Movies were a family affair, way back when
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- March 26, 2022
- 803
It’s all about family, always has been, always will be.
Amen.
But I wonder, sometimes, if the one I grew up in might have been dangerously different, a kind of Addams anomaly in a world inhabited by Cleaver and Cunningham clones, populated with folks who didn’t have art quizzes after supper and embraced the fermentation of opposing points of view, eschewing uniformity, not to mention conformity, happy in its own little world of five.
I remember an offhand comment offered by our one-time high school principal when he ran into us in a parking lot outside a shopping mall where we had traveled to get apparel appropriate for our father’s funeral. It wasn’t all that awkward, more reaffirming.
“Ah,” he said, taking in the three surviving children and their partners on that chilly, sanctified Ohio morning, “it’s the Deweys. Good to see you, the family that’s done it all and won it all.”
Done it all and won it all.
Pretty catchy, isn’t it?
He, himself, the principal who wouldn’t live out the year, didn’t have to say that. He just felt like making sure we felt better; I mean, it really doesn’t matter how old you are: Losing a parent hurts a lot.
That same day, before all the calling hours and rosaries and phone calls and burial preparations and visits from friends and bundt cakes and casseroles delivered to the doorstep, I made a point of walking past the mall’s movie theater, the very place where I had taken a girl on my first real date, where we’d seen “Deliverance.”
Couldn’t I have picked, you’re wondering, a more appropriate film?
And that’s the whole point. As a Dewey it really never occurred to me that an innocent high school sophomore might not want to see a movie whose essence sloshed around survival of the fittest, one whose most quoted line was and will ever be, “Squeal like a pig.”
To her eternal credit, my comely companion was a good sport about the whole debacle, one that had begun inauspiciously enough with me spilling her orange pop all over the tabletop as I brought back our rib-eye steaks from the waiting line at the Ponderosa.
I remember slouching into my favorite place after I’d dropped her off at her house and hearing — as if God himself had jammed a shiny ironic quarter into the jukebox — the banjo-fueled theme from “Deliverance” greeting me as I walked into the smoke and the din.
A few years later, when I was a junior in college, I’d take that first-date disaster to a new level of cruel stupidity when I asked the girl I’d only been seeing for a couple of weeks to join me for a screening of “Straw Dogs” at the Engineering Auditorium, Notre Dame’s version of a venue for couples just finding their way.
For the uninitiated, it revolves around a brutal gang rape. Nice, eh?
But like “Deliverance” before, it was something I really wanted to see, and the fact that it was incredibly not a “date movie” never dawned on me until it was far, far too late to make proper amends.
Blame it on my being a Dewey, someone who loves drifting back.
Movies were something we did as a family, from the very first film I can remember — “How the West Was Won” in 1962 — until the last one we saw together, which was “The Paper Chase” in 1973.
In between, the five of us sat united, as one, all in a row, captivated.
Allow me the privilege of listing a Top Ten that stays with me:
10. “Fantastic Voyage” (1966)
9. “Love Story” (1970)
8. “The Singing Nun” (1966)
7. “Emil and the Detectives” (1964)
6. “Paper Moon” (1973)
5. “Mary Poppins” (1964)
4. “Dr. Zhivago” (1965)
3. “To Sir, With Love” (1967)
2. “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)
1. “The Godfather” (1972)
I’m not sure how many families made a habit of seeing movies together, but I have a feeling our old high school principal would have said something like, “Ah, it’s the Deweys: They saw them all and loved them all,” had he been asked for his assessment.
Oddly enough, though, back in a time when drive-ins were in their heyday, we never once saw a single motion picture projected on a huge white wall, a speaker hooked to the driver’s side window, the five of us huddled in the station wagon, angling for a better view.
It was there, however, I saw “Easy Rider,” the first movie I ever watched on my own, something that would become rather a habit as the years marched on and films like “Schindler’s List,” “Titanic,” “Pulp Fiction” and “The Blair Witch Project” followed.
Before the pandemic screwed everything up, my wife and I saw “Peanut Butter Falcon,” “Yesterday” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and I hope we can pick up that tradition this year.
Until then, movies in a public setting will remain a reminder of what’s possible when the lights go down and thoughts take flight.