Goin' to The Movies. The Education of a kid. ©Joel Baumwoll

Ah… the movies.  What a sense of excitement we had, almost every Saturday afternoon.  Knowing we were about to be swept up in an adventure, scared beyond imagination, turned into heroes, facing down enemies foreign and domestic.  Two hours of being transported to places I’d scarcely heard of--Iwo Jima, the Sahara desert, the Casbah, Mars. 

I don’t think a kid has any experiences that even come close to the magic of going to the movies.  I know I never did, and never will.

The first movie I remember seeing, I was eight years old, was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  It scared the hell out of me.

The monster was the most terrible creature I could imagine.  It was made from parts of dead people!  This idea reached into the innermost terrors of my nascent imagination.  Corpses taken from graves and sewn together into a giant, ugly creature that walked.  What could be more horrifying to an eight year-old kid who hadn’t figured out what was real and what was not?

Goin’ to the movies without our parents made the event even more exciting.  This was purely a kid thing.  The local “movie,” which is what we now called a “theater,” was the Crest, on Ogden Avenue in the Bronx.  Looking at it now, it was a simple place, nothing more than a big room with a screen, a ticket booth and a typical sign over the entrance.

But then it was a place of unbelievable real experience.  In the years just after the war, I remember walking to the Crest on a Saturday afternoon to see The Sands of Iwo Jima.  I was filled with a palpable feeling of excitement.  I was going to see something fantastically important.  I was going to see the battle I had heard about on the radio as a five year old kid.  Here it was, only four years later, and I was about to see the evil Japs defeated by tough, invincible Marines. 

 

This was the battle that heralded the victory in the Pacific after years of terrible defeats by the treacherous enemy that had sneak-attacked us at Pearl Harbor.  The words “Pearl Harbor” and “sneak-attack” were inseparable in our lexicon.  And we always referred to the enemy as “the Japs,” or the “nips,” a strange foe who would commit suicide as a battle tactic. 

I was shocked to tears at the movie’s end, when Sgt. Stryker, the hero, leaned back to savor victory as the flag was being raised on Mt. Surabachi, and said “I never felt so good in my life. How about a cigarette?”  just as a camouflaged Jap arose from nearby foxhole and, in a redux of the sneak attack, shot him dead.  Dead! The hero was dead.  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Looking back I realize that was when I learned that bad things can happen to good people.  And I learned it in the movies.

Of course I learned other things.  My first stirrings of what was to become an appreciation for sex came from an exotic movie about a small time crook who lived in an strange place called the Kasbah.  His name was indelibly carved in my brain.  Pepe Lemoco.  How I got to see this steamy foreign language movie I have no idea.  But see it I did, at the tender age of ten.

Jean Gabin was a new kind of hero, a jewel thief, smitten by a beautiful woman.  He sacrifices his freedom in a vain attempt to stay with her.  Another lesson in life learned in the movies; that bad guys are not all bad, and they can be heroes too.

The idea that a person could see into the future was particularly scary, and Edward G. Robinson introduced it to me at the Crest in The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.  In this thriller, the main character, a mentalist, discovers that he has the ability to see into the future. He becomes a recluse out of the fear that his predictions always come true. That same fear brings him out of reclusion when he seeks out the daughter of a woman he once loved to warn her of impending danger.

His struggle to prevent the death of the young woman made a huge impression on me.  The idea that a fate awaited me that I could do nothing to change was terrifying. For years, I had vague feelings of foreboding as the memory of this movie haunted me.  Oddly, I don’t remember whether he was able to save the girl.  I imagine he did, but the ending was less significant to me than the idea behind the story.

After Frankenstein, the monster movies that followed lost their bite, and it took a disembodied hand to create nightmares for me.  The Beast with Five Fingers featured the surreal Peter Lorre and a murderous hand that strangled people.  The sight of this thing floating in the air and grasping helpless victims at the throat until they were dead gave me the willies.

 

That it turns out the hand was the psychotic image of a deranged killer who sought revenge on his victims was a revelation into the dangers of murderous insanity.  Lorre’s bug eyes and low nasal whine stuck in my mind for years.

Every now and then, we ventured to another part of the Bronx to see a movie.  I realize now, it was a short walk from my block to the Earl (we pronounced it “oil”) on the other side of the Grand Concourse, in the shadow of the “El” (elevated subway), and Yankee Stadium.  Oddly, I remember we called this The Earl Theater, which gave it a bit more glamour than the Crest, which was just that.

If we had an extra quarter, a special treat was going to Addie Valens.  This was no mere ice cream counter.  It was a full-fledged palace of sundaes, whipped cream, bright red cherries and thick malteds.  The bitter-sweet hot chocolate ladled over vanilla ice cream was the best I’ve ever had.

Rarely, on a family outing, we were taken to one of the legendary movie "palace."  These left indelible impressions of grand and almost religious places, reserved for special occasions.

The late 40s was the era of what is now known as film noir.  To us, these were gangster movies.  Bogart, Cagney and Robinson were the faces we associated with crime.  But I wasn’t to appreciate these nuanced stories until I was much older.

The murder mystery that scared me most was an Agatha Christie staple “And then There Were None,” a version of an earlier movie “Ten Little Indians.”

The plot involved ten people who are summoned to a large home on a distant island, to discover that their host planned to kill each of them, one at a time.  The idea of being trapped in a huge, spooky house with an invisible killer who succeeded in murdering them one at a time, despite their best efforts to protect each other struck chills in me.  I think the feeling of helplessness in the face of such danger was what got to me. In fact, it stayed with me for years.

During the war years, my imagination was captured by the heroics of marines, pilots and brave GI’s, played by the likes of Dana Andrews and Robert Taylor.  Through them I lived the war, and shared in triumphs of killing Nazis and Japs, and the sadness of seeing my friends die in front of me.  These were strongly felt experiences that took days to evaporate after leaving the movies and walking out into the sunshine of Ogden Avenue.

The war occupied most of my fantasy life through the 1940s.  Lead soldiers, Images of P-51 Mustangs with sharks teeth on their noses, streaks of tracer bullets leading to Nazi foxholes, Sherman and Panzer tanks filled my mind between stickball games and homework.

That is until I my imagination was captured by the idea of space travel.  A mere abstraction until 1950, the idea of flying to the moon became a movie reality when I saw two movies—Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M.

In XM, the excitement of a flight to Mars was tempered by the trauma that the entire crew, including a woman, would die at the end.  This was an incredibly powerful thing for a ten year-old kid to experience.  It took nearly half a century for reality to match it with the Challenger explosion.

My sense of safety was shaken, however, by the cold war years, and the specter of atomic attack.  The far off destruction of the war against Germany and Japan was brought home after Hiroshima.  The very idea that one bomb could vaporize a city and all the people in it was a scary thing to me, all the more so because it was real, and not the stuff of movies.

I remember being introduced by a movie to the idea that the entire planet could be destroyed.  The Day The Earth Stood Still portrayed a space traveler who was a kind of judge, evaluating man’s behavior.  He saw the warlike nature of man and the dangers of atomic war growing as the Russians and Americans built their bombs. His giant steel robot Gort, and others in outer space have the capability to utterly destroy the Earth if man does not mend his ways.

I realize now that seeing this movie was the first time I was moved to contemplate the nature of man, and his capacity for evil.  An astonishing revelation to an eleven year-old kid.

That same year (1951) The Thing from Another World brought home the terrors of outer space.  A monstrous creature dug from the arctic ice by scientists comes to life and begins to kill and eat them.  

Confronted with ultimate danger and, at the same time, excited by a fantastic scientific discovery, the scientists wrestled with the decision to destroy their discovery before it destroyed them.

These movies dealt with the inherent conflict between the good of scientific discovery and its capacity to destroy us.  This was a powerful idea, and it came to me through the movies.

Of course, the movies introduced me to another elemental aspect of human nature, sex.  My pre-adolescent hormones were stirred up considerably by a movie that combined the excitement of an outlaw western and a woman of unimaginable allure.  That, of course was The Outlaw.

Though produced in 1943, I did not get to see it until eight years later, at the tender age of eleven.  It was the first movie I ever took a girl to see with me.  In fact, it was a double date, with my buddy George Gugliotta, my fourth grade girlfriend, Diane Fastige, and her friend Mildred Ruggerio.

Oh man, I remember the sense of anticipation, and the feeling that we were doing something slightly illegal or illicit when we sat down to watch Jane Russell roll in the hay with Billy the Kid. 

There’s no telling the fantasies that were triggered by the big-breasted woman and the baby-faced outlaw hero.  To this day, I remember the squishy feeling I had when Russell nursed the wounded Billy back to health from his wounds, and fed him tenderly, as he lay hidden in a barn, helpless on a bed of straw.  Whoooweeee!

As I entered adolescence, my sense of self was formed in part by movie characters whose values I admired and sought to emulate.  None was more powerful than that of Marshall Will Kane, the lone figure risking all to stand up against evil.  High Noon created in me the belief that there were times in life when a person could not back down, no matter how scared he was, if he wanted to have any respect for himself.

The very human portrayal of fear, doubt and resolve that Cooper brought to this character, and the simple, brilliant picture of this man, standing alone, likely to die but unable to do anything else but confront his nemesis had an impact on a twelve year-old that lives with me to this day.

As I moved into my teen years, the movies lost their power to shape me, as they had earlier in my life.  They continued to bring important issues into focus, and forced me to confront social ills, the evils of segregation, the hypocrisy of the establishment, preaching values that it never practiced.

On The Beach created in  me a sense of dread and impending doom as it portrayed the apocalyptic end of days in a radioactive cloud the encircled the earth.  The characters, as much as the events, moved me to reflect what it might be like if we did indeed have a nuclear war.

Rebel Without a Cause, heralded by many, was not my battle.  Brando’s Wild One was a character in a movie, and not a persona I related to.   Perhaps the sense of being an alien in my own country was reflected in Easy Rider, as my alienation from the America of the 1960s and the war in Vietnam grew increasingly.

I think this was the last movie I can recall that touched me in a very personal way. 
By the time I was in my late teens, my perspective of the world and my place in it was being formed more by real life than the vicarious experiences that movies brought to my early years.  They still had the ability to move me, excite and scare me. 

But the murder of Medger Evers and three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the lies of government to foster war and exploitation of people were more powerful than any movie.

The magic was gone.