How to Watch a Movie
“In the last chapter, I was treasuring the community of film-going in the late 1940s. But I wonder if I was being unduly sentimental or nostalgic, for I know in my innermost being that another thing that has always appealed to me about the movies is the solitude, or the aloneness, they foster. How can those reactions coexist?
The community wasn’t simply a mythic idea promoted by the business. Moviegoing was the national pastime. By the late twenties, a third of Americans were going to the pictures once a week. In the war years, that figure reached 70 million admissions on a population of about 140 million. Immediately after the war it was 80 million—or still half the population. The average admission price was less than 50 cents. The theaters were crowded or packed. People went in groups and they saw friends there. The spirit of the war was reinforced by the movies and enshrined by them. It was in theaters that we formed our idea of what war looked like, granted that the newsreels were... carefully controlled and very positive.MoreLess
The community wasn’t simply a mythic idea promoted by the business. Moviegoing was the national pastime. By the late twenties, a third of Americans were going to the pictures once a week. In the war years, that figure reached 70 million admissions on a population of about 140 million. Immediately after the war it was 80 million—or still half the population. The average admission price was less than 50 cents. The theaters were crowded or packed. People went in groups and they saw friends there. The spirit of the war was reinforced by the movies and enshrined by them. It was in theaters that we formed our idea of what war looked like, granted that the newsreels were... carefully controlled and very positive.MoreLess
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