Oscars Time: Reflections on My First Grown-up Movies

It is Academy Awards time Sunday night, so naturally my non Trump thoughts are focused on the silver screen. This year’s host will be Jimmy Kimmel. I don’t have high expectations he will exceed or even match past enjoyment of seeing Billy Crystal emcee the gala event, but to be totally honest, I am probably too conservative, or should I say traditional, in my taste of comedic genius on Oscars night as I grew up watching Bob Hope host countless Oscars telecasts. I was disheartened when he lost his emcee spot back in 1969.

I’ve gotten over it. Though I see more flicks nowadays while sitting on the couch in our den I still enjoy the experience of going to the movies. Which brings me to the following question:

Do you remember the first films you saw in a movie theater? I don’t mean kiddie cartoons or even Disney full-length features, which in my case would be animated classics like Bambi, Fantasia and Lady and the Tramp. I mean the first grown-up movies you saw in a movie house, not on television.

The three movies that seem to be anchored in my memory as my first exposure to cinema are an eclectic trio. One is the 1953 comedy The long, Long Trailer starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as newlyweds who spend their year-long honeymoon driving a motor home trailer across the United States.

The second is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 The Trouble With Harry. Starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine in her film debut, the film is a comic mystery whodunnit and what-to-do-with-it when Harry’s body is found in a field of a small Vermont town.

The biblical epic Samson and Delilah starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamar round out my memorable threesome. Gilda thinks I saw this Cecil B. DeMille movie on television since it came out in my birth year, 1949, but I remember seeing it in color and our family didn’t get a color TV until 1962, so I’m sticking with my vision that I saw it as a re-release a few years later. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, it was re-released in November 1959 when I was 10.

I don’t believe either of our parents took me and my older brother and sister to these movies. I suspect our babysitter, next door neighbor Madeline, did, though I might have been taken to Samson and Delilah by our mother.

For sure she took us to see The Ten Commandments at Radio City Music Hall in 1956. Before the movie we ate lunch in a nearby Schrafft’s restaurant.

A year before or after, as our mother recuperated in a hospital from what I believe was gall bladder surgery, our father took us to see Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, a taut English-language Israeli picture about doomed soldiers during the country’s war of independence.

As my brother Bernie is four years older, he had the unenviable burden of taking me along when he went to the movies with his friends. Back then a ticket bought you two movies. One double bill I vividly remember was Glenn Ford in Torpedo Run, a World War II submarine story, and James Mason in The Decks Ran Red about a mutiny aboard an old freighter skippered by Mason. Even more memorable to me at the impressionable age of nine was the coming attraction for Steve McQueen’s first movie—The Blob, about a red slime man-eating extra terrestrial.

The promo so scared me that I stayed away from sci-fi movies until the day I graduated eighth grade in 1962. Several of my classmates chose to go to the movies after we were dismissed at 1 pm. The nearest theater was showing a double fare of horror: Godzilla followed by Rodan. I’m still creeped out by the opening scene of Rodan wherein Japanese miners discover a prehistoric egg that hatches into a flying Pteranodon.

The theater had no qualms letting half a dozen 13-year-olds enter unchaperoned. Three years earlier, however, my 12-year-old sister had difficulty buying tickets for us to see Cary Grant and Tony Curtis in 1959’s Operation Petticoat. We were deemed too young to see this risqué-for-the-time comedy. Lee and I had to try several movie houses before one would let us in.

Not that they were great movies, but I recall only one other double feature that I believe I saw with Lee. The first movie was A Pocketful of Miracles starring Glenn Ford and Bette Davis in a 1961 Frank Capra remake of his Apple Annie 1933 classic Lady for a Day. The second feature starred Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse in 1958’s Party Girl about a mob lawyer and the woman he loves.

For a more complete record of movies of my formative years, I have to include 1954’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Otherwise, as that was one of his favorites, my brother Bernie would label this blog as fake news (OMG, I just can’t get away from Trump no  matter how hard I try).

News of the Last Few Days

Reason to Celebrate: Sorry for the delay in reporting on my jubilee bar mitzvah day last Saturday. You can exhale now—all went well, especially Ellie’s singing. As usual, she emotionally charged the congregation, even bringing one woman to tears, according to our cantor.

As mentioned a few days ago, my secular birth date is March 6, a day I usually have associated with the fall of the Alamo. But thanks to an article in today’s NY Times, I can now relate March 6 to a happier occasion, the anniversary of the first sale by the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) of an Oreo sandwich cookie in 1912. To control my blood sugar and triglycerides levels I no longer indulge in Oreo binges, but I just might buy a package to put out for the poker game I’m hosting that evening. Hopefully my friends will be kind enough to let me win for a change.


Hearing My Age: Overall, I thought the Academy Awards Sunday night was a feh, or in today’s word, meh, show. No real excitement. If the academy brain trust was trying to convince a younger audience that going to the movies was more special than watching a DVD at home or on your computer, they could have picked actors more readily identifiable with their demographic. Heck, even Adam Sandler, for all his adolescent movie persona, is 45.

As for Billy Crystal, what I could hear of his opening act was okay, but let me be honest, I couldn’t hear half of his lyrics either because he didn’t sing loud enough or the band overwhelmed him. And speaking of the band, the breakaway shots showing the band playing before commercials were really bad.


Playing Hooky: The bar mitzvah weekend was capped by a Saturday afternoon visit from our niece Julie, husband Matt and their children Maggie and Harrison. The kids were interested in playing with Finley who found it fun to be entertained by bigger folk just eight and six years his senior. Maggie, however, soon retreated to the couch and wasn’t feeling up to staying with us during dinner. She felt a little warm so Julie asked if we had a thermometer.

Under the mouth it went. By the time Dan found Finley’s Exergen Temporal Thermometer, the one you scan across the forehead, Maggie’s temperature clicked in at 101.2. The Exergen quickly recorded a temp just 0.1 degrees higher. By the next day Maggie was diagnosed with pneumonia, but she’s doing better today, glad to report.

Meanwhile, the Exergen lived up to its advertised claims as being easy to use and virtually mistake free. A far cry from a temperature-taking incident when Ellie was a little older than Finley’s two and a quarter years. We were using a rectal thermometer back then. Gilda stuck it in and during the three minutes it was supposed to reside in Ellie’s butt, my dear wife fell asleep. So did Ellie. When they awoke about two hours later, Ellie whimpered, “Mommy, the thermometer is still in my tushy.”

Yes, the Exergen Temporal Thermometer would prevent any such mishaps from occurring. But had such technology existed back in the 1980s we might well have missed such classic movies as E.T. and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as Elliott and Ferris would not have been able to fake their illnesses to play hooky. Off they would have trooped to school.


Passing a Compliment: About 10 days ago Ellie complimented me for being “prolific.” At least I took it as a compliment. Anyway, it’s hard not to find something to write about when there’s so much going on and, with a discerning eye, so much worthy of comment or just simply noting.

Take, for example, a recent headline of an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times: “How to Halt the Butchery in Syria.” How could I not point out the irony of the author’s name: Anne-Marie Slaughter!?!

As long as we’re on the subject of Syria, the plaintive cries for help by those opposed to the Assad regime are heart-rending. But I wonder why it seems the cries are aimed at Western ears when it should be fellow Arabs that should be the first responders. It’s not as if Arab princes and potentates do not have the money or the means to provide relief.


Bottled Up: The economy is said to be improving, but the other day, for the first time in a long time, I noticed someone culling through the recycling bins on our cul de sac looking for redeemable bottles.


Back Page: Okay, after several comments from loyal readers wanting to know why I haven’t written about Jeremy Lin of the Knicks, let me remind people I am not a basketball fan. I did try a few times to see what all the hype was about, but every time I tuned into a game, Lin either was on the bench because the Knicks were way ahead or the Chinese-American sensation was in the middle of a not very productive stretch where he turned the ball over repeatedly and looked just plain overmatched. Still, there’s no denying the Knicks are playing better because of him.

P.S. I hope everyone noticed—no gratuitous Lin-puns.