I READ John Podhoretz’s “Multiplex Blues,” his amusing account of the difference between the broken-down theaters of his early moviegoing days in the 1970s and the plush multiplexes and cineplexes in which the inferior flicks of today are shown, with the smug smile of the man with history on his side. The theaters with sprung seats, gum on the floors, and sad concession stands of Podhoretz’s youth were earlier the dazzling movie palaces of my own boyhood. The great difference between youthful moviegoing in the 1970s and in my day is that I grew up in an America that still had a unified popular culture, not then so divided as now between things produced for specific audience generations: children, youth, grown-ups. Rock ‘n’ roll may have been the watershed. After the advent of Elvis and following him the Beatles, the country divided between the young who wanted to stay young forever and those who thought adulthood not really so bad a deal. Although there were childish entertainments when I was growing up in the late forties and early fifties–comic books, after-school and Saturday-morning radio shows, Disney and Lassie movies–most children partook of the same popular culture as their parents. Particularly was this so in the movies. Censorship was strict–in the movies, even married couples were allowed no closer intimacy than twin beds. Ratings were nonexistent because they were not needed. In those days, one generally went to the movies without even inquiring about what was playing. In the era before air conditioning in private residences, one was sometimes taken by one’s parents to escape steamy summer nights. Moviegoing was so much part of big city life that, when I was a boy, there were no fewer than seven movie theaters within walking distance of our apartment. Most of them showed double features–two full-length movies–with a cartoon or two, a newsreel, and coming attractions thrown in at no extra charge. In a child’s version of a long day’s journey into night, we walked into a movie theater on bright, cold Saturday afternoons at 1:00 and emerged from it into the dark at 5:30. The largest of the movie theaters in our neighborhood was The Granada. Other grandiloquently named theaters in the Chicago of those days were the Riviera, the Oriental, the Tivoli, the Alhambra. The names were meant to suggest the promise of exotic adventure to be found within. A small, nearby theater was called The 400, and must have taken its name from Ward McAllister’s socialite 400, which derived from the exact number of people who could be fitted into Mrs. Vanderbilt’s ballroom in her Fifth Avenue mansion. There must once have been exactly 400 seats in the theater, which has since been broken up into four mini-theaters and is now called, rather prosaically, The Village North. As for the Granada, perhaps only the tsar would have felt at home there. Its sumptuous lobby ended with a magnificent red carpeted staircase that led to its immense balcony. Marble was everywhere. So were enormous paintings of unidentified nobility. Ushers dressed with care as if cadets in some unknown but aristocratic regiment. The men’s room was so large it gave off an echo. The cheapest children’s admission ticket I can remember was 10 cents at the small Coed Theater on Morse Avenue. Elsewhere tickets were 15 and 20 cents. Candy was a nickel–I had a serious weakness for tooth-destroying Jujyfruits–a box of popcorn cost a dime, 15 cents if one were so flush as to be able to afford extra butter. I was given 35 cents to go to the movies, and never seemed to require more. Downtown, the Chicago and Oriental Theaters charged 50 cents, but they offered stage shows, a last carry-over from vaudeville. Alternating with the movie, there were circus acts–trained dogs, jugglers, acrobats–and a headliner, usually a popular singer. On the stage of the Chicago Theater, I heard Nat “King” Cole, Dinah Washington, the Four Aces, Johnnie Ray, and Frankie Laine, the latter singing “Mule Train.” The best age to watch movies is undoubtedly one’s childhood, before either critical intelligence or cultural snobbery kicks in. I cannot remember any flicks from my early moviegoing days that I disliked, though I did have a mild antipathy to the overly romantic. I particularly enjoyed a lengthy sword fight, usually conducted up and down a marble staircase or near the edge of a cliff, especially one in which Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Cornel Wilde fought Basil Rathbone, George Macready, or some other pure type of the villain. In those days, Danny Kaye’s movies probably gave me more pure pleasure than any others. I have tried to rewatch them as an adult, but it has been no go. The magic they once brought is lost, gone forever, with the astonishing popcorn palaces in which I first saw them. -Joseph Epstein
