The Movies

I’m going to the movies today. I wonder how many times I’ve sat in a movie house and been transported to another world. It can’t be counted in the number of movies I’ve seen. When I was a kid, you saw two and sometimes three movies at one sitting. There were also the Three Stooges, a serial like Buck Rogers, a newsreel, and a whole lineup of cartoons. I didn’t care that some of the “shorts” were filmed before I was born. They were new to me. We went into the movie around twelve and came out around six, our eyes like saucers.

The love of film was given to me by my daddy, who took me almost every weekend. If he had to work, he gave me a quarter so I could go to the neighborhood house by myself. Admission was ten cents. Popcorn and a drink cost another fifteen cents. I recently celebrated a birthday. The price of my Saturday entertainment ought to give away the year I appeared on this planet.

I was around eight or nine when we went downtown to the United Artists Theatre. It was one of those magnificent movie houses built during the twenties and thirties. Gone With The Wind had been re-released, and Daddy wanted me to see it.

Rhett Butler was handsome and charming—yes, but it was the women who mesmerized me. Scarlett, who acted as if she were a selfish little ninny, but stepped up when she was needed. She served in the hospital with the wounded soldiers, delivered Melanie’s little boy, and got them out of Atlanta before the whole city went down in flames. At Tara, she was the one everybody came to for strength—and she had it. She buried her mother, worked the fields, and kept the family together. When a dreaded Yankee showed up in the house and threatened her, she shot him in the face, and I was glad.

Melanie seemed to me to be the ideal of what a Christian ought to be, non-judgmental, accepting of others shortcomings, forgiving. She appreciated Scarlett’s sacrifices on her behalf and remained loyal to Scarlett through thick and thin. Like Scarlett, Melanie had a backbone of steel. When Scarlett shot the Yankee, Melanie heard the shot, jumped from her sickbed, and came running down the stairs carrying a saber. Gentle and sweet? Certainly. A wimp? Hardly. Knowing she put her life at risk, she welcomed her husband to her bed, conceived another child, and paid the ultimate price. I wanted to be more like her. My daughter’s name is Melanie.
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And Mammy. Let us not forget the woman who held it all together. Except for her color, she reminded me of my Grandmother Mayse. Scarlett’s mother, Miz Ellen, ran the plantation, but it was Mammy who ran the family. When the young Scarlett acted out, it was Mammy who could give her a look and put her in her place.

I had to be twelve years old before they let me take the book out of the library. I still think of it as one of the greatest novels of all time, but it was the movie that took up residence in my heart.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see GWTW on the big screen another five or six times. I have worn out the VHS tapes I had and now play my set of DVDs from time to time. If I’m channel surfing and find it playing I sit down and get lost in it all over again.

Most movie lists place Citizen Kane as the best movie of all time. I’ve tried repeatedly to watch that and could never get through all the way to the end. I didn’t care about anyone in that film. I’m pretty sure those lists were compiled by men.