Edenville Owls

Even the small movie theaters in second-level cities were impressive. All of them had big velvet curtains on either side of the big screen. There were gilt-trimmed loge boxes on either side of the theater, just like real theaters where they put on plays in New York. Usually there were two movies, a newsreel, maybe a cartoon, previews of coming attractions, and sometimes a short subject, Robert Benchley or some other person like that... Every week during the war, on Saturday afternoons, unless we were playing basketball, we went to see double-feature westerns at The Art Theater on Purchase Street in New Bedford. These weren’t westerns like Duel in the Sun with Gregory Peck, or My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda. They were more grown-up movies in which we had little interest. In fact, often we hadn’t even heard of them. If we did see them, we thought they were kind of slow. Instead we saw Tom Mix and Rocky Lane; Wild Bill Elliott and Bob Steele; Buck Jones, Sunset Carson, Ken Maynard, Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, and Randolph Scott... We saw every Tarzan movie starring Johnny Weismuller. We would have died to be Boy. We were saddened as Johnny Weismuller got heavier and heavier. We never doubted that the movies were shot on location. The whole question of sex bothered us a little. If Jane and Tarzan were married, who married them? If they weren’t married, then what were they doing living together out there in the jungle? Someone told me that they had actually gotten married at the end of one of the books, but I never found the place, and for us, Tarzan was a figure of the movies... We also went to any Boston Blackie movie we could find. Blackie was played by Chester Morris, who was also on the radio: “Enemy to those who make him an enemy. Friend to those who have no friend.” We watched Tom Conway as The Falcon and anything Bing Crosby was in: Going My Way, The Bells of St Mary’s, and the Road pictures he made with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, which all of us thought were hilarious. Even with these movies we were not at all sure it was not shot in Rio, or Singapore, or wherever. It was years, even after seeing many real cities, before I could imagine a city as looking different than the back lot city of noir films, and B movie detective stories. It was like movies were more real than the life I was actually living.