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We live in the world of cable, Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime. Now, with TV streaming, my DVD movie collection gathers dust. Waiting a week for the next installment of a series is forgotten as I now binge-watch every episode on a snowbound weekend. With so much out there, we barely digest the plot or appreciate the characters. Stories blend into each other until nothing stands out. Television today is 300-plus channels spattered onto a world-size canvas.
That canvas, when I was a boy, was the size of a bed sheet – in fact it was a bed sheet, stretched between two water pipes. The sound came from a single speaker directly under the screen.
From the ages of 7 to 17, I was in a Catholic boarding school in a secluded “hill station” in northern India. It was as remote as the moon – no radio, newspapers or magazines. We heard of historic events only when we went home on vacation.
Our isolation from the outside world was why the weekly movie took on an exaggerated importance and we lived for those Saturday evenings when the whole school assembled in the gymnasium for the movie. For two hours-plus, Hollywood and Pinewood Studios transported us out of the confines of our school.
The movies, chosen by the religious order that ran the school, fell into three categories: Westerns, historical dramas and slapstick comedies. If we were fortunate, extra canisters of film were included with the main feature: That meant Mickey Mouse cartoons or sonorous Movietone News.
So immersed were we boys in what was on the screen that we would re-enact the film repeatedly in the following week. The words “virtual reality” had not been invented yet, but in our imaginations we escaped the cramped school confines, defending wagon trains or swordfighting alongside King Arthur and his knights. We walked like Gary Cooper in High Noon – a man doing his duty when those around him would not – our right hand held over the imaginary Colt in the holster. After seeing Stewart Granger in King Solomon’s Mines, we searched for buried treasure in the brush.
With our best friends, we re-enacted Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s antics in Scared Stiff. After seeing Kenneth More play the legless flying ace Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky, I developed a limp for a month. We fell in love with Doris Day when she couldn’t find her son in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. We endlessly argued the merits of Bob Hope in The Paleface over Laurel & Hardy in Air Raid Wardens.
In my memory, nothing learned in class could equal what unfolded on the screen – it was all in VistaVision or CinemaScope. Years later, when I saw the Oscar-winning aircraft carrier movie Top Gun, it didn’t come close to The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Sure, the dog-fighting scenes were better, but Tom Cruise was no William Holden. Or maybe, as silent-movie-star character Norma Desmond remarked in Sunset Boulevard, the movies just got smaller.
The school chose our movies at the beginning of each school year from a catalog – probably by title alone. Sometimes they tied in to the calendar, as holy days meant religious blockbusters such as The Robe or The Ten Commandments. Romantic movies were out, of course, and if onscreen kissing became too passionate, we could count on the film jumping and going blurry. Movies with social messages, such as Judgment at Nuremberg, made us restless. As did long conversations between the actors.
I realize now that it must have been hard to tell movie content from titles alone. A memorable mistake happened one Easter when, after much hype from the school chaplain, the Technicolor epic Solomon and Sheba was shown.
He hadn’t counted on a bare-chested Yul Brynner and partly-clad Gina Lollobrigida in some steamy sex scenes (for 1959). Whenever the camera panned on Lollobrigida's heaving breasts, the Bell & Howell projector developed severe shakiness, causing us all to groan.
Because of the importance of the movie, the most drastic punishment was to be denied going to it. No amount of physical punishment could equal that, for not only would we be deprived of cheering for Glenn Ford in The Fastest Gun Alive or admiring Jack Hawkins’ stiff-upper-lipped tenacity in The Cruel Sea, but we were locked out of the conversation all the next week. So-called friends seemed to take pleasure in saying: “Remember when Abbott and Costello did … Oh, sorry, you don’t.”
By my graduation year, I had tired of cowboys and slapstick and wanted to see movies in which Elvis Presley or Ricky Nelson featured.
But that never happened, as rock stars meant rebellion to the authorities.
My graduation year coincided with the family emigrating to Canada, where we became entranced by the wonders of television. It was grainy black and white and the set could only pull in two channels – CBC and CTV – unless we sent my little brother out to the balcony with the rabbit ears, when we might catch an American station. But you didn’t have to wait for Saturday night to be transported.
Peter Pigott lives in Ottawa.