I Love Movies

I love movies.  Not shoot-‘em-ups with cars crashing and exploding buildings.  I like sweet, romantic comedies. 

As a little girl, our family went to see the “picture show” at the Tivoli on Magnolia Avenue or the Parkway on 8th Avenue.  We went whatever was on the screen just to cool off.  In Fort Worth in the 1930's, movie theaters were the only places, besides downtown department stores, that were air-conditioned.

My earliest memories are seeing Jeanette McDonald singing “I’ll be calling you-oo-oo-oo to Nelson Eddy in “Rose Marie.”  As I remember, my brother Lyle, a misbehaving a three-year-old, made so much noise we had to leave before the end of the movie. 

On another night I understood that Ramona and the young man were in love without having the faintest idea what the rest of the movie was about.  I was a bit older when I fell in love with Errol Flynn flashing his sword in “Robin Hood.”   Maybe you saw that recently on TCM.   

All this was before I grew up with “Gone With the Wind.” 

Last night on TCM I watched “The Human Comedy”, a movie made in the middle of World War II about the effect of the war on a small California town.  I was a teenager in Fort Worth at that time.  The movie ended at 11 p.m., ‘way past my usual bedtime, with Mickey Rooney’s brother being killed.  I remember the Lowery boy being killed; his sister Ruby was my Sunday School teacher.  I sat in my recliner with tears streaming down my face.  As I blew my nose, I reminded myself, “It is only a movie.”  Van Johnson, the actor, was never in the Army and lived another 50 years.

Two years ago son David gave me a Roku to use watching Netflex programs on my big television.  At the time I told him, “I don’t need that.  I have TCM.”   But television has such poor stuff these days that I find myself watching movies using the Roku several times a week.  

I switched from television to Roku to watch a French movie, “The Well-Digger’s Daughter.”  Set in a village in Provence at the beginning of World War I, it tells the story of a pretty peasant girl who falls in love with a rich, store-keeper’s son.  Afterwards I realized it was a fairy tale, Cinderella in the 20th Century.  A sweet story to make me forget all the dreadful things I see on CNN.