Finding Friends in the Films
“Do you go to the movies? Find a friend in the films?” – “Movies”; The Hothouse Flowers, Home
I learned to love at the movies.
As a kid of about six or seven, I would watch the Sunday morning cartoons on TBS (then called “Channel 17” in Atlanta), which were followed at around 11:00 o’clock by a morning matinee of a classic black and white films. It was here that I first saw Bogey and Bacall, Powell and Loy, Tracy and Hepburn, Astaire and Rogers, Garland, Gable, Lombard, Davis, Crawford, Grant and Olivier. I can remember sitting on the floor in front of the television, slightly sleepy, but riveted to movies whose themes I could barely understand.
It was the look of things that first drew my attention, the mixture of light and shadows combining to create a mood that influenced the story as much as the plot and the acting. Be it the dark shadows and lousy lives of the punished in the noirs, or the bright crystalline glamour of the MSM musicals, where nothing was ever dirty, and every story had a happy ending, the flickering light tripped something inside my subconscious that made me sit up and listen to the tales being told. I didn’t always get what I saw, but I was hooked and knew here was a thing that could teach me something. Read the rest of this entry »