The Films From My Youth
I have been a lover of classic films for as long as I can remember. This love was passed on to me by my parents, born in Indonesia and both classic film fans. They spent their childhood and teenage years on the island of Java and loved to go to the movies. I talked to my mother the other day and asked her about her love for the classics. She said that in the 1940s/early 1950s (before the advent of television) no Indonesian films were shown in the movie theaters (Indonesia had no film industry to speak of), nor Dutch films (Indonesia was a Dutch colony back then). The only films shown were American films, not even British ones, she said. During WWII there were no screenings at all and the first movie she saw after the war was a Tarzan film. (I was named after Tarzan's girlfriend!) My mum also collected photos of Hollywood stars, mainly of her idol Elizabeth Taylor. She swapped photos with her girlfriend who was an avid Audrey Hepburn fan. She told me they collected pictures from the Dutch magazine De Lach. I looked it up online and apparently this was a weekly magazine for men, which ran from 1924 till 1972. The magazine featured photos of scarcely dressed (in bathing suit, very daring at the time) actresses.
When I grew up in The Netherlands in the 1970/80s, there was no such thing as cable television. We only had two Dutch channels (a 3rd one was added later), two Belgian channels and two German. There was no BBC nor any commercial channel. Dutch television didn't seem to be interested in classic films from Hollywood (they were shown sporadically) so we turned to Belgian and German television for our classic film fix, but more German television than anything else. That's why I grew up with classic films dubbed in German. I didn't mind the dubbing (but I liked it less when the songs in musicals were also dubbed); in fact, it became the most natural thing for me to hear the voices of the German dubbers. Germany had voice doubles, which meant that one and the same person would dub the voice of a certain actor throughout that actor's oeuvre (for instance, actor Siegmar Schneider dubbed James Stewart in over 30 movies). Sometimes the voice actor would do the dubbing for other actors as well.
Two examples that are vivid in my memory illustrate how used I was to the German versions. Ann Miller sang Es ist viel zu Heiss in Kiss Me Kate and when I first heard her sing in English It's too darn hot it just sounded weird to me. When Tippi Hedren gets attacked on the boat by a seagull in Hitchcock's The Birds, Rod Taylor rushes to meet her and says "Sie bluten ja". I always liked how he said that. Later I saw The Birds in English and "You're bleeding" just didn't sound as nice as in German. Seriously!
When I say I grew up with classic films, I mean I grew up with films from certain decades and genres, the ones that were broadcasted on television. This meant a lot of adventure stuff — which my dad loved — (Scaramouche, The Naked Jungle, Captain Lightfoot, Ivanhoe, The Crimson Pirate, The Flame and the Arrow, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Black Rose, The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Don Juan, The Time Machine, etc.), predominantly films from the 1950s, biblical epics (The Robe, Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Spartacus), westerns (like Shenandoah, The Sons of Katie Elder, Montana, How the West Was Won, The Sheepman, The Hallelujah Trail, Roy Rogers films and Winnetou & Old Shatterhand films) and Dracula films with Christopher Lee.
We also watched a lot of musicals, mainly from the 1950s and 1960s (like Gigi, Singin' in the Rain, Hello Dolly, Oklahoma!, The Music Man, It's Always Fair Weather, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, West Side Story, Sweet Charity, Lilli, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Show Boat, Royal Wedding, Doctor Doolittle, A Song is Born, The King and I, Kiss me Kate, Bathing Beauty, White Christmas). I wasn't familiar at all with 1930s musicals and I never saw an Astaire and Rogers film in my youth. Pre-codes were also unfamiliar territory for me when I grew up (except for maybe It Happened One Night, but I never watched a pre-code film filled with sexual innuendos). I hardly watched silents except for Laurel & Hardy and maybe the occasional Chaplin movie. I think I must have seen some film noirs but probably didn't even know that they were called noirs. A lot of actors that I already knew by name while growing up I had never seen films of in my youth, or very little, e.g. Gene Tierney, Tyrone Power, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. For instance, of Stanwyck I can remember having seen Stella Dallas, Remember the Night and Cattle Queen of Montana but not much else. I've always liked her since.
More films I remember from my youth:
Irma La Douce, It's a Wonderful Life, Wait Until Dark (the scariest film I've seen in my youth!), Apartment For Peggy, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, My Man Godfrey, Woman of the Year, Gambit, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Giant, Operation Petticoat, Saratoga Trunk, The Countess from Hong Kong, Circus World, Gilda, Rebel Without a Cause, I Was a Male War Bride, Arsenic and Old Lace, Walk Don't Run, Cheaper by the Dozen, Belles on Their Toes, Sitting Pretty, Imitation of Life, 12 Angry Men, Houseboat, Exodus, The Long Hot Summer, Pillow Talk, Send Me No Flowers, Lover Come Back, Man's Favorite Sport?, Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, Love in the Afternoon, Stagecoach, Knock on Wood, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Five Pennies, Alfred Hitchcock films.
Some actors I grew up with: Doris Day, Rock Hudson (my favourite actor then), Audrey Hepburn (my favourite actress then), Danny Kaye, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor, Virginia Mayo, Cary Grant.
Some films I remember we had recorded on our Betamax video recorder (it was a large-sized recorder machine and the tapes were big as well): The Naked Jungle, Elephant Walk, The War of the Worlds, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The World of Suzie Wong, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Quo Vadis, The Birds, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes.
Most of the taped films we watched repeatedly and one of the most watched films was The War of the Worlds. My dad loved this and so did I. I've seen this film so many times that I can dream the content and most of the dialogue and I still love it.
Of course I've seen a lot more classics in my youth but the titles mentioned here are an indication of what type of movies I watched and also what I missed out on. There are a lot of films from my youth I have never visited again, but I enjoyed most of the ones I have rewatched, sometimes only for their nostalgic merit.
Coming to the end of this post, I wanted to add that growing up I hardly knew people other than my parents and siblings who knew classic films or actors. So I was pleasantly surprised that there was a whole community of classic film lovers out there. I discovered this when using Letterboxd for the first time and while blogging and discovering classic film blogs. All of a sudden my classic film world expanded. And it's expanding still as I discover more actors and actresses and watch more films. Now my favourite decades are the 1930s and 1940s but I enjoy films from other decades too.
Here's to more classic film watching!
PHOTOS IN THIS POST FROM TOP TO BOTTOM:
*Giant (1956) with Elizabeth Taylor; (screenshot by me)
*The Birds (1963) with Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, the "Sie bluten ja" scene;
*Kiss Me Kate (1953) with Ann Miller, singing Es ist viel zu Heiss;
*Pierre Brice and Lex Barker as Winnetou and Old Shatterhand;
*The Naked Jungle (1954) with Eleanor Parker and Charlton Heston;
*Elephant Walk (1954) with Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Finch;
*The War of the Worlds (1953) with Gene Barry;
*The War of the Worlds (1953) with Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. (screenshot by me).