In the dark of the movie theater, a significant moment has come. Across the screen comes action that I have seen before, some three hours ago. It's time to leave.
I lean over and whisper to my companions: “This is where we came in.” So we stand up, and shuffle past the other kids who are sitting between us and the aisle, perhaps spilling some of their popcorn on our way out.
As Roger Angell observes in his new memoir Let Me Finish, the phrase “This is where we came in” has dropped out of use long since. People no longer arrive in the middle of a film. Almost everyone takes pains to show up at the time when the film starts, if not earlier for the previews.
Angell adds: “Walking into the middle of movies was the common American thing during the double-feature era, and if one stayed the course, only minimal mental splicing was required to reconnect the characters and the plot of the initial feature when it rolled around again.”
Looking back, I feel astounded that we did not care about getting to movies at the beginning. How could we feel content with watching them from some mid-point to the end, and then from the beginning to the middle? It now seems nonsensical even if, as the memoirist recalls, the mental splicing demanded no great effort.
But, if nothing else, it meant that people were coming in and searching for seats in the dark, with the fuss that usually entails. Even then, I did not like kids crawling over me just as the tough guy with the gun was forcing bank employees to open the vault.
From the vantage point of six or seven decades later, I suspect the practice reflected the mentality of us moviegoers. It was not merely an ingrained habit to arrive at any old time. Rather, we did not look on movies as art but rather as simple entertainment, served to an American public that loved Hollywood stars with all their glamour and allure.
This habit of untimed arrivals also says something about the kind of movies Hollywood was making when I was a boy. Often, they were B films, those that a studio would turn out quickly without investing much money. They were meant to fill out the double bill and keep you in the theatre for a while longer.
However little went into them, I used to enjoy these potboilers, the equivalent of cheap novels. Commonly, the ones I saw revolved around crime and featured the low life of gangsters, their loves and their rise and fall. The actors I remember in films of this genre ─ Jimmy Cagney, John Garfield, and Humphrey Bogart ─ turned out to be more talented than I knew, as their work in other films would demonstrate.
The second-rate films also had the virtue of being short. In those days you would not have to sit through productions that lasted two and a half hours. Predictable they may have been, but you could be confident they would lead from a beginning and move toward a middle and a reasonably timely end.
Of course, there was a second movie that, combined with the other one, would mean a total of three hours or so of viewing time. Two for one seemed like a bargain: for your 15 cents, you could take in a lot of worlds different from your own.
The main feature I frequently found less interesting than its accompanying film, however minor-league the quality of the latter. In the principal films, I remember interminable love scenes with Bette Davis and other stars whose prolonged kissing or teary confrontations with lovers would thoroughly bore me. When would the real action begin?
Nowadays film connoisseurs have a higher regard for the films of the 30s and 40s than I would ever have expected. They often admire productions that seemed to me at the time of their release to be just ordinary.
Of course, during my boyhood, I had only a vague concept of how a film was made. I did not realize how much technique went into the fashioning of movies, nor did I know of the talents required to direct a good film. And watching them from some mid-point till their end could not have helped me to appreciate them.
I regret that so many of my current age peers have given up going to the movies. (Less than one-quarter of the audiences last year were over age 50.) The many fine films I continue to see offer to those of us who see them both imaginative stimulation and new angles on the world. As fodder for conversation they also strengthen bonds with other people, especially the younger generations.
It’s been a long time since I last whispered “This is where we came in.” Beginning to end suits me a whole lot better.
Richard Griffin