When senior citizens (I like the phrase 'seasoned citizens') remember the movies of their youth, they focus on the dime it cost to enter the dream palace.

I've been quizzing my elders about their movie memories since the late 60s, when the one o'clock matinee movie on TV got me hooked on the black and white era. Here are some of the stories they told me.

One man who grew up in Lima, Ohio, in the Depression, told me how he saw three shows for fifteen cents. 'On Saturday, I'd be at the Lyric Theater by 10 a.m., pay my dime, and they'd give the early birds a free ticket to another movie house owned by the same man. After the second show, I'd go to the nickel theater. Five cents to see a second run movie.' His allowance was a quarter. 'That left me ten cents to buy something to eat on the way home.'

Memories of the Teens

My grandmother grew up in Newton, Iowa, at the turn of the century. Its first movie house, in the one- and two-reeler days, was a storefront operation called The Electric Theater. By the time she entered high school, Newton had several conventional movie houses. She remembered The Birth of a Nation, which her father took her to see, with its admission price of .50, as an historic occasion. Cinema, the piffle and the afternoon's diversion, was an art form and could attain the status of the legitimate stage.

In high school, she was friends with a girl whose father owned a theater. The two girls would watch the end of the matinee feature on their way home from school. It fascinates me to think of the untold reels of now-lost films she must have seen this way. She remembers Theda Bara's bizarre appeal. Theda was not the sort of woman you would see on the sidewalks of Newton, Iowa. She remembered the buildup of Valentino as Hollywood's Latin lover.

She also had a real-life encounter with future Hollywood royalty. She attended Grinnell College when Gary Cooper was there (1922-24). He's there in one of her yearbooks. She remembers him well. 'When that man crossed the campus, every girl was watching him.' I teasingly asked her why she hadn't befriended him. 'Gary Cooper wouldn't have looked twice at a plain country girl like me.'

About twenty years ago I had a delightful chat with a lady in her late eighties. She had lucid memories of her youth, and I naturally asked her who her favorite film star had been. She answered without hesitating: 'Bert Lytell! You don't know who that is, do you?' I knew the name, but I wasn't sure I'd ever seen him. To this day, I've seen only one Lytell performance, and it's his supporting role in the Ronald Colman version of Lady Windermere's Fan (1925). Lytell (1888-1954) is a forgotten star, yet here was his loyal fan, pronouncing his name wistfully, like that of a much loved friend of her youth. Lytell was big box office in the late teens and early 20's, a debonair figure who did equally well in comedy, romance, and adventure. He played gentlemen thieves in such roles as the Lone Wolf, Jimmy Valentine, and Boston Blackie. He made a few pictures in the early sound period and did some TV work late in his life. Today it is next to impossible to see his output. Most of what survives is in archives. Classicflix has one Bert Lytell picture, and it's Along Came Love (1936), his one credit as director.

Memories of the Twenties

Back in 1972, I caught a special screening of 7th Heaven (1927), with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. It was the first silent romance I saw, and I was knocked out. The lush photography, the Fox Movietone score, and the full-on assault of the tear ducts were irresistible. Months later I mentioned the film to a friend's elderly parents. They were astounded that I knew about the film, and furthermore that I loved it. It had been 45 years since they'd seen it together -- they knew it as a date picture! The husband spontaneously sang the complete melody to 'Diane,' the picture's love theme.

Nearly everyone who was a child in the 20's and early 30's remembers Tom Mix. Men and women have told me they never missed a chance to see Mix. Those dimes added up. Mix's westerns made millions and kept Fox Films solvent. By some accounts, Mix was the best-paid actor in Hollywood in the 20's, earning 0,000 a week at his peak.

Most of Tom's films are five-reel westerns. It was an over-subscribed genre, and Mix beat the competition with his dashing, compact acting style and stuntwork. Mix pictures moved. Classicflix has a nice selection of his work, including Sky High (1922), which was shot in Grand Canyon, Just Tony (1922), starring Mix's horse, and The Miracle Rider (1935), the serial with which Mix closed his film career.


Bob Steele, Hoot Gibson, and later cowboy stars such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers are remembered fondly, but none of them budge Tom Mix off his eminence as the greatest screen cowboy of all.

Memories of the Thirties and Forties

Everyone remembers the serials. They could be westerns, jungle thrillers, stories about moon men or mad scientists, and they brought the kids back to the theater every Saturday for a 12-week run. 'Boy, you didn't miss one chapter,' one man told me. 'And you thought about it all week long. If you had to miss one, your friends could tell you what happened, but it wasn't the same as seeing it. They'd end each chapter with someone hanging off of a biplane or a car going off a cliff.'

I have my mother's movie star scrapbook, so I know the stars she idolized. Her mother took her to all the Shirley Temple vehicles, once telling her, 'I want you to see Shirley Temple, because she's going to be in the history books someday.' My mother liked Shirley, but she got a much bigger kick out of Jane Withers, who played what the New York Times called 'Public Problem Child No. 1.'

Withers was an outsize talent from the start of her career. Not all of her vehicles have come out of the vaults, but Classicflix has such titles as Little Miss Nobody (1936), Rascals (1938), with Withers living in a gypsy camp, and High School (1940). Jane Withers virtually invented the screen image of the bratty child. She's a treasure.

My mother clipped fan magazine photos of Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor, the major dreamboats of the late 30's, but she was too young to see their pictures. She got permission to see Bobby Breen, and Breen became her big crush. Breen is something to see. A slim, curly-haired youngster who started on Eddie Cantor's radio show; he had a star career from age 8 to 12, pegged on his pure tenor-to-soprano vocals. Breen pictures aren't screened much today, even on TCM, which has broadcast rights to his RKO releases. They are sentimental films, to say the least. For a few years, Breen was a preteen idol. A Bieber for the 30's. Classicflix has four of Bobby's features: Let's Sing Again (1936), Make a Wish (1937), Way Down South (1939), and Fisherman's Wharf (1939).

Going to the movies was a weekly experience for many families in the 30's. If you were doing better than average, you went twice a week, because many neighborhood theaters changed their show midweek. One man told me about the movie-going experience in the hamlet of Grand Mound, Iowa. Without a regular movie house in town, the merchants stretched a sheet between two stores and ran free movies for the kids so their parents could do their Saturday shopping in leisure.

One man remembered being electrified by a new kind of actor in Humphrey Bogart when The Maltese Falcon opened in 1941. Here was an actor with a defining attitude, unlike anyone else on the screen. 'He thought about every line he had in the script and came up with a special way to say it.'

A woman who had vivid impressions of Tom Mix and the serials told me her biggest movie thrill was the newsreel footage of World War II. 'It didn't scare me at all. We'd go home and play Allies Versus the Nazis with all the neighborhood kids.'

Postscript

I met a woman over Christmas in 2014 who had just celebrated her 98th birthday. Born in 1916! I had to know what she remembered of Pickford, Swanson, Gaynor, and Colleen Moore. She cautioned me that she had very few memories of the movies. She'd grown up in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania, a company town with no theater. 'But you did go to the movies sometimes?' I asked. 'Only when we knew someone with a car who could take us to a bigger town.'

'So, then did you have a favorite star?' I could have fallen down when she answered, 'The Three Stooges!' I am a Stoogephile myself, so it was easy to share impressions of Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, and Doctor Howard with her. And why shouldn't she get the biggest kick out of the Stooges? The movies have given us a century of memories, from sublime to pulse-pounding to ridiculous.