She Never Got Into Watching Old Movies

Doom scrolling and reading the major headlines have morphed into one another.  Taos Bubbe and I have a small scale political action promise similar to the one JannyLou and I created when Martha McSally was my biggest concern.  I'm going back to when the world was aright on its axis.

Linda's comment yesterday (cf title) got me thinking of how I got into watching old movies.  I cannot think or write about the coup happening right under our noses (anyone else remember 1933 Germany?  They aren't burning the books, they're deleting the websites and all the information stored therein.) so I'm taking myself to a happier place.  

Daddooooo's parents watched the Marx Brothers movies with me when I was very young.  I didn't understand it all, but Harpo made a lot of sense to me.  My recurring desire to pull a giant horn out of my pocket and blast away at stupidity comes straight from Sunday afternoons and Million Dollar Movie.  

G'ma and I laughed uproariously at Buster Keaton's The General when I was in high school.  If Errol Flynn knocks on the door, 

Wikipedia

your father knows to leave the house.  That was the reason I knew about his swashbuckling before I met TBG, who is still obsessed with it.  

I went off to Cornell, where there were seven movie outlets on campus.  Classic films, cult films, X-rated films; remember I Am Curious (Yellow)? There were first run movie theatres downtown and at The Crossroads (which really was at the crossroads of many diverse paths), but those required a car and a modicum of advance planning.  And they were expensive.  Ours demanded not much more than our attendance.

Then I took myself to Chicago and TBG came to visit and we walked into The Biograph Theatre

Wikimedia Commons

where the audience was convulsed in laughter.  It was the second half of Bringing Up Baby (neither of us can remember which main feature we were there to see) and although we had no information at all it took about 10 seconds before we, too, were howling as Cary Grant yelled Susan!!! at Katherine Hepburn.  

The blonde at the film

It was the beginning of a love affair with screwball comedies and the Biograph itself.  

We usually walked, my graduate school friends and I, through the (then) largely ungentrified DePaul neighborhood.  When it was super cold we'd pile into Big Steve's car, park in the lot that only locals knew about, walk through the alley where John Dillinger was shot, and pay $2.50 for the late shows.  \They started at 9pm, which was just about when we'd finished school and work and dinner and, if it were a weekend, a game or two of Clue. 

There was The Granada, a big, beautiful, ornate and overdone masterpiece of a real movie theatre,

Chicago Magazine

all the way up Sheridan Road but absolutely worth it.  Bogie and Bacall deserved to be seen in such a setting.

DVD's and Netflix helped when we moved to Marin.  TCM has saved us in Arizona.  I try to go to The Fox Theatre and sit in those two person upholstered couches in the loge

Historic Theater Photos

when oldies but goodies are shown around the holidays.  Taking Mr (now 19 and 21) as tweens to see Princess Bride (an old movie for them, after all) and Robin Hood was like transporting them to another dimension.

And isn't that what a good movie experience is supposed to do? 

*****

For Linda and anyone else who wants to start at the beginning, arranged roughly:

Casablanca

Charade

Singing in the Rain/anything with Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy

Bringing Up Baby

Robin Hood/The Sea Hawk/Captain Blood (and TBG would be furious if I left off The Mark of Zorro)

The Lady Eve

North by Northwest/Psycho (if your heart can stand terror... serious screaming out loud terror)

If you're not hooked by then, tell me what you want.....