Home from a screening of Chicago, I was singing “All that jazz” while measuring rice and slicing radishes, punctuating my breathy notes with occasional attempts at syncopated shimmies. The movie had been pure escape, entertainment, a gaudy show, its tantalizingly costumed bodies more lithe and nubile than mine had ever been. But there I was, sassily rocking my posterior and working out my vocal cords while cooking our simple dinner. For two hours during the movie I hadn’t once thought back to Methodist Hospital’s Emergency Room, my husband’s huddled frame bleeding, shivering, in shock. I hadn’t once remembered how long it would be before Steve could drive, let alone run his usual eight daily miles. We’d been close to housebound since he’d broken his fibula, dislocated his shoulder, and suffered multiple abrasions after his bicycle had collided with a car. I grinned through the swaggering, narcotic rhythms of the film, for the first time in two weeks oblivious to my poor husband, in obvious pain beside me. If the movie couldn’t take care of him, then what could I do? Meanwhile, the movie took care of me.

The film’s low camera angles made the characters appear gargantuan, mythic, all-powerful, so that for a short time I’d felt my own sense of powerlessness…

Nothing, not a single character in the movie reminded me of my life. Although I’ve certainly been angry enough to want to shake someone till his teeth rattled, I’ve never thought about actually murdering anyone. As furious as I have been at my former husband, I swear I never once fantasized “taking him out.” But the women in Chicago kill their betraying lovers and not only get away with murder, but also sashay unrepentantly to stardom. Initially a mousy woman hurled to the wall by her perfidious seducer, Renée Zellweger’s Roxie not only shoots the man who did her wrong, but also persuades the city’s most powerful — and unabashedly corrupt — lawyer to take her case, ultimately breaking free of jail, the death sentence, and a numbingly boring marriage. The film’s low camera angles made the characters appear gargantuan, mythic, all-powerful, so that for a short time I’d felt my own sense of powerlessness, inability to keep Steve from pain replaced by gusto, brio, irrepressible vigor.

Seldom do I leave the multiplex overflowing with so much energy, with what used to be called high spirits. Feel-good movies are far rarer now than when I was growing up, an era dominated by Doris Day’s spunky smile and Cary Grant’s off-hand charm. And Doris Day never would have committed murder. My parents took their daughters to very few movies, all carefully chosen, so it was not until long after the fifties that I finally saw such gripping films as On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and Man With a Golden Arm. At home, after the advent of television, my mother and father tensed audibly during General Electric Theater’s adaptation of A Doll’s House and the Schlitz Playhouse production of Billy Budd. Though my father did not always change the channel during a program that dove too deeply into the murky undercurrents of our buttoned-up lives, still I knew my parents often worried that the material might be too grim for their daughters — or for themselves. So it is not surprising that, several years before we ever owned a television set, when I was barely six and my younger sister three, it was only after much cautious deliberation that my parents chose the first movie they took us to see. The film they selected was, they were sure, not at all grim, an ideal movie for their daughters’ cinematic initiation: The Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz
DIRECTED BY Victor Fleming
(MGM, 1939)

Bear in mind that we had not been prepared by watching even a fourteen-inch TV screen. In 1948 my little sister and I had never seen a cartoon, or anything more animated than a pop-up book. True, the radio, a large drawerless bureau occupying a place in our living room as central as the sofa, sputtered and boomed the Lone Ranger’s clip clops and Colgate jingles, but these aural barrages left us open to our own imaginings. Anticipatory discussions with my mother in the kitchen over my peanut butter and jelly sandwich focused on the fear that active little Liza would be unable to sit still through the movie. Of course, as a grown-up, more sophisticated six, I would be fine.

But the moment the black-and-white turned to color, to a profusion of vivid flowers and a chorus of happy Munchkins, something began to bubble inside me. I started to cry. Quietly. It was all so beautiful. Glinda was beautiful, kind. My crying grew louder. My nose ran, I blubbered. My parents leaned over, asked in whispers what was wrong. I sobbed. They took me out into the lobby, talked to me, tried to calm me down. But back again in the dark, facing the glittering screen, my crying resumed, uncontrollable. My father drove us home in our two-door Ford. No one spoke as we stopped at red lights, intersections in the black and white Phoenix night.

Sometimes when my film critic husband and I see a particularly frightening movie and I flinch, or gasp, or grab his arm, he reminds me, whispers, “It’s only a movie.” We see so many they frequently blur into one another, titles little more than hooks to help dredge up a brief scene, an actor’s name. Steve screens up to half a dozen movies a week. I can absorb half a dozen a month.

I suppose you could almost say we fell in love over movies. During the thirty-six years of my now-defunct first marriage, I had pined for a movie companion, for someone to share my fascination with the screen. My former husband, a gifted musician, cared more for audio than video, unless it was a sporting event. Late summer, fall, and winter weekends meant the TV was on full football blast for hours at a time, and by dark, I often yearned simply for quiet. But even during those years, my favorite evenings were those when we brought supper into the living room and watched a video I had rented, as carefully chosen as the shows my parents had picked out, but with different criteria: no British dialogue (he could not follow it); no subtle psychological drama (he could lose patience); no Woody Allen (he wouldn’t get the humor); and nothing with a bad score (he would criticize the music so loudly I could not hear the dialogue). Occasionally we would talk a little afterward about the movie we had seen. Once in the early years of our marriage, he had presented me with a hand-written “gift certificate” good for five movies — he knew how much I loved them. But finally at the theater, the soundtrack struck his perfect hearing as too loud, too quiet, or garbled; a wad of gum attached itself to his shoe; or the picture waffled in and out of focus. At times it seemed he spent more time in the lobby complaining than he did watching the movie. And he was never the sort of person with whom I could exchange a glance during a particularly charged scene. He was never a hand-holder. Love scenes usually left him scornful.

… I had pined for a movie companion, for someone
to share my fascination
with the screen.

During my junior high school years, when my girl friend Sandy Davison, her boyfriend, his buddy, and I would be dropped off at a movie by Sandy’s mother, we sat four in a row while Sandy and her boyfriend made out. I gradually became aware of the male wrist on the arm rest next to me, but it was not until a couple of years later that I knew what a short, delicious distance it was from my upholstered chair to the one next to me, and it was not till over forty years later that my unspoken, perhaps even unconscious fantasy of the ideal movie partner materialized.

Steve had often invited colleagues to attend screenings with him. At first I was simply one of several friends who would meet him outside the multiplex and accompany him as he flashed his press card and strode past a line of dozens, sometimes hundreds of hopefuls waiting for a seat in exchange for their free passes. We sat — as we still do — in the choice seats reserved for the press. And although it was many months before our arms crossed over the arm rest’s barrier, even early on we would stand outside the theater late into the evening, talking and talking about the movie. Now we squeeze fingers as the credits begin, and grin and snuggle during especially moving scenes. At home we watch screeners sent to Steve by the film companies, comfy on the sofa after dinner, curled up together with no arm rest between us at all.

Portrait of Glinda in Glinda of Oz
BY Frank L. Baum
ILLUSTRATED BY Jonathan R. Neill
(Reilly & Lee, 1920)

But when I saw The Wizard of Oz, even though my little sister sat right next to me with — was it my mother or my father? — one of my parents on the other side, I might as well have been adrift in a vast outer-spatial theater of absolute darkness. And even if someone like Steve had been reassuringly beside me, The Wizard of Oz would not have been “only a movie.” From its opening moments, the film held me in thrall. Running to prepare for a storm was hauntingly familiar: dust storms often blew into Phoenix from the surrounding desert. My mother would race from room to room as soon as she spotted the moving brown wall of dust, screaming, “Hurry, close the windows, close them tight, hurry, hurry.” Still, with the windows latched as tightly as we could manage, every sill would be layered with brown dirt, every tabletop and bookshelf covered. There was no way to keep all that blown dust outside the small rectangle of our two-bedroom tract house. My mother’s shrill concern for haste struck me as panic — for all I knew, we just might blow away.

We had moved a year earlier from Summit, New Jersey, a suburban town inhabited — as it is now — mainly by prosperous professionals commuting to New York City. Although I lived with my parents in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment, I spent much of my first five years in the care of my grandparents, whose spacious two-story house on Ox Bow Lane rose above a sloped, manicured, tree-shaded acre interspersed — at least in spring and summer — with the petals, foliage, and fragrances of roses, peonies, dahlias, as well as daffodils, tulips, irises, and lilies-of-the-valley. As a toddler I squatted in green-mossy mud, playing with the bells of purple fuchsias. I took my first running steps across wide expanses of soft mown grass. And best of all, I clamored into my grandmother’s silken lap. My grandfather jested and tumbled, guffawed and tickled. They were daily presences, Grandma stroking me on the sofa as I played with her rings, her pearl necklace, inhaled the fragrance of her skin mixed with hints of stale Arpège.

… my parents never mentioned what we had left behind. Eyes front and forward, none of us would turn into pillars of salt, headed as we were for a new lease on life.

After we left Summit, flying cross-country in a DC 3, my parents never mentioned what we had left behind. Eyes front and forward, none of us would turn into pillars of salt, headed as we were for a new lease on life. In the Phoenix sun my blond-complexioned skin burned brilliant as Arizona Highways’ sunsets, and my pale eyes winced from the hot glare. My mother was pregnant again by the time we saw The Wizard of Oz, her belly so mountainous the cat hissed at the sight of her. An enthusiastic new member of the Valley of the Sun’s Chamber of Commerce, my father adopted Western dress, even learning to ride a horse in the Rodeo Parade. Snapshots show me slumped, sullen in the sun, while my parents beam from pristine Stetsons under an unfenced sky.

ILLUSTRATION FROM Cinderella
BY Edward Dalziel AND George Dalziel
(George Routledge and Sons, 1865)
COURTESY OF THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

When the Good Witch Glinda entered the movie, something about her voice, her movements, reminded me of Grandma. And the flowers. And New Jersey. It wasn’t Kansas I wanted to go home to. I was trapped in a black-and-white, or, rather, dust-brown land — and Oz glittered like paradise lost. The movie jerked the loneliness stored for months in my lungs, yanked it up to the surface, boiled it over. But even as I cried and cried, unlike Dorothy I did not know what it was I wanted, could not say out loud, plainly, “I want to go home.”

By the time of my second cinematic foray, a year later, to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I sat all the way through the final credits, only closing my eyes and crouching behind the seat in front of me every time the Wicked Queen burst onto the screen. I had nightmares about her for months, but the music also stayed with me: “Whistle While You Work,” “Someday My Prince Will Come.” When I was eight, my parents took my sisters and me to Cinderella, and I did not cover my eyes once. I bought a Disney coloring book with my saved-up nickels and colored every picture, careful to stay inside the lines. With the strokes of my crayons I could pretend it was my own long skirt that billowed as I waltzed with the prince, my own pet mice who unlocked the door for me, my fairy godmother making sure everything turned out all right. Someone even gave me a set of molds so I could form figurines of these characters, and paint them with a tiny brush.

These three, The Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella formed the cinematic trinity of my childhood. But of the hundreds of movies I have seen during the fifty-four years since, none has had the impact of Judy Garland’s classic, even though I did not follow Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City until years later. Snow White and Cinderella I believed in with all the longing pent-up in my rib-lined chest. Until my teens I breathed deeply from the heady air of Snow White’s success: even though a Wicked Queen (who reminded me of my own mother when she lost her temper) might try to hurt me, I could survive by working cheerfully (although, try as I might, I never learned to whistle), staying very still and quiet, not bothering anyone, and someday, a kind prince would find me, kiss me, take me home. It seemed that the more we moved… the less we talked about what really happened in our lives, between each other, within ourselves.We played a game called statues in those days; one of us swung the others around by the arm, and then said “freeze.” We had to stop exactly as we were, but when the person who was “it” said “move,” we flew into a frenzied enactment of whatever our position suggested: a ballet dancer, a bull fighter, a baseball pitcher. Someday someone like the prince would tell me it was safe to “move” and I would spring to life. The message from Cinderella was similar: help would arrive, albeit from unexpected sources. No creature was too small to be a guardian angel — even mice, or birds might turn out to be rescuers. And if I were very lucky, I would be found by an absent-minded fairy godmother, an elderly, doddering (perhaps grandmotherly?) lady who would free me from the locked-in emotional life of a family where almost any overt expression of jubilance was too loud, sorrow too troubling, and anger too rude. It seemed that the more we moved (and we lived in five houses in Phoenix in four years), the less we talked about what really happened in our lives, between each other, within ourselves. Certainly no one seemed aware of the titanic surges of emotion that shook my ribcage, the longings that flooded my growing frame.

When I was nine, with vague prepubescent cravings also beginning their tidal flows, we moved to Tucson, where my parents discovered drive-ins. Although I saw Gone With the Wind and several other classics with my sisters or friends indoors at the Catalina Theater, the Frontier Drive In was the setting for some of my happiest childhood moments. All five of us together, and my father even seemed to enjoy himself. My youngest sister Trisha sat in the front seat between my parents, and Liza and I had the whole back seat to ourselves. One summer night rain drops began plopping on the windshield as the opening credits began. For once I did not relish the smell of dust being moistened, was miserable that a thunderstorm shut down the movie and drove us home to the separate rooms of our four-square house.

But Singin’ in the Rain was not rained out. Gene Kelly’s famous dance sequence with the umbrella lightened my sense of my body so that, even today, simply remembering the scene, I want to begin a little imitative loose-limbed toe-heel-toe, although I never had a toe or tap lesson in my life (and would not want anyone, even Steve, to watch). High Society I saw with my mother’s cousin. Periodically, Dick would drive up from his home in Guadalajara in an aging black Cadillac, covered in dust by the time he swung into our driveway, calling out for my mother, and raucously punctuating the quiet. I felt I had entered a movie myself. This was a double dip, triple delicious — I was on the front seat between my mother’s loveable cousin and his handsome friend, fed popcorn and root beer (both off limits with my parents) as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra crooned about colliding with Mars. What a swell party it was. Maybe people could actually have fun in their lives, make clever jokes, laugh with each other, make music together. Maybe. He told jokes on the sofa, the ice in his glass of scotch chinking as he laughed. He brought with him the sounds of exotic birds and the smells of brilliant flowers, his still-thick British speech deliciously precise, his wit intoxicatingly naughty. With her favorite relative in the house, my mother’s British accent and humor returned full force, while my father shrank further into the cigarette-sodden gloom of his Barcalounger. Dick seemed to like my presence beside him on the sofa, and directed much of his talk right to me as if I were an adult. I think I laughed more during his visits than all the time in between them. I did not know then that Dick was gay or even what that meant, that he was a painter who inhabited a hill-top hacienda with half a dozen other artists and dancers. Or that, before settling in Mexico sometime in the early forties, he had lived briefly in Hollywood, a friend of movie stars like David Niven. But I knew I adored him. So when he and his friend Pedro arrived one spring evening and took me with them to see High Society at the Frontier Drive In, I felt I had entered a movie myself. This was a double dip, triple delicious — I was on the front seat between my mother’s loveable cousin and his handsome friend, fed popcorn and root beer (both off limits with my parents) as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra crooned about colliding with Mars. What a swell party it was. Maybe people could actually have fun in their lives, make clever jokes, laugh with each other, make music together. Maybe.

In 1954 our whole family saw The African Queen at the drive-in. It’s still one of my favorite movies. Although only twelve, I identified with Katharine Hepburn’s character: prim and dutiful, her missionary daughter’s corset-stiff demeanor constraining powerful emotions. Bogart’s character not only saves her life, but also, somewhat like Snow White’s prince, wakes her, makes her move. A rough man, certainly not “high society,” Bogart has survival skills, common sense, knows how to keep the boat afloat. Necessary skills in a war, in Africa, in dangerous times.

I knew danger wasn’t limited to the movies. Two doors down, a sign had gone up saying “Quarantine,” and a year later the girl who had been kept inside came out, walking lopsided on a shriveled leg. One of my friends had spent a year in an iron lung; her left leg was no bigger around than the flute she played in the school orchestra. Knifings were a regular part of after-school life at Roskruge Junior High. Half the boys I knew carried switchblades. On the way home from the bus stop I suffered a severe concussion from a rock hurled in a fight. I remember stopping off at Sandy’s on the way to my house and vomiting in the toilet, Mrs. Davison at the door asking if I needed sanitary pads. I missed a month of school. Sandy’s father came home paydays whipping drunk, and often I barely had time to run out the back door before his belt was out of its loops and landing on my girlfriend and her little sister. Other friends’ fathers never returned from the Korean War.

I also knew that my father did not know how to cope with the simple practical difficulties of daily living (let alone emotional ones). Beneath the walled-over surface of our suburban life in one of Tucson’s drearier new subdivisions loomed chasms of potential disasters. My father panicked if a light bulb needed replacing. How many people did it take to hang a small picture in our family? Three. My mother to find the nails, the hammer, the pencil, the ruler, me to hold them and hand each to my father upon request, and my father (with much discussion, shaking, and gentlemanly swearing) to measure, make a tiny mark on the wall with the pencil, and finally (oh the moment of no-going-back) to hit the head of the nail with the head of the hammer, in hopes (oh, how we hoped) that it wouldn’t hit his thumb. These were problems in our house, challenges. A toilet, the washing machine overflowing — crises.

Beneath the walled-over surface of our suburban life in one of Tucson’s drearier new subdivisions loomed chasms
of potential disasters.

Perhaps, I began unconsciously to reason after seeing The African Queen, if you paired up with a man who could fix things, even if he had bad manners, even if he took ungentlemanly swigs straight from bottles, he could keep you afloat. I knew the waters out there were dangerous. Maybe this would be better than a prince. Certainly more practical. In Arizona, I had seen no castles.

The man I married at nineteen lured me initially through his singing, although not from a theater’s speakers, but from behind the pulpit at a wedding, where he was the hired tenor and I was one of a thousand guests. His voice rang through the arches of the Episcopal church: “Oh Perfect Love,” he sang. But his practical know-how made him just as alluring. Made him safe. He could fix anything, and seemed to like doing so. Besides, his big chest, and even at twenty-two, his big tummy, made him pillowy, easy to lean on. He could take care of light fixtures, dripping faucets, and much more. In fact, he was big enough, a former football player, to take on two wicked witches at once and win.

During the sixties, movies became as exciting as everything else that infused our suddenly speeded up, psychedelically flavored lives. Blow-Up: we began to question the reality of what we actually saw — how did we know what we thought we saw existed, could we trust our senses? My husband even liked that one so much we saw it twice — we had never seen pantyhose before, let alone watch them pulled off. Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? Another serious “film” (as opposed to a crass, bourgeois “movie”), one I could talk over with fellow English majors. Film as literature? A kind of art? Better than ever.

… how did we know what we thought we saw existed, could we trust our senses?

Now, of course, films, movies, flicks — they’re an embarrassment of riches. Hanging a picture in our house is not an activity fraught with tension as it was for us with Daddy, although Steve and I do tend to put off household repairs until we can no longer endure the skylight’s dripping leak or the toilet’s post-flush gurgling. But living with a film critic means that I see most of the year’s worthwhile movies, and usually before most people know they are in town.

During the first months Steve and I lived together, I even succumbed to his urgings to go with him to morning screenings — the ones reserved only for the critics. I am not an early — or a rapid — riser. Seeing a movie before afternoon I find unnerving. Unlike Steve, who grew up in Brooklyn, I did not cut my milk teeth on the movies; as a kid I could not walk a few blocks, or even take the bus, to Saturday morning showings. For me, the theater before noon is surreal, the vacant parking lot haunting, as if everyone else knows something we don’t and has evacuated the area. Even inside the multiplex, I find the emptiness disturbing, as if we’ve shown up on the wrong day for a party. Sometimes the projectionist must be as sleepy as I am, because occasionally a reel will be inserted upside down. Once, after trying to adjust to seeing the actors’ eyes below their mouths, I left Steve and the other local critics and walked out of the auditorium. I was hungry and bored. How long till the next reel, and would it be inserted right side up? I walked into the next room. Down the aisle, yellow lights lining the sides like miniature runway lights. Up close to the screen — across, then back up to the hallway again, in and out of all twelve silent theaters. Like gates at an airport at three o’clock in the morning. With no movies coloring the screens, each destination looked identical. Blank.

I decided that particular morning screening would be my last, though I did make an exception to my new rule when I had a chance to join the critics for The Pianist. The other film reviewers were already there. One of them, paunchy and shuffling, garrulously voices his opinions, which he flatly records in one of the neighborhood weeklies. He has no patience with subtitles or subtleties. Sighs, wheezes, doesn’t like anything too sad. Life’s bad enough, he says. Often he falls asleep, and snores, loudly. He likes to sit next to Steve. Three quarters of the way through Polanski’s film I reached for a tissue, and crumbled half a dozen into damp shreds by the final credits. Steve and I waited for the others to leave before we ventured to look at each other. I was glad we had seen this story of tenuous survival in World-War-Two-torn Warsaw in relative privacy, rather than surrounded by a crowd of folks redeeming their free passes and bolstered by barrels of soft drinks, popcorn, platters of nachos, and cell phones: “I’m in the movie, can’t talk now, can I call you later, well, maybe you’re right, maybe we should invite Tiffany to the party, I mean, like, Roger would be pissed if we didn’t, can you call her, oh okay, hey, I gotta go, call you later.”

People who don’t go to the movies for total immersion are people I don’t want to be with in the theater. I have a friend I won’t see movies with anymore; she talks through the trailers, the opening scenes, and even on into the plot’s development. I have learned — I keep my eyes and my focus ferociously attached to the screen, ignore anyone trying to distract me, and if need be, I tell them to hush. I am also extremely careful about movie partners for another reason: watching a movie together can be a surprisingly intimate experience. I saw The English Patient with a good male friend, a colleague, before I divorced my first husband. After the credits had finished, the screen had gone blank and the cleaning crew arrived with their plastic bags and carpet sweepers, we slowly turned to each other; his face was as tear-streaked as mine. We hugged on the steps before walking out to our separate cars. Weeks later, he said, only half joking, that somehow it didn’t feel right seeing that movie with “another man’s wife.”

Sometimes while waiting for an evening screening to begin… I think… How much we all want to extend further than we do, live longer than we can, make a difference. Be noticed. And have someone’s fingers interlaced with ours as we silently face the enormity of the screen.

Maybe part of what I love about the movies is the chance to sit next to someone, right beside them, for ninety minutes or more, as you both focus on the same thing for the same duration. Like inviting the one you love to look at geese in flight, or a moon with a halo. After we moved to Tucson in 1951, Grandma and Pop visited during the winter. Grandma and I would sit side-by-side on the sofa of their small apartment, gazing out the window framing the Catalina Mountains, the light changing them minute by minute, as she stroked my fingers, my arm. In the theater we watch the lights flickering, the story unfolding for an hour and a half to three hours, and nothing else calls us away.

Maybe this is why I actually prefer the evening promotional screenings, even with their interruptions and razzmatazz. I like the warmth, the bustle, the sense of company, the expectation before the movie, the increasing hush as the lights go down. I like the sensation of being in the dark alone facing the film, yet safely surrounded by others. I look forward to greeting the regulars, the promo folks and the critics, even the garrulous one who snores. We exchange reactions and tidbits about titles, both recent and upcoming. It’s a whole family of us, multiplied, and occupying a much bigger space than our Ford in the fifties at the Frontier Drive In.

Sometimes while waiting for an evening screening to begin, as the movie’s publicist strains his voice to reach the crowd, advertising the sponsoring radio station, posing trivia questions with tee shirts and posters as prizes, I think how insubstantial, how fragile this struggling human being seems in contrast to the amplified lives we will be watching in a few minutes. How much we all want to extend further than we do, live longer than we can, make a difference. Be noticed. And have someone’s fingers interlaced with ours as we silently face the enormity of the screen.