THE OLD DAYS
by Arthur Vidro
When my brother was nine and I was six, our mother dropped us off at the local cinema for a full afternoon so she could visit her own mother at the hospital. Grandma was receiving radiation treatments.
I wanted to go to the hospital, but mom said children were not allowed.
So, the movie theater was our babysitter for the day. Back then leaving one’s kids alone was not considered remarkable.
As often happened then, it was a double feature. First on the screen was a routine western. Harmless fluff. Then came the main feature, a science-fiction outer-space monster movie called “The Green Slime.”
I still recall some of those scenes, which gave me nightmares. That movie was more horrifying to me than seeing grandma battle her ailments. (She died a year later of leukemia caused by those radiation treatments.)
Five or six years later, I went to the movies for the first time with a friend instead of with family. Seth H. and I went to a double feature.
First up was “The Gold Rush,” a 1925 silent flick starring (and directed by) Charlie Chaplin. He was in Alaska and at one point was so hungry he ate his shoe.
Then came the main feature, “Animal Crackers” (1930).
“Animal Crackers” was in the news then. Unlike the other Marx Brothers movies, this one had never been shown on television, for some sort of problem involving legal rights had kept it in limbo for a full generation. But now the rights were straightened out and the movie was being re-released nationally.
Seth and I roared with the audience. I recall especially roaring when Harpo and Chico played bridge with a couple of society ladies, and Harpo had an endless supply of aces of spades. As for his means of cutting the deck, well, that must be seen to be believed.
This hit our funny bones because at the time Seth was my most frequent bridge partner (and chess opponent). Didn’t every 11-year-old play bridge? Well, maybe not, but Seth and I were always intellectually advanced for our years. (He eventually became our nation’s acting Secretary of Labor.)
At the movie’s conclusion, the lights came up, patrons exited, and the cleaning crew went into action to spiff up the joint before the next crowd would be allowed in. We put a dime into a pay phone in the lobby to get a ride home.
That was a single, plush, large theater, with uniformed ushers (holding flashlights) in the auditorium, doing whatever was needed to maintain order.
Over the years, each plush theater would be subdivided into a less-plush triplex or a rinky-dink multiplex, with tiny theaters rubbing elbows with each other, no ushers patrolling, and nobody bothering to clean up before the next screening began.
The year Seth and I saw “Animal Crackers,” Eric S. and his kid sister saw, to coin a phrase, a quintuple feature. In one sitting, they saw all five “Planet of the Apes” movies (1968 through 1973). The patrons, Eric said, all made monkey movements and noises as they exited. Five full-length movies! Probably started in the late morning and let out in the early evening.
As a responsible 14-year-old, I would be hired to babysit on Saturday nights for a couple around the block whenever they wanted to “go to the movies.”
But by then, “going to the movies” meant going to one movie.
An era had ended.
Contrast that with the experience of my parents, who grew up in the 1940s. They would see a cartoon, a news reel, a comedy reel, one part of a 15-chapter adventure serial (such as “Superman”), then a B movie, and finally the main feature.
According to family lore, my grandfather would give my father a quarter to go to the movies, with the admonition to “bring back the change.”
My father grew up in Brooklyn, New York, so he and his friends needed to buy only one ticket among them. Then that kid would open the emergency door to admit the other kids. So, it was possible at times to bring back the change.
As a senior citizen in Florida, my father and his second wife (also a Brooklyn gal) would indeed “go to the movies,” for by now every theater was a multiplex. Whenever the movie they had tickets for ended, instead of exiting the complex they merely strolled to another screen in the multiplex and sat down. And kept repeating the process until they’d had enough.
Guess you can take the kids out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take the Brooklyn out of the kids.
It was sad when the Claremont cinema shut down this year. But I had stopped going years earlier. When the owners stopped listing on its marquee the names of the movies being shown, I lost interest. Too much bother to learn what was playing.
The movies’ titles were replaced with huge images of snacks.
Alas, today the focus for many a movie theater is to get patrons to the snack counter. Sometimes they sell the entry tickets at the snack counter, so even if you want merely to see a movie, you are still required to line up behind everyone else as the ticket sellers devote their time to filling orders for ridiculously large portions of junk food.
There was always a separate ticket counter in the old days.
