LITTLE ROCK — I grew up in a town of about 15,000 people in the middle of Nebraska. For most of the 1950s, North Platte was still waiting for its first television station. But movies? My little town had three movie theaters.
The fact is hardly remarkable. Before TV took hold, towns all over had movie theaters. Big cities had true palaces. And Arkansas had some much grander movie houses than the ones I remember.
Maybe you have memories, too, of rowdy matinees and, later, of venturesome date nights in places that seem better and better the longer they’re gone.
Memory does a spiffier job than the janitor ever could at cleaning the Nehi orange and Raisinets out of the carpet. Recollection polishes the glass top of the concessions stand to the crystal sheen of a jewelry case, enshrining the affordable Tootsie Rolls, the sugar-encrusted Chuckles, the sure-to-spill Lemonheads.
Even better, memory is a uniformed usher with a discreet flashlight, leading you down the aisle to the softest seat in the house, seeing to it that nobody taller sits in front of you.
The more pint-sized youwere, the more likely your idea of a movie was the back of somebody’s head. Now and then, you caught a thrilling movement of something to the far side of the screen, like a fish that might have jumped. You learned to imagine.
I imagine there were more exciting movie houses than the ones I remember, but I don’t believe it.
DOWN THE DARK AISLE
The Fox was North Platte’s most ornate. It felt like a visit to some rich relative’s home, where your manners were apt to be corrected. The Fox showed movies about people who talked too much - movies about women who stared off with sad looks, and men who didn’t know what to do about it.
But the first movie I remember seeing, Bambi, was at the Fox. Crying over the death of Bambi’s mother, I turned to my own for comfort. She knew just how to ease the trauma: Flicks chocolates that came in a cardboard tube wrapped in blue foil.
If you remember Flicks at the movies, then you probably had a favorite color of foil wrap - red, green, gold. Mine is blue, and I’ve liked blue ever since.
The State was on the hardscrabble side of the railroadtracks, a dingy and disreputable den - so bad that people were afraid of the popcorn. It showed such cut-rate fare as The Giant Claw (1957), an amazing picture.
The producers couldn’t afford much when it came to the hideous bird of prey that was supposed to terrify leading man Jeff Morrow. They had to settle for a dangling marionette that looked like a bug-eyed buzzard with a failed comb-over.
Morrow claimed to have been the most embarrassed man on earth. But the title actually belonged to my manof-few-words grandfather, who took me to see the spectacle of this (proclaimed on the poster) “winged monster from 17,000,000 B.C.”
“Say, Gran’dad,” I hollered at first sight of primordial terror, according to family legend, “how’d’ja like to fightthat ol’ rooster?”
Saturday afternoons, I lived at the Paramount. It showed 10-cent matinees of bloodand-thunder serials and Little Rascals marathons that were crackling old even then. The melees were announced in newspaper ads that pictured clowns and balloons - and shouted, “HEY, KIDS!”
Here it is, The Paramount, in a photo book of the town’s history (North Platte: City Between the Rivers, ArcadiaPublishing). And, wow! - the real thing looks even more incredible than I remember, the marquee lighted to a blinding declaration of marvels.
Now showing in the photo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida on a typically something-for-everybody double bill with a low-budget Western, Dragoon Wells Massacre with Barry Sullivan and Dennis O’Keefe.
Guess which movie I’d have skipped, much preferring to dig through the boxes of comic books in the sweet smell of the movie theater’s adjoining attraction, Kenney’s Karmelcorn - and which would have dragooned me.
THAT’S ALL, FOLKS
The Paramount is gone like so much trail dust - the tower of blazing neon letters torn down, never again to illuminate the whole block. The State, you’d have to know where it used to be, and there’s no reason to look. The Fox, respectable to the end, is home to the community playhouse.
And your town? - probably a lot the same story.
See you at the movies, as they used to say - best of all, the ones that show in stunning widescreen and lifelike Technicolor on the insides of your eyelids.
Style, Pages 50 on 02/20/2011