Ma and Pa Kettle” to “The Brothers KARAMAZOV.” I don’t remember any of the movies’ content. I remember previews but not cartoons. I remember being tucked in the window well of our Chevy convertible, an unaccountable extravagance we had for many years. We didn’t have a television until I was in fifth grade, but I saw kiddie shows and movies at other people’s houses. I remember Smilin’Ed on Buster Brown Theater with Froggy the Gremlin. Andy Devine was the sidekick on “Wild Bill Hickok”
and he seemed like an interloper when he turned up with Froggy and the gang after Smilin’ Ed ceased to be. (Robert Crumb mentions Smilin’ Ed’s death in “Ducks Yas Yas” in ZAP # 0, and Kim Deitch wrote a graphic novel about @The Search for Smilin’ Ed.”) I didn’t watch any of these shows regularly except “Superman” and “Disneyland.” I think the first movie that made a big impression” on me was @Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which, for some reason, was on television at somebody’s house right after it came out. That was a real mindbender in the Fifties.
A real mindbender anytime!
Yeah. I watched that on the sly one night when the parents went out. Mom specifically said "No scary movies!" so of course Body Snatchers it was. The pod reveal in the greenhouse is etched – Ah Say ETCHED! – in the little kid brain bits that persevere today.
There are a few drive-ins still extant, and there was one in South Carolina when I was living down there that I always wanted to go to but never made it to. Now I watch video compilations of intermission films and still want to go, but I'm sure it wouldn't be anything like I imagine it.
The Philip Kaufman 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland is a masterpiece of paranoia.
Thanks, I've seen the original a dozen times but I generally stay away from remakes, sounds like I should be more open-minded.
The Sutherland version is different, but still very good.
I can't even remember the first movie I saw because my parents used to take us to the drive-in and I'm sure they started way before I would be old enough to form any memories. The first movie I remember seeing in an indoor theater, which was notable for its being a lot more expensive than a drive-in, was Lady and the Tramp. I also have vivid memories of the 1965 TV special, Cinderella.
From Cinderella I remember the music, of course, and that during "Impossible" (what a beautiful song) they showed the pumpkin carriage flying though the air -- just a chroma-key of the thing rocking gently as stars rushed by, but i loved it.
The first movie I saw was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas. I was maybe 4. I don’t remember it at all but apparently the submarine scared me. I told my mom that Superman was gonna spank the Nautilus. That made me feel better!
And I remember the movie theater interior especially the little lamps with tiny lampshades high along the walls.
I think 20,000 Leagues was the first movie I saw at my request, at an indoor theater in a nearby town. It was fantastic. At a Fourth of July picnic that summer I drank some adult’s glass of beer and clam juice, climbed on a table, and sang “Got a Whale of a Tale” as sung by Kirk Douglas in the movie. I was eight. That’s when the family realized I would come to no good.
Mom thinkin' "Spank the Nautilus! The kid knows euphemisms already!"
I think it was “The Conquest of Space” (1955) but the only thing I remember about it is the title, an image of a wheel-shaped space station, and that my dad took me to see it—and he just about never went to movies. I just looked it up and honestly it sounds like a pretty scary story for an 8-year-old’s first movie*. Which may connect somehow with the various pathologies manifest in my dad’s parenting.
The first one I actually remember at all was “No Time for Sergeants” in one of those old grand movie theaters with ushers, a place so wondrous that I remember its red carpet runners and popcorn smell and the giant curtains that opened to reveal the screen better than I remember the movie. That would have been when I was around 11.
*I know that seems weird now, but this was the early ’50s, we were poorish, my folks were fanatically frugal depression-era kids, and I think they thought movies were a frivolous expense. But I first started regularly going to movies sometime in my early teens after, shockingly, those same parents gave me a book of tickets to the local theater for my birthday. I think I used the first one for “Spartacus.”
Fucked-up childhood, really.
Another child of a father damaged by the Depression (among other things) here. My mother had grown up at the same time -- with a widowed mother and several siblings -- yet she didn't have the same phobias about spending money. Between living in the boondocks and Dad's stinginess, theater movies were a rarity.
I always felt my parents must have had no memory of being children, and that accounted for their usual lack of sensitivity toward us. But sometimes there were hints of caring. Gestures I remember as out of the ordinary, and reasons to accept that they sort of tried. It may have been something similar with your parents, that without your expecting it, they picked up on something that led them to give you the book of tickets.
Yeah, they weren’t *horrible* parents, they cared, but the depression and the war gave them plenty of trauma. I remember my mom, tearing up, telling about the piano her mom had bought being repossessed. She never talked much about her family before the depression hit, but from the surprising number of photos, going back to the days when photography wasn’t so simple or cheap, I gather her family was comfortably upper-middle class before they must have lost it all in 1929 (when she was 9).
Obviously, you are a little younger then I (me?) whatever. I never saw Andy Devine and his frog (we only had 1 and later maybe 2 stations and he wasn't on them). But when I was in the AF I was stationed with a guy who would for no reason I could figure out, shout: "Twang you magic twanger Froggie. I'll be good, I'll be good, I'll be good." We were usually drunk or high, so it seemed pretty funny at the time.
I'd say the first partial memory I have of a movie in school was one about flies and how they are disgusting and how they grow. The only part I remember is where a fly is hatching and then having to dig itself out of the shit it was born in before something got too big and it couldn't dig any farther. I was rooting for the fly to make it. Oh well.
Aside from the drive-ins my family didn't frequent, in my earliest memories, movie theaters were still something found in the city or inner suburbs. My mother was overall culture-deprived, and it must have been a big deal when she somehow got to take me and my sister to a theater.
The earliest movie I can remember is The Wizard of Oz, in a theatrical run sometime before showings became an annual event on TV. I think I was 8 or 9, which would have made my sister 2 or 3 (talk about possible viewing trauma). The shock of the sepia scenes turning into technicolor was visceral, but also hinted at what aesthetic pleasures could be like. I was charmed by the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion; entranced by the strangeness of the Emerald City; seriously terrified by the Wicked Witch and flying monkeys. I didn't identify with the characters at all, and of course, the story ends up with Dorothy back home and realizing she had no real reason for discontent. But, the whole idea of movie magic on the big screen had been offered up.
A few years later, I resented being taken to 101 Dalmatians, supposedly a wholesome Disney movie for my sister, at 6. My insistence that I was too old to see this did me no good, and I squirmed through the whole thing. It was years before I recognized Cruella de Vil's name as a pun.
We were driving through the Bayview district of SF yesterday (Sat), where there's a bunch of auto repair shops. One of them was called "Emerald City Auto Body", and I said that that was an appropriate place for the Tin Man to work.