Movies

My family is not a movie family.

There are however memories of movies, and many I have watched more than once, whether on the silver screen or TV. Movies that I remember. The dates may not be when I saw them, but are when they came out.

So it is when, where, and with whom.

One afternoon years ago, for instance, Nennella, my best friend and I, decided to go to the movies. We were in our 70s or perhaps 80s. The movie was popular with the younger crowd, starring a handsome young man who turned into a vampire when the moon came out. He was the heartthrob of the teen-age girls. So here we were in the movie house, the only two elderly ladies in a crowd of giggling girls and boys who probably wondered what we were doing there. I don’t now remember much about the movie and even less its name.

The first movie I do remember was The Good Earth with Paul Muni. 1937. I might have been 10 years old.  The scene where the poor peasants made tea, adding just a leaf of tea to the water to save their tea, has remained with me.

In those years cinema was a double feature. There was a news reel with planes zooming through the sky, World War II was about to begin. There were the comics with Laurel and Hardy whose misadventures didn’t seem funny to me at all. There was Mickey Mouse and Popeye guzzling his can of spinach. And later Roadrunner.

Little Women, 1933. A very young Katherine Hepburn as the stubborn Jo who marries a German professor. The first of many versions of the Alcott novel. Must have seen it much later though.

Shirley Temple, 1937. As Heidi with her goats in the mountains. My Christmas doll was a blond curly Shirley Temple doll, even though my father frowned on dolls.

In 1939-40 my parents took us to the World Fair in New York where the highlight was Fantasia. What did I like best? Perhaps Night on Bald Mountain.

Gone with the Wind. 1939. I do remember seeing Gone with the Wind and rooting for Melanie and not finding Scarlett very likeable. Also remember her making a dress out of the curtains.

The Great Dictator,1940. Charlie Chaplin. The most memorable scene is when the dictator plays with a globe-shaped balloon, the world at his beck and call, and suddenly it bursts.

It wasn’t till I went to New York that I saw much in the way of foreign cinema. It was my introduction to Kurosawa with Rashomon, 1950. Four figures comment on a murder they witnessed, but each story differs.

In Ugetsu, 1953. Kurosawa again, with spirits or ghosts.  A boat, a skiff, silently slides through tall reeds.

La Strada, 1954. My first Fellini film, with Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina. Despite being an unlikeable character, Anthony Quinn appealed to me.

There would also be Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, 1957. When the woods started walking up to the castle, I realized that it was none other than a Japanese version of Macbeth. I probably saw this at home, perhaps in the company of my dog.

The Seventh Seal, 1957. Ingmar Bergman. The knight playing chess with Death on the beach, with the dance of death silhouetted on a hill, is unforgettable.

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), 1963. With Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. The most memorable scene is where they are waltzing together.

How could I forget the spaghetti western I first saw with Carolyn. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The good, the bad, and the ugly), 1966.  Sergio Leone. Carolyn, an archaeology student, was staying with my family, and we decided to go to the movies. She was particularly delighted at what she saw as a summing up, a mocking, of the various aspects of the classic American western. Pistol duels, chases in the Badlands, eating plates of beans. Now that was a film I certainly saw more than once. Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, and music by Ennio Morricone.

The Desert of the Tartars, 1976. Tornatore. Did I read it first or did I see the film first? I think the former. Scene in the book and in the film of an inn where the lieutenant overnights on his way to the fort. The wooden beams creak and seem alive.

The Name of the Rose, 1986. Based on Umberto Eco’s novel, with Sean Connery. Many memorable scenes. Was thrilled when I recognized the doorway of the church with its fantastic carvings, that frightened the young novice, Adso, as the one on the Romanesque church in Moissac that I had marvelled at during a summer course.

The Dead. The Dubliners. 1987. James Joyce, directed by John Huston.  After a Christmas dinner, a man realizes that his wife has a hidden life of before their marriage as he watches snow falling over everything. We saw the film in an open-air theater, in a high school courtyard in Orvieto, on a summer night. I had not read the story and was struck by the fact that the Italian audience (the movie was, of course, dubbed) was so taken by the ending that you couldn’t hear a pin drop. 

Moonstruck, 1987. So very Italian. Love the scene with Olympia Dukakis making French toast with a hole for an egg, even though it is not part of my Italy. New York with its brownstones is however part of my past. With Cher and Nicholas Cage. Only time I liked him.

To be continued