As we look forward to a day of programming from TCM in which Mildred Pierce and I Remember Mama both play as a nod to Mother’s Day (what, no Stella Dallas?!), I look back to the programming that made its way into my head every day throughout my youth, programming of the old school kind. The kind that came from my mom. You see, while my dad was a great guy who enjoyed movies to the extent that anyone on earth enjoys movies, my mom really loved the cinema and it was her early influence on me that guided me towards my own love of cinema and where I am today.
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Starting with tv shows, I knew my mom was different than other moms. Other moms of the sixties and seventies that I met, the moms of my friends, liked serious late night dramas, sitcoms, and soap operas. Standard fare. My mom loved Wild, Wild West and Star Trek. In fact, the first one, Wild, Wild West was her favorite show of all time. Ask her, anytime, anywhere, and that would be her answer: Wild, Wild West. And so I watched it, too. And her love of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone led me to a preference for the science fiction/paranormal/supernatural side of things. There was something about my mom’s taste in television that seemed far more attuned to that of a teenage boy than a thirty something woman. I saw all of these shows in syndication while she saw them first run but I connected with her on them nonetheless. I could actually make references to these shows, to Artemus Gordon, and my mom would get it. Nobody else’s mom could do that. And we watched sci-fi movies together, like The Andromeda Strain and Silent Running. And whenever Planet of the Apes was on, we watched it. But she also liked thrillers.
It was early on in my obsession with the cinema that she gradually relayed stories of her own experiences of seeing classic movies in the theater that she loved. They were invariably of the thriller variety. One of her favorite movies ever was Diabolique. When VCRs and video stores finally became a thing in the early eighties, and you could finally see movies without having to wait for your local PBS station to show them, Diabolique was one of the first movies I sought out. When I finally found a video store that had it and got to see it, I wasn’t disappointed. That’s when my mom told me about her and her friend seeing it in the theater and how both of them grabbed each other’s hand and screamed when the supposed corpse of Michel (Paul Meurisse) slowly arose from the tub. Years later, when Turner Classic Movies assigned me Diabolique to write up for its Essentials Series, I was honored and overjoyed.
And as my friends’ moms were taking them to see live action and animated kiddie movies, my mom was taking me to see Jaws. Two years later I saw Star Wars with a bunch of my friends three times but I saw it two other times with my mom, who wanted to go back within a week of seeing it the first time. That’s the kind of mom I had, one that were she still going to the movies now would be just as interested in the comic book stuff as the awards season movies. I still remember, with surprise, even though I shouldn’t have been given all the evidence before me, how much she liked The Road Warrior.
But if that’s all it were she wouldn’t have been the influence she was and is. She also loved Barry Lyndon without condition and, as a result, made me watch it after we got cable and I immediately fell in love. We even watched it one time at our house with a friend of the family who was a music professor and he talked to us, as if in a film class where you study a film frame by frame, about how Stanley Kubrick had done an immense job of making the film in a way that flowed musically, meticulously building its rhythms and uses alternating meters. The dual scene was, to him, a master class in film as orchestral performance, with Kubrick as the conductor.
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My mom, unfortunately for her love of film, was surrounded by people who weren’t anywhere near the same level as she was in their appreciation of film. I heard endlessly about how she got my dad and another couple to go see Nashville, a movie that after experiencing Robert Altman’s previous great works MASH and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, she was dying to see. The problem was, she was the only one who liked it. And they let her know it throughout the film, pretty much ruining the experience for her. When I saw it later on cable, I told her it was great and I was sorry she had to see with people, including my beloved dad, who didn’t appreciate it. Robert Altman never did very well with, um, how do I put this? The average moviegoer. My mom wasn’t the average moviegoer.
If my mom had one blind spot with the cinema it was with the movies of the forties and before. She just wasn’t big on old Hollywood. She really started to see movies in the fifties and it was that period on that she really liked. Oh, she had favorites from the earlier decades, like Rebecca, a movie she loved, but most of her favorites came later, especially once the ratings system came in and you could finally have sex, violence, and adult language. When movies like The French Connection hit the screen, she was in heaven. It was that kind of gritty, hard-boiled movie she’d been waiting for.
My mom gave me more understanding and education on the cinema than any other person in my family. I watched movies with my dad but they were always more on the fluff side. My dad liked movies that had dumb comedy and lots of gunfire. He was a great guy, but cinematically, we didn’t really connect. I saw tons of movies in the theater with my brother and had some great experiences. My sister and I have also shared some good movie experiences and she definitely has a preference to one of my favorite genres, horror, which is never a bad thing. But my mom did more. She took me to the movies, and not just Jaws and Star Wars. She took me to a revival showing double feature of Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space, complete with 3-D red/blue glasses. And I loved it. And, of course, I love her. Always have, always will. She did everything a mother is supposed to do for her son but she did something more: She introduced me -I mean, really introduced me – to the movies. It doesn’t get any better than that.