Just got through reading a book about old movies. I was really surprised. The author wrote about movies he had watched growing up. He later began writing and directing movies. The beginning of the book was great. He had gone to movies when he was very young with his mother. I had seen these movies too. He was in elementary school when he began going to the movies and I was in high school.
Turns out that he was writing about movies made in the late sixties and early seventies. What a treat! He was critiquing and analyzing movies that I had seen in a theater or drive-in movie.
What a trip down memory lane. Then it hit me. These movies first came out fifty years ago. I had seen the movies he was writing about several times on the big screen and many times on television too. I can watch a movie over and over.
Watching movies can take on a changing perspective. You go out on a date and watch a movie. You’re a teenager and a movie is entertainment. Once you get older, you don’t go out to movies as much. Then you get to the point that you don’t go to movies at all. You can watch the movies over on television.
The book covered about a thirty-year run of movies. Many of the movies from the seventies I had seen. The eighties had fewer movies I had seen and the nineties covered only a handful of movies I had seen. I saw those movies on television.
It is amazing when you look back on fifty-year old movies. Had he written this book in the seventies, he would be writing about movies from the 1920s. Think about that. There was no television and there were plenty of movies with and without spoken words.
I bet it was fun to go to a show and have to read the dialogue and listen to a piano player adding music to the show.
Most of the movies I read about and remembered I would still watch again. Even going to the drive-in again would be a real treat. The drive-in was the best. Food to eat, popcorn, walking around to visit your friends in other cars and of course parking on the back row of the drive-in. A lot happens in fifty years.
One movie stands out that I continue to watch over and over. The movie had a poignant part where the hero is talking to the bad guy. You know the bad guy is going to get it. The hero gives a little speech and then the bad guy is shot. An excellent movie that I watched many times in the theater and the drive-in and still watch if it comes on television.
The last time I watched the movie at a drive-in was a memorable time. The hero was about to start his line when over the speaker in the car screeches out, “The concession stand will close in ten minutes.” The favorite line of the movie was interrupted and all the people starting cursing and blowing their car horns.
It was a fun night and if the movie comes on television I am going to watch it again.
