It was a pretty big deal when my parents would go out on a date. My Pop was a man's man and would generally go out with the boys, but one night my mom got her way and the two of them headed out for dinner and a movie. I have no idea where they dined but I do remember the talks they had about the movie they watched the next morning. Bonnie and Clyde. I know for certain that that film made an impression on my mom, and not necessarily in a good way. I think big studio movies changed for her that night. I believe they did for the rest of America as well.
That was 1968. Flash forward to 1971. I was a gawky, slighty overweight boy, all too caught up in girls and having much too hard of a time leaving behind the joys of boyhood. I still had a sizeable arsenal of plastic weaponry and toy soldiers up in our attic, a sanctuary for those times when I wanted to get away from bickering parents and a pesky, much too young to play with brother. It was an area of the house that was much too hot in the summer and all too cold for comfort in the winter, a unwelcoming space that nobody bothered with but me. I had an old television set up there that I would use to watch PBS and old movies. Old movies were a favorite escape, and I would use them as basis for knowledge about the world, no matter how skewed or inaccurate the information was.
Accurate information was hard to come by in those days, even if you went to an "authentic" news source. In my home the world was definitely skewed to the right, not too hard to believe considering that I grew up in the county where the John Birch Society was born. But that arch conservatism flew in the face of what we openly embraced on the left. We were slap happy for outlaws, for the counterculture, for all things wicked and deviant and strange. We were dealing with an unpopular war overseas and in turn we found ourselves at war with ourselves and each other. Culturally all the norms were turned inside out. The Orange County Register, Life magazine and CBS news brought that uneasy and beautifully strange world to my home every day: Altamont, Patty Hearst, Easy Rider, marijuana, the siege at Disneyland. That the world was changing rang in loud and clear in my conservative household. I didn't know at the time how close I stood to the flame or how soon it would be before I was touched hard by it.
I know that I was a good kid. I had seen my share of old Warner Brothers gangster films and knew the fate that awaited bad guys, watched old Westerns and knew the role of the black hat in cinema, but never had a seen a movie that took the outlaw's stance and made it a good thing. I don't know if I was truly ready for that kind of break from reality at thirteen, but what the hell did I know about a good thing? I was a Catholic school boy, a goodie two shoes that didn't swear or smoke or drink. If Bonnie and Clyde blew my mom's mind, we can safely say that that movie turned my world and what I knew about it on it's ear.
So that fabled day when I jumped from one dimension to another finally arrived. It was fall, early winter of my eighth grade year. It was just another Saturday afternoon. All my pals were busy and I wanted to go to the movies. I took a bus downtown to catch a double feature at the West Coast theater. That in itself wasn't remarkable, it was the double bill that I was slated to watch that day that should have spelled trouble if someone had bothered to ask me what I planned on seeing. I had no idea what to think of the double bill I was about to watch other than it looked exciting. Boy howdy. Bonnie and Clyde. Bullitt. Both contained cinema moments that changed the way that I looked at film forever. Balletic violence. Outrageous groundbreaking car chases. Raw language. Permissive morals or a total lack thereof. Bloodshed, mayhem, oh my.
I don't think that I came home and prayed or went to church and took in confession. I think that afterwards, after the shine and fever of all that cinematic wildness went out of my eyes, after that glazed weekend passed where I could not think of anything else but those movies, that I went down to the local branch library and started reading everything I could get my hands one about the gangsters of the 30's. I am sure that I was a changed boy at that point. It was the turning point of my life, cinema wise, and baby, I've never looked back.
It saddens me to think that most of those old movie palaces that I loved as a boy are gone now. It bums me out to see that most movie houses have abandoned the double feature. But if I ever want to remind myself what it was like to break the bounds of boyhood and straddle the chasm between youth and young adulthood, I'll set up those two flicks for an evening's viewing. Just watching Steve McQueen squint and mumble his way through Bullitt the other night was a reminder that many things have passed, but that cinema touchstones never go away.
Action!
Filmography: Peter Yates:
http://www.allmovie.com/artist/peter-yates-117576
Fox Fullerton:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Theatre_(Fullerton,_California)
A review of the status of old Orange County film palaces:
http://www.fromscripttodvd.com/70mm_in_orange_county_theatres.htm
Cinema Treasures link:
http://cinematreasures.org/chain/116/
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