NitrateVille.com

I'm writing a piece for a website (Classicflix) on how vintage films are remembered by folks who saw them when they came out. Therefore I'm seeking any first-hand memories of film-goers who remember their earliest film favorites. I'm most specifically interested in the 20s-early 40s vintage films. When I've interviewed people in person, I've phrased it as, 'What is your earliest memory of being impressed with a film or a film star?'
If you care to share a memory, you can expand on your impressions of the film or personality, and, if you care to, indicate the age you were when you first saw them.
I plan on using any comments anonymously (except in the case of my grandmother, who years ago told me about attending Birth of a Nation in 1915. She also attended Grinnell College when Gary Cooper attended and had vivid memories of watching him cross campus.)

What an interesting project! My mother recalled watching silent movies in the 1920s, often at the Hamilton Theater in Upper Manhattan. Also movies in the '30s, such as TOP HAT at Radio City Music Hall. I'm glad I asked her about that before she passed away in 2005. Sometimes the movies during the silent days were accompanied by live shows. One movie was interrupted by the manager, who announced that Lindbergh had landed in Paris! Unfortunately my mother didn't recall the movie that was interrupted!

Good luck with that project. I would suggest attending as many silent film screenings as possible. I was at a screening of either Annie Laurie or The Four Horsemen (can't remember which) back in the early 90s, and there was an old woman there who saw it when it first came out. Unfortunately I don't remember if she shared anything about it.

One possible roadblock to such a project is the unreliability of their memories. Kevin Brownlow interviewed a ton of silent stars back in the 60s and 70s and found that some were not much help and some had inaccurate recollections. This just got me thinking about something. Has there ever been an effort to take silent film, or early talkies to assisted living (formerly called old folks homes) for screenings? Not cost effective I'm guessing, but....

In the early 90s, I did a movie night at one of our retirement homes. I showed silents and early talkies and got a few of the residents to share their memories. One Easter I showed DeMille's King of Kings and some of my little audience were in tears.

I acquired my first projector in 1970, and started collecting 8mm films from Blackhawk soon after. On several occasions over the years I screened comedies for friends and relatives, including some of my father’s elderly cousins who had gone to silent movies when they were new. When I showed Tillie’s Punctured Romance everyone recalled Marie Dressler with fondness, but there were expressions of surprise that she’d appeared in silent pictures. (They knew her MGM talkies from the early ‘30s.) A similar thing happened when I showed Pool Sharks, and my audience was surprised to find a very young—and slender—W.C. Fields in a silent short.

We talked about the movies from those days, too. When I mentioned a Keystone comedy featuring a race car driver named Barney Oldfield, one of Dad’s cousins was surprised: he said that as a boy he’d seen Oldfield race in person, at the San Diego Exposition of 1915. I replied that I’d enjoyed a comedy filmed at that fair starring Fatty Arbuckle. But the mention of Arbuckle’s name seemed to sour the mood. This same cousin exclaimed “Oh, he was a bad egg!” and added that some people get away with murder. When I suggested that Arbuckle might have been railroaded (a notion I'd picked up from Rudi Blesh's Keaton bio), he got mad and dismissed me with: “What do you know about it? You weren’t even born!” Which is true. Then again, he wasn’t invited to Arbuckle’s party, so perhaps he was bitter.

Although my father enjoyed going to live theatre more than going to the pictures, he nevertheless used to recall some experiences on request.

Amongst some of the things he said, I recall that if the picture was a dud, he would simply put his head back, close his eyes and listen to the orchestra. It appears that he thought very highly of the orchestras that used to accompany the pictures in his hometown city.

Rudolf Valentino - called "Rhubarb Vaselino" was considered a joke by most men and they generally had a good laugh at his pictures. The only pretext for having to attend a screening was due to the woman they were going out with. Likewise Douglas Fairbanks was the butt of many a joke with all the overdone athletics in his films. My father's interest was, naturally, more towards the ladies on the screen and he liked Wilma Banky, Greta Garbo and Clara Bow.

Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were right up there for laughs and if I asked him what his favourite silent pictures were, he couldn't narrow it down but he did mention "The Big Parade", "The KId", "Wings" and "The Lost World" as pictures that impressed him at the time.

He said that when talkies first started, he didn't much care for them. A few of the cinemas had the sound on record system and there were often problems with loss of synchronisation. He also said that in those huge cinemas, the equipment must have not been up to it as the sound sounded quite tinny or muffled at times. He also remembered that one of the very early newsreels featured the Italian dictator Mussolini, who was greeted with a number of "appropriate epithets" loudly voiced from male members of the audience.

Hope the above can give you one slant on the proceedings.

Donald Binks wrote:He also remembered that one of the very early newsreels featured the Italian dictator Mussolini, who was greeted with a number of "appropriate epithets" loudly voiced from male members of the audience.

In Australia, this was not only very early, it was the earliest. Two sound programs debuted in Australia in the same week via competing distributors: Union Theatres had The Jazz Singer, and Hoyts had Dolores del Rio in the synchronised The Red Dance, with the Mussolini newsreel in support. Your pa would have seen it at the Regent.

I was fortunate to have a great-uncle (born 1918 and no longer with us) who was not only a film buff but a formidable memoirist. By coincidence, I was reading some of his recollections of his filmgoing only yesterday. Here is just one small excerpt:

"In 1925 our family moved to Rawson St Haberfield, which was a very short distance from the Elite Theatre in Ramsey Rd. We children attended the Saturday matinees every week, the admission price for kids being threepence. You can imagine the surprise and distress of many kids to turn up one day to find the entrance fee was now sixpence. Some of the kids were crying, but I ran home to tell Dad the sad news, and to get another shilling …

Long before the advent of air conditioning, the theatre (or picture show as we called it) had a high ceiling and roller shutter blinds set high on the walls, which were opened to let the air in on hot days and nights. At interval the lolly boys did a roaring trade with their trays loaded with sweets and ice creams. These delights were beyond the finances of the Wilkins kids, but we made sure we got something that would last, so we spent our Saturday pennies on Penny Curls, a chocolate covered caramel confection ….

I can't count just how many thousands of movies I have seen, but some I remember well. One was 'The Iron Horse' with George O'Brien, another 'The Volga Boatman' with William Boyd, many years before he became famous as Hopalong Cassidy. Usually just after interval, the serial would come on to shouts and screams from the kids, and much kicking of the seat backs."

There is plenty more. For those who are interested, the author was the son of Margaret Higgins, authoress of the 1916 Film Diary. It runs in the family!

Dave, here are two (second-hand, of course):

- When I upgraded from Super8 Silent to Super8 Sound, one of my first purchases was Castle Film's 200' FRANKENSTEIN. I screened it for my cousins at my Grandma's house (this would be about 1972-73?) Grandma came upstairs to watch, with her mother, who just happened to be visiting from Michigan. After, both regaled us with their memory of seeing the film first-run, in 1931 Defiance, Ohio! Grandma had been twelve years old then, and so went with her mother - and both recalled being well and truly terrified by Karloff's work. (For the record, neither were fans of the horror genre per se, and my screening was likely only their second ever of the film.)

- Knowing that I dabbled in film, an elderly member (80s) of my church congregation asked me to help catalog and combine some old 16mm shorts that he had. This would be just a few years after the screening I mentioned above. His films were mainly home movies, as well as one or two locally produced commercials for hometown stores, and regional newsreels, all dating from the '20s. As we worked, he told me that he was an avid filmgoer as a boy. He fondly recalled seeing all of the major Fairbanks films upon first release, but he seemed to enjoy serials even more. 1919's THE LIGHTNING RAIDER was his very fave.

-Craig

My 91 year old aunt often talks about how thrilling Lon Chaney's "Thunder" was when she saw it in Los Angeles in '29 or '30. She still hopes somebody will turn up a print somewhere.

-Martin

When people of my parents' generation learned I was interested in old movies, they would often recall films they'd like to see again. The two films that most often came up--at least a half dozen times--were JUST IMAGINE, remembered for El Brendel's line, "Give me the good old days," and Harold Lloyd's THE CAT'S PAW--which must have seemed quite fresh at the time. THE GREAT DICTATOR was another film that piqued nostalgia, with people remembering how gut-bustingly funny it was. The Newsreel footage of Hitler, also being shown at the time, made the images of Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel all the more hilarious.

Thanks to all who posted -- got my piece written & finished.