My Mom Can't Help It

My mom has always been very indulgent of my interest in movies. As a kid, if I thought a scene or a line of dialogue was funny, I’d summon her into the room from wherever she was in the house to watch. If I thought a scene was well-played, I’d call in mom to validate my impressions. She usually agreed.

She was born in 1939, arguably the biggest year in movie history. That means she debuted the same year in which such timeless movie classics as “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” hit the theaters.

Mom’s childhood years were spent in a working-class area of Youngstown, Ohio during the war and post-war years. She loved her friends, her parents, sisters Vi and Betty, big brother Tom, and an extended family of Italian relatives. Certainly she went along to the occasional film with her mother, sisters, or friends, but movies don’t seem to have been a significant part of those years.

Even without a face, Gort doesn't look pleased.

When I asked her about the movies she saw as a kid, she told me that one of her earliest film-going memories was 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the ground-breaking science fiction movie that doubled as a warning against a rising atomic threat. She was 12 years old.

“The spaceship lands in Washington, DC and a man comes out with a big robot,” she remembers. The man calls himself Klaatu, and he’s come to warn the human race that, due to humans' proclivity for war, other races have deemed Earth a danger to the rest of the universe. Klaatu implores Earth to live in peace or face destruction. Being the war-mongers that humans tend to be, their reaction is to shoot and wound Klaatu, which causes Gort, the big robot, to go on a rampage.

“For days after I saw the movie, when I went to bed at night, I would get up and go to the window and look for space crafts in the sky. I never saw any, but I kept on looking for them.”

Ostensibly a vehicle for Jayne Mansfield,
this movie was really a rock 'n' roll showcase.

By the time she was in high school, Mom counted Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley as two of her favorite heartthrobs, plastering posters and pictures from magazines on her bedroom walls. (She was in good company with millions of other teenagers.)

One non-Brando/non-Elvis movie she remembers from that period was 1957's "The Girl Can't Help It." “I wanted to see it so bad!” she says. And why not? The movie featured performances by some of the biggest rock acts of the day, including Little Richard (who sang the title song), Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, the Platters, and others.

But my grandmother wouldn’t let her go. Maybe it was the potentially negative influence of rock ‘n’ roll? No matter. My Uncle Art and Aunt Vi (mom’s oldest sister) said, “Come on, we'll go," and they snuck Mom to the theater. 

"It was a poor class-D movie with Jayne Mansfield. I loved it!”

(Bonus: The film co-starred Julie London, an actress who was also one of Mom’s favorite singers. In fact, Mom sang London’s “Cry Me a River” during the annual Variety Show in 1958 – but that’s another story. See the footnote.)

Here's Mom during her college years, looking like a Beatnik. 
My Uncle Tom, Mom's brother, made the easel for her.

Mom’s tastes changed when she entered college. At Youngstown State University, she majored in art and developed a taste for the foreign films coming into vogue in the U.S.

“La Dolce Vita” is a prime example, a seminal Federico Fellini movie released in 1960, all about a journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who ambles around Rome over the course of a week, interacting with a gallery of eccentrics, movie stars, artists and others. 

“I just remember that the actors were beautiful, and it was creative,” says Mom. 

Anita Ekberg dribbles water on Marcello 

Film fans remember “La Dolce Vita” for the scene in which Anita Ekberg, in a black evening gown, wades seductively into the Trevi Fountain – surely one of the movies' indelible screen moments. She calls out, “Marcello! Marcello!” until he can do nothing but wade in after her.

"It was Italian. And that was it at the time. Fellini was too cool. And I was an artist!"

Mom graduated from college in 1962, married Dad in '64 and moved to Reno, Nevada, and started a family as an Air Force wife in '65. Her tastes in design, fashion, and music during that turbulent decade were streamlined, clean, and cool – in keeping with the trends of the era.

The United States changed a lot in a short time: A president had been assassinated and we entered a misbegotten war that would shatter the country. Meanwhile, by mid-decade, the counterculture was percolating, and ready to erupt.

That's Anne Bancroft's leg.

When I asked Mom about her favorite films from that decade, she mentioned three from 1967, when Dad returned from Vietnam after a year's tour. The late '60s vibe was encapsulated by "The Graduate," a movie whose style and approach was unlike anything ever committed to film at that point, representing a tonal shift not only in movies, but in American culture. 

In it, Dustin Hoffman rejects everything his upper-middle-class parents expect of him, including the society they represent. Some critics consider it the movie that changed the way filmmakers thought about how to construct a film narrative.

Another favorite of Mom’s from 1967 was “To Sir, with Love.” It featured Sidney Poitier as a new teacher in a poor British school who has a profound impact on his students. “It’s one of my favorite movies," says Mom. "I’ve watched it many times and still love seeing it."

I bet Mom was excited by the scene where Poitier takes his students on their first museum trip. By '67, she had been teaching for only a few years, and was burnishing an abstract painting style. She knew how thrilling art and antiquity could be when learning about it for the first time.

The year 1967 was a great one for Poitier, who also starred in the classic examination of Southern race relations, “In the Heat of the Night,” as well as yet another of Mom’s favorites, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."

The latter centered on the then-radical idea of a white girl marrying a black man, making it a rather subversive topic disguised as popular entertainment. In it, otherwise liberal parents (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) have to confront their own reservations about race, and let go of their daughter and trust her to make the right decision for herself.

“I’m sure not everyone embraced the movie as I did,” says Mom. “I didn't even think about it. I just loved the characters. I love Sidney Poitier. He was special, and that is what made him so great.”

Katharine Hepburn's niece Katharine Houghton's
film debut – opposite Sidney Poitier.

It's worth noting that "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" debuted six months after interracial marriage was legalized, in the case of Loving v. Virginia. Yet, as Mom noted, at that time blacks and whites were still using separate bathrooms, at least in the South.

I guess that's the point of this post. Mom has lived through some turbulent times in this country, and the movies she remembers and loves from childhood and beyond reflect the changes that swept America during the decades after a world war that altered everything. It's all there, from the post-war allegory of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and the rock 'n' roll teenage fantasy of "The Girl Can't Help It," to the arty foreign films of the early 1960s that exposed audiences to new ways of looking at the world, all the way to later mainstream movies that dared to push the envelope and break new ground in the 1970s, such as "The Godfather" series Mom rightly refers to as a masterpiece and among her all-time favorites.

Yet, she's as game to watch a new release like "The Danish Girl" as much as she is to re-watch a classic like "Some Like it Hot." Mom's open to watching anything.

And she's still watching the skies.

Footnote: Cry Me a River

By the time of the annual high school Variety Show in 1958, Mom’s friends figured she was destined for big things in the music industry. “I was definitely influenced by Julie London's torchy, moody singing,” says Mom. “Even the teachers thought I was going to do some kind of professional singing.” During her Junior and Senior years, Mom was even the lead singer for a local rock band, Bill Davids and the Rockets. But...

“When reality hit, I discovered that I better do something practical,” says Mom, who got her first job teaching art at East High School and at YSU in the Art Department, while teaching at East. “Still creative – but not like singing.”