Movie Memories
Can't remember the first movie I viewed in a movie theatre as a kid growing up in midtown Toronto in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, but it was probably a Martin and Lewis comedy. Or perhaps Abbott and Costello.
It would have been 1947 or '48 (at age five or six) at one of four neighborhood cinemas - the Alhambra, the Midtown, the Metro or the Bloor.
We lived at 759 Euclid Ave. and all four theatres were within walking distance. No Sunday movies in those church and state days, just Mondays through Saturdays, with popular Saturday action serial matinees.
On more adventurous days, it would be a trek to the University theatre on Bloor Street near Bay Street, where the large comfortable seats felt more like thrones.
The pre-television years were paradise for movie fans, with a cartoon, a newsreel and a double bill in quiet, comfortable theatres staffed by uniformed ushers hired to keep the peace and to eject rowdy patrons. Admission was 50 cents and popcorn was a dime.
For a time, my older sister, Gloria, worked at the Alhambra and she would get me in free. After the movies, it would be a free sundae or milkshake at Leggett’s at the northwest corner of Bloor and Bathurst, where another older sister, Carol, worked.
Lucky kid.
Two movies I remember my mother taking me to were A Streetcar Named Desire and Come Back Little Sheba. Those movies left me with lasting images of Marlon Brando in a torn T-shirt screaming "Stella" and Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster arguing a lot in domestic disputes.
In those ancient, pre-TV years, there were two forms of family entertainment:
Sitting in the living room by the radio listening to popular shows like Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen, Red Skelton, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
And the movies.
Then suddenly there was this odd looking box in the local appliance stores that had test patterns and fuzzy black and white comedy shows. It was a mesmerising new toy.
McGrath’s, an appliance store on the south side of Bloor just steps from a house housing the humble beginnings of Honest Ed’s, would leave a black and white TV in the window on after closing hours with the sound cranked up for all to hear.
Vividly remember standing in the snow and cold with a dozen other people watching Gillette’s Friday Night at the Fights risking frostbite to share the new experience.
The first on our block to get a TV was the family of my buddy Morton Posner, two doors up. The Posners were Orthodox Jews so Friday nights and Saturday until dusk were off limits for viewing their TV, but they welcomed Morty’s friends during the rest of the week.
I think Mr. And Mrs. North, with Richard Denning and Barbara Britton as amateur crime solvers, was the first TV show we watched at Morty’s in 1952, sitting on a plastic-covered couch and wide-eyed at the new home entertainment box.
We didn’t get our first TV until the spring of 1953, when my sister Gloria's first $1,000 bond was used to buy a fridge, furniture and a 17-inch TV. I remember coming home from seeing The Robe at a movie theatre and there it was sitting in a corner.
Scheduling was skimpy in the early days of television and the few stations available were usually signing off by midnight. I can remember sneaking downstairs after bedtime to watch the test patterns and then turning off the TV to watch the white dot disappear.
The fascination with television, especially Howdy Doody for the kids and the growing number of radio stars making the transition to television for family viewing, began to take its toll on neighborhood movie theatres.
With more and more people staying home to watch television, movie theatres got creative. In addition to a double bill, cartoon and newsreel, some theatres had live entertainment between the movies. They also put silver dollars in some 10-cent popcorn boxes.
But TV was not a passing fad and as the number of sets in homes escalated, the decline in the number of neighborhood movie theatres took its toll in the late 1950’s and 1960’s.
(Talk about nostalgia, look up the movie ads in any of the Toronto newspapers from the 1940’s and ‘50s, with hundreds of theatres advertising current movies. Few remain, including the Metro and the Midtown - now the Bloor - in our old neighborhood.)
The older I got, the wider the movie theatre experience. My record as a young movie fan was seven theatres in seven days: six consecutive days at neighborhood theatres and the seventh was a Sunday screening of La Strada, an Italian movie starring Anthony Quinn, on College Street in Little Italy. Sunday movies were not allowed in Toronto until the 1970's, so it was a thrill of sorts sitting and watching La Strada on a Sunday. The theatre was flouting the law and bravo to them. No English sub-titles for the movie, so I didn't understand the plot.
One Saturday, I took the streetcar to the Lansdowne theatre, on Lansdowne, just off Bloor Street. While watching the double bill, had to make a big decision: spend my last dime on popcorn, or save it for the streetcar ride back home.
It was a very long walk home, but when I got there tired and hungry, the rest of the family was sitting down to a roast beef dinner. It was a memorable meal.
As a kid, the five minutes before the theatre darkened and the curtain went up were the longest five minutes you could experience.
After Ontario's Sunday closing laws were loosened to allow movies and sports events, Saturday night midnight screenings became popular. I remember falling asleep at the Imperial Theatre on Yonge Street on New Year's Eve - before midnight and the movie arrived.
One by one, my favourite movie theatre haunts began to close.
And somewhere along the way, ushers made their exit from movie theatres; the television generation thought nothing of talking throughout movies; theatres got smaller; people began putting their feet up on the backs of seats; admission and food prices went up.
Enter VCRs. In 1980, paid $1,200 for my first monster Zenith Beta VCR. Rental stores were not allowed at first, so I paid $100 each for Alien and Animal House and welcomed the latest technological breakthrough with open arms.
Being a movie addict paid off. While working at the Toronto Sun, I wrote a video column for 12 years and the studios were most generous in providing screener copies for reviews.
DVDs? Another reason to stay at home to watch favourite movies.
Still have fond memories of my movie theatre days in the Annex and try to get to the Bloor once or twice a year to sit where I sat as a kid.
My favourite new movie source is the Mustang Drive-In in Picton. Discovered it in the summer of 2004. The FM radio sound made such a big difference and I blew a speaker on the first night.
Bought a new and more powerful set of speakers and now try to get to the Mustang most weekends for a double bill during the season. The Mustang - the drive-in's entertaining web site is at http://www.thechequesinthemail.com/mdi/ - takes me back to my teen years at drive-ins in the Toronto area, which are now all but extinct.
Paul and Nancy Peterson were driving by 18 years ago when they noticed a "for sale" sign at the single screen drive-in. They bought the property, saving another drive-in from extinction, and added a second screen to let movie fans know they were in for the long haul.
What motivates me to get me out of the house and drive miles to watch movies is the friendly atmosphere at the Mustang, something you don't get at the huge multi-plex theatres. Paul's comic banter before and between movies is a bonus.
The Petersons are making plans for the 2006 drive-in season, which will mark the drive-in's 50th year. Got a feeling a lot of folks who were teenagers in '56 will be reliving the '50s at the Mustang. Looking forward to next spring.
So veteran Ontario movie fans have it all today: a small but determined group of neighborhood theatres, modern multi-theatre complexes, DVDs, videos, television, computer downloads and a handful of drive-in theatres.
Which brings me to one of my brother Bill’s favourite jokes:
Did you hear about the two guys found frozen to death at a drive-in theatre?
They were waiting to see Closed For The Season.
Ta dum
It would have been 1947 or '48 (at age five or six) at one of four neighborhood cinemas - the Alhambra, the Midtown, the Metro or the Bloor.
We lived at 759 Euclid Ave. and all four theatres were within walking distance. No Sunday movies in those church and state days, just Mondays through Saturdays, with popular Saturday action serial matinees.
On more adventurous days, it would be a trek to the University theatre on Bloor Street near Bay Street, where the large comfortable seats felt more like thrones.
The pre-television years were paradise for movie fans, with a cartoon, a newsreel and a double bill in quiet, comfortable theatres staffed by uniformed ushers hired to keep the peace and to eject rowdy patrons. Admission was 50 cents and popcorn was a dime.
For a time, my older sister, Gloria, worked at the Alhambra and she would get me in free. After the movies, it would be a free sundae or milkshake at Leggett’s at the northwest corner of Bloor and Bathurst, where another older sister, Carol, worked.
Lucky kid.
Two movies I remember my mother taking me to were A Streetcar Named Desire and Come Back Little Sheba. Those movies left me with lasting images of Marlon Brando in a torn T-shirt screaming "Stella" and Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster arguing a lot in domestic disputes.
In those ancient, pre-TV years, there were two forms of family entertainment:
Sitting in the living room by the radio listening to popular shows like Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen, Red Skelton, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
And the movies.
Then suddenly there was this odd looking box in the local appliance stores that had test patterns and fuzzy black and white comedy shows. It was a mesmerising new toy.
McGrath’s, an appliance store on the south side of Bloor just steps from a house housing the humble beginnings of Honest Ed’s, would leave a black and white TV in the window on after closing hours with the sound cranked up for all to hear.
Vividly remember standing in the snow and cold with a dozen other people watching Gillette’s Friday Night at the Fights risking frostbite to share the new experience.
The first on our block to get a TV was the family of my buddy Morton Posner, two doors up. The Posners were Orthodox Jews so Friday nights and Saturday until dusk were off limits for viewing their TV, but they welcomed Morty’s friends during the rest of the week.
I think Mr. And Mrs. North, with Richard Denning and Barbara Britton as amateur crime solvers, was the first TV show we watched at Morty’s in 1952, sitting on a plastic-covered couch and wide-eyed at the new home entertainment box.
We didn’t get our first TV until the spring of 1953, when my sister Gloria's first $1,000 bond was used to buy a fridge, furniture and a 17-inch TV. I remember coming home from seeing The Robe at a movie theatre and there it was sitting in a corner.
Scheduling was skimpy in the early days of television and the few stations available were usually signing off by midnight. I can remember sneaking downstairs after bedtime to watch the test patterns and then turning off the TV to watch the white dot disappear.
The fascination with television, especially Howdy Doody for the kids and the growing number of radio stars making the transition to television for family viewing, began to take its toll on neighborhood movie theatres.
With more and more people staying home to watch television, movie theatres got creative. In addition to a double bill, cartoon and newsreel, some theatres had live entertainment between the movies. They also put silver dollars in some 10-cent popcorn boxes.
But TV was not a passing fad and as the number of sets in homes escalated, the decline in the number of neighborhood movie theatres took its toll in the late 1950’s and 1960’s.
(Talk about nostalgia, look up the movie ads in any of the Toronto newspapers from the 1940’s and ‘50s, with hundreds of theatres advertising current movies. Few remain, including the Metro and the Midtown - now the Bloor - in our old neighborhood.)
The older I got, the wider the movie theatre experience. My record as a young movie fan was seven theatres in seven days: six consecutive days at neighborhood theatres and the seventh was a Sunday screening of La Strada, an Italian movie starring Anthony Quinn, on College Street in Little Italy. Sunday movies were not allowed in Toronto until the 1970's, so it was a thrill of sorts sitting and watching La Strada on a Sunday. The theatre was flouting the law and bravo to them. No English sub-titles for the movie, so I didn't understand the plot.
One Saturday, I took the streetcar to the Lansdowne theatre, on Lansdowne, just off Bloor Street. While watching the double bill, had to make a big decision: spend my last dime on popcorn, or save it for the streetcar ride back home.
It was a very long walk home, but when I got there tired and hungry, the rest of the family was sitting down to a roast beef dinner. It was a memorable meal.
As a kid, the five minutes before the theatre darkened and the curtain went up were the longest five minutes you could experience.
After Ontario's Sunday closing laws were loosened to allow movies and sports events, Saturday night midnight screenings became popular. I remember falling asleep at the Imperial Theatre on Yonge Street on New Year's Eve - before midnight and the movie arrived.
One by one, my favourite movie theatre haunts began to close.
And somewhere along the way, ushers made their exit from movie theatres; the television generation thought nothing of talking throughout movies; theatres got smaller; people began putting their feet up on the backs of seats; admission and food prices went up.
Enter VCRs. In 1980, paid $1,200 for my first monster Zenith Beta VCR. Rental stores were not allowed at first, so I paid $100 each for Alien and Animal House and welcomed the latest technological breakthrough with open arms.
Being a movie addict paid off. While working at the Toronto Sun, I wrote a video column for 12 years and the studios were most generous in providing screener copies for reviews.
DVDs? Another reason to stay at home to watch favourite movies.
Still have fond memories of my movie theatre days in the Annex and try to get to the Bloor once or twice a year to sit where I sat as a kid.
My favourite new movie source is the Mustang Drive-In in Picton. Discovered it in the summer of 2004. The FM radio sound made such a big difference and I blew a speaker on the first night.
Bought a new and more powerful set of speakers and now try to get to the Mustang most weekends for a double bill during the season. The Mustang - the drive-in's entertaining web site is at http://www.thechequesinthemail.com/mdi/ - takes me back to my teen years at drive-ins in the Toronto area, which are now all but extinct.
Paul and Nancy Peterson were driving by 18 years ago when they noticed a "for sale" sign at the single screen drive-in. They bought the property, saving another drive-in from extinction, and added a second screen to let movie fans know they were in for the long haul.
What motivates me to get me out of the house and drive miles to watch movies is the friendly atmosphere at the Mustang, something you don't get at the huge multi-plex theatres. Paul's comic banter before and between movies is a bonus.
The Petersons are making plans for the 2006 drive-in season, which will mark the drive-in's 50th year. Got a feeling a lot of folks who were teenagers in '56 will be reliving the '50s at the Mustang. Looking forward to next spring.
So veteran Ontario movie fans have it all today: a small but determined group of neighborhood theatres, modern multi-theatre complexes, DVDs, videos, television, computer downloads and a handful of drive-in theatres.
Which brings me to one of my brother Bill’s favourite jokes:
Did you hear about the two guys found frozen to death at a drive-in theatre?
They were waiting to see Closed For The Season.
Ta dum
posted by John Cosway at 1:59 AM
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