<< Back 5/15/02 A strange kid finds a refuge at the cinema SMN When I was 6, my Aunt Ruby took me to the movies for the first time. The consequences were profound. Ruby later told me that I perched on the edge of my seat, mouth agape, giving little astonished gasps and sighs. Other moviegoers stopped watching the cowboys and Indians and watched the strange little kid instead. I didn’t simply watch, I crawled inside the whole flickering, banging, whizzing, assemblage and put it on like a suit of long underwear. I talked of nothing else for days, causing my grandparents concern. They kept explaining that what I saw wasn’t real, or as my grandfather said, “It’s just shadows on the wall.” At school, I told the teachers about the horses, the cowboys and the Indians. I even got up in the middle of class and told the other children about it. I begged constantly to be taken back and was successful, launching an impressive record of perfect attendance at the Saturday westerns. I became known as “the Front-Row Kid.” When my grandmother refused to give me the dime I needed, I prowled the creek banks, retrieving beer bottles for the deposit and sold scrap iron. My attendance was uninterrupted for four years. When I ended up with a “mild touch” of polio in 1945, I was in bed for two months and alarmed my grandparents with long delirious dialogues with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. My Aunt Ruby represented me at the matinees, and gave me detailed accounts of each show, including the “continuing serial.” When I was in high school, Mr. Moody, the manager of the Ritz, gave me a job. In exchange for popping the popcorn, putting up the big plastic letters on the marquee and sweeping out the theatre, I got to see all of the movies free. My grandmother didn’t think it was much of a job and worried about me getting electrocuted when blue fire jumped from the shorted-out marquee and made my hair stand on end. (That really happened, but it didn’t frighten me much. I just pretended that I was on a spy mission which involved disengaging the wires on a bomb.) Then, there was Doris, Mr. Moody’s daughter, who took up tickets and wore wonderful cashmere sweaters — a visual benefit which sort of offset the fact that I didn’t receive any money. But I saw three movies each week (usually twice). I can still quote memorable “death lines” from many of them: “The Big Carnival” — “I’m a $100-a-day newspaper man, and you can have me for nothing.” Then there was the bullet-riddled Edward G. Robinson saying, “Is this the end of Rico?” in “Little Caesar.” Sometimes, on the way home from the movies, I entertained myself by suddenly dropping to the ground and crawling several feet like Steve Cochran, the dying gangster in “The Damned Don’t Cry.” Once I was brought home by the local police who told my grandmother that I yelled “Come and get me, coppers!” at them as they drove by. “It’s them movies,” she said. “They’ve ruined his mind.” Okay, I admit it. I was a strange kid. But here it is, 50 years later, and I still love movies. Things have changed a bit. I’m deaf now and can’t hang out at the local cinema where the movies all sound like feeding time at the dog pound. (Hearing aids don’t work well in theaters.) So, I am reduced to watching captioned videos. This desperate compromise has brought me a wonderful, new world — foreign film. I’ve learned to love Japanese, German, Italian and Russian films for the singular reason that I know exactly what is going on because they tell me in neat letter-box script at the bottom of the screen. Which brings me to the reason for this column. I want to spend a bit of time talking about “art films.“ (For me, an “art film” is any film that I want to see six or seven times). I’m going to try to stay out of Hunter Pope’s subject matter — current cinema — and restrict myself to film that has been around for a long time. Some of it falls into the category of “cult films,” and some are just plain ... weird. I like that. I’m still a strange kid. So, indulge me a bit, okay? If possible, encourage me. Drop me a line by e-mail or the Smoky Mountain News. Ask me questions, make a few recommendations about some classic film, comment on the content of my column. Tell me your favorite film and why. Let’s talk about Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Wertmuller and Tarkovsky. (If you don’t want to talk about those folks, maybe you could just give me the name of a really good mental health counselor.) (Gary Carden can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com)