Lucking Out - James Wolcott [27]
My uptown address had the down-market advantage of being within walking distance of two of the major revival houses in the city, the New Yorker and the Thalia. Shopping-mall multiplexes were unknown when I was growing up in Maryland, the only two theaters being on the Edgewood Arsenal military base and in the nearby town of Bel Air. The programming at the army theater never erred on the side of daunting pretension. Each weekend offered a carousel of the latest Elvis Presley musical, Jerry Lewis comedy, or garish war epic (such as Merrill’s Marauders or any other World War II film set in the Pacific with malaria and leeches), and to this day I can dazzle myself with piquant, mindless details from It Happened at the World’s Fair or Follow That Dream or The Delicate Delinquent that are stuck like gum to the roof of my mind. I knew nothing about directors but was aware when I saw Ride the High Country (Peckinpah) and Hell Is for Heroes (Don Siegel) that the guys behind the camera were a different breed of cat from the ones who gave us Elvis making with the hips at a back-lot luau. Though I had taken an introductory film course at Frostburg, where screenings of the classics of German Expressionism (The Last Laugh, The Street) failed to fire my classmates’ synapses, judging by their simulated snores, it was at the New Yorker and the Thalia, especially the former, that I was inducted into the Eleusinian mysteries of art cinema. Nesting in the balcony of the New Yorker, I wondered why strangers sat so close to each other, given the availability of vacant seats, and then, as if answering a cue, migrated to the men’s room together, missing much of the movie. I soon divined that these weren’t instances of bladders in harmonic sync. The other patrons seemed to be solitaries, like me, perhaps because I tended to avoid the theaters on weekend date nights, my dating life still in the starting blocks. Many a time I sensed that the men in the audience weren’t going to the movies as much as getting away from something, stealing a few hours in the hideaway cove as a temporary reprieve. The prints of classic foreign and Hollywood films in those pre-DVD days were legendarily scuffed like locker room floors, with washed-out colors, bleached black and white, frames missing, vertical lines slicing the frames, strange blotches appearing like fungus, fuzzy sound, the screen going blank as a reel came unsnapped and the audience groaned, what little audience there was in the dead of afternoon. But the imperfections in the prints made the experience more dreamlike, closer to an unfinished rough draft from the unconscious, the subtitles a ghostly reduction of dialogue that sounded so much more expressive and layered than the plain words at the bottom of the screen. Needing no translation, the serious Hollywood heavyweights—On the Waterfront, High Noon—carried their own echo of the hereafter, a sense that you were watching glorious figments reenacting a heroic rite that now belonged to immortality, where self-importance savors its just reward.
And so the uptown revival houses combined art and elegy in a delinquent atmosphere that made Susan Sontag’s vaunted cinephilia seem like basic training for cultural sainthood, membership in a monastic order of paleface prunes. It was different downtown at Theatre 80 St. Marks, which specialized in Hollywood musicals and screwball comedies, its seats a chiropractor’s delight;