Picture This

Over breakfast most mornings I scan the Turner Classic Movies listings in the newspaper to see if there are any old time flicks that interest me. This morning I noticed The Blob was to be shown tonight at 8. Starring Steve McQueen, the 1958 movie is far from a classic sci-fi thriller. But as an impressionable 9-year-old sitting in a darkened theater, I was forever frightened by its coming attractions, never to see this flick, not then, not now.

The trailer aired before two movies I distinctly remember, Run Silent, Run Deep, and The Decks Ran Red. I had tagged along with my older brother, Bernie, and his friend, Jerry, for an afternoon of celluloid entertainment. Other than being scared out of my wits (there was a preview of another even scarier sci-fi film, but its title escapes me), the double-bill features did not disappoint. Run Silent, Run Deep starred Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster as officers of a WWII submarine. James Mason received top billing in The Decks Ran Red, a story about a mutiny aboard a freighter.

I don’t know why, but certain movies from my childhood have stayed with me, not because I have seen them time and again on television (though mostly I have), but because I remember the circumstances of when and where I saw them as a youngster.

In 1956, our mother took my brother, sister Lee and me to see The Ten Commandments at Radio City Music Hall. First, we had lunch at Schrafft’s. A day of spectacle any 7-year-old would remember.

That same year, while my brother attended a bar-mitzvah party, my father took Lee and me to a screening of Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, the first feature film produced in Israel. It told the story (mostly in English) of a group of four Israeli soldiers assigned to hold a strategic hill near Jerusalem during the War of Independence. As the title implies, they did not survive their mission.

I remember seeing what should have been a most forgettable double bill, Pocketful of Miracles, a less than fulfilling 1961 remake of the delightful Lady for a Day (both, incidentally, directed by Frank Capra), and Party Girl, a story about mobsters and molls in early 1930s Chicago.

Two of the earliest movies I saw were Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and The Trouble With Harry (1955). Both times our babysitter, Madeline, took us to the theater, most probably because she wanted to see them herself.

When I was 10 years old in 1959, I encountered my first example of censorship, and how to beat it. Twelve-year-old Lee and I went to see Cary Grant and Tony Curtis in Operation Petticoat. Because of the “raciness” of the script, we were barred from entering the movie house on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue U without an adult. Not to be deterred, we made our way to the theater at Kings Highway and Coney Island Avenue where they were more than glad to take our money.