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Four
- University of Iowa Press
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Four 143 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Four Perhaps such marked contrasts help explain a child who learned to do what many children of estranged parents do, which is to navigate the vacancies between them. Or to stay, as I often did, almost out of reach in an oddly rich remoteness , missing what I didn’t know I didn’t have. —barbara hurd Four 144 The Hundred Days Movies My earliest memory of going to the movies is connected to Joan of Arc, a film starring Ingrid Bergman. I remember sitting with my mother in one of the back rows of the center downstairs section of the Palace Theatre and Ingrid Bergman’s helmeted head filling up the screen. I also remember moving toward the aisle, my mother behind me, with perhaps the credits or a trailer for another film rolling. I only remember bits and pieces. The film came out in 1948 and, if we saw it then, I must have been nearly six or so, my mother either pregnant with my brother or taking me along on an outing while my grandmother watched my sister and new brother at home. I remember seeing the film in a crowded theater, most likely at a weekend matinee. I may also have seen Christopher Columbus with my mother—the film with Fredric March was released in 1949. My mother might have claimed the films were educational for me—the first, about a Catholic saint, was touted as the “Greatest of All Spectacles” and the second, about the discoverer of the Americas, was called “The Greatest Adventure Man Ever Lived”—but my mother was also a fan of Ingrid Bergman and Fredric March. Going to that film (or those films) had a lasting effect on me. Since then I’ve seen perhaps all the movies about Joan of Arc—my favorite is Carl Dreyer’s silent Passion of Joan of Arc, especially with Richard Einhorn ’s Voices of Light soundtrack—and I’ve read not only Maxwell Anderson ’s Joan of Lorraine, the play on which Bergman’s film was based, but also George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette (The Lark). Each time I see one of those films or read one of those plays, I remember that moment in the Palace Theatre with my mother. Joan of Arc might have nurtured my taste for historical spectacle, but The Robe likely revived it. Certainly I missed none of the subsequent epics in CinemaScope or VistaVision—if there were swords in the ad, I made it a point to see the movie. At one period, in junior high, I kept a scrapbook of movie ads from newspapers. My favorite was a huge two-page ad for Alexander the Great, with Richard Burton on one side, Fredric March on the other, and Claire Bloom clinging to somebody’s leg. In time, through black-and-white television, I discovered the earlier swashbuckling of Four 145 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood and The Adventures of Don Juan and I’ve never tired of viewing The Adventures of Robin Hood. Naming such films hints at the kind of escapism I continually longed for and the reason my reading in the same period turned to swashbuckling historical novels. I saw movies alone as often as I could. The Palace showed the major A films; the Rialto, the B pictures, double bills, and reissues. With neighborhood kids I went often to the Rialto, but mostly went to the Palace alone. I wanted to see every movie that came to the Palace, since that was where the new films played, three new bills per week. This meant that, for a while, I watched a wide range of movies—not only historical spectacles but also westerns, mysteries, comedies, musicals , the whole panoply of 1950s films. I loved musicals. When I saw Call Me Madam, with Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor, I was so thrilled by O’Connor’s numbers with Vera Ellen that I couldn’t keep myself from...