Classics

Classics

My mother and I shared a hobby that helped to shape my moral character as well as entertain us. We both loved classic movies. My “growing up” years were before commercial cable television, but fortunately vintage films had been acquired by television, to be watched either daily or weekly. By the 1970s one station in Boston offered classics as regular evening fare from 8:00-10:00 p.m. Public Broadcasting assumed the role on weekends. There was a cinema near us that specialized in the “oldies,” as well, so rarely were we bereft of film opportunities.
I can divide the decades of my early life by my growing awareness of the films’ messages. Mom grew up during American films’ “Golden Age,” when she and friends or a date went to movies at least twice a week for double features, plus cartoons and news reels. Her absolute, all-time favorite was Rebecca, and I remember the first time that I watched it with her on television. Mom was as engrossed as she must have been the first, second, tenth(?) times that she saw it, and although “running commentary” on a movie in progress was severely discouraged, she broke her own rule for Rebecca. One of her favorite segments was the announcement of the couple’s pending marriage, during which Mom grinned as broadly as she could. Another was the “declaration” scene that I won’t describe because it is a pivotal point in the story, but Mom added a triumphant “AHA!” to the proceedings. Alas, since I was about eleven and it was a school night, I had to go to bed before the ending. Not to worry about missing out, however. The next morning Mom filled me in on the details with the precision and joy of the true movie maven.
Two tales of morality came from The Slender Thread, about the attempts of a volunteer at a crisis line keeps a woman who is suicidal on the phone during the lengthy tracking process (“You see, she feels that everyone’s leaving her,” she remarked to herself and me during one of the scenes in flashback), and To Kill A Mockingbird. Mom identified with the setting of the latter because she had spent some of the early years of her marriage in a rural town in the South. Her in-laws’ front porch was very similar to the Finches, including a porch swing. Mom and I shared an intolerance of injustice, but hers was tempered with first-hand knowledge of the structure of those towns, a decade or so after the time of Harper Lee’s classic story. My mother, whose married name was Betty Davis – with a “y,” not an “e,” – managed to impart a good bit of sociology to eight-year-old me, while skimming over the definitions of “rape” and “incest.”
I think that it was about eight years later when we were watching a musical starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Mom suddenly said, “It’s so nice that you like these movies.” By that time, I was a veteran of countless Saturday afternoon and weeknight viewings of everything from the light and fluffy Top Hat to the severe No Way Out. “Oh, yes,” I laughed. “I was raised on them.”
Years passed, and Mom was in a nursing home. My sister, brother and I kept her supplied with videotapes of classic movies and television programs that we hoped provided her with some diversion. Then, as before, our mother had her favorite film. One day my sister and I asked her what she had watched recently. Mary, Mom’s caretaker and friend, who usually was the soul of cheerfulness and accommodation, said with an aspect of woe,
“Yesterday we watched Rebecca – three times!”
Mom responded with the wide, gleeful grin of decades past.