The Most Beautiful Fraud

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.” – Jean-Luc Godard

Last week was pure summer. I did all the things I should be doing in the middle of July – mowing lawn, picking strawberries, harvesting vegetables, weeding, sweating while I weeded. We had sultry weather and thunderstorms, all the good July stuff. It was so typical a week that I decided not to write much about it.

On one of my morning walks last week.

The big event of the week at our house, a sad event for several reasons, was that our television broke on Monday. It really broke. Not an internal malfunction. It fell and met its demise. That made me sad because I watch it a least a little while every day, and I couldn’t. And the fact that I was sad that I couldn’t watch it, made me even sadder. As much time as I spend reading books, listening to music, working in the garden, and doing other things, I do like to watch television shows (usually just Gardeners World and Perry Mason) and movies. It’s a way of winding down in the evenings, an hour or two of escape. A new TV arrived on Thursday, so we are up and running again, but I’m surprised and a little dismayed at how much I missed my TV time while we waited. I think maybe I love it too much. But then, I come from the first generation that grew up watching television – and we watched a lot of it – so maybe I have a flimsy excuse. My parents did not grow up watching TV. Most homes in America didn’t get a TV set until the mid 1950s. They might not have watched TV, but they did go to the movies. I love going to the movies as much as I like watching TV.

The old TV.

My love of cinema began early. [The word “cinema” has an interesting origin. It comes from the French word cinéma, a shortened form of cinématographe the term coined in the 1890s by the Lumiere brothers, who invented the technology, from the Latinized form of the Greek kinema “movement,” and graphia, “writing.” But I digress.] Two blocks down from our house on Bridge Street in New Cumberland, was the West Shore Theater (it’s still there). For what seems like most of my conscious life, until I was ten years old and we moved away, I went every Saturday morning with my brother and cousin, and sometimes my sisters, to the matinee at that theater. The matinee started at 11:00, which gave us time to finish our morning cartoon lineup and then head to the theater. My father gave us 50¢ each and we walked down the street and bought our tickets, which cost 35¢, and with the change we went next door to the drug store and bought a bag of candy to eat while we watched the movie. I saw so many movies in that theater, mostly B-movies, but some big productions too.

Later, when I was in high school and living in Naperville, Illinois, I went to the movies almost every weekend and sometimes twice in a weekend, with my friends. We knew every theater within a fifty mile radius of Naperville. When my family moved to Southern California, the number of theaters available increased dramatically and I haunted many of them – iconic movie houses like the Chinese Theater and the El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard, the Pacific Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, and others. Here in Potter County, there is only one theater, The Coudersport, on Main Street  in Coudersport, our county seat.

The Chinese Theater.

The El Capitan Theater.

The Pacific Cinerama Dome.

The Coudersport Theater.

The Coudersport Theater is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. In 1923, when the theater opened, movies were silent (the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1927). The top movies in 1923 were The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille’s precursor to the Charlton Heston one in 1956), The Covered Wagon, Safety Last! (starring the great Harold Lloyd), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (starring Lon Chaney), Scaramouche, Main Street, The Gold Diggers, and Tiger Rose. The only ones on that list that I’ve seen are Safety Last! and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!

The Coudersport Theater was first owned by Harry Cane (1872-1966). When it opened on January 16, 1923, the price for a ticket was 30¢. In 1928 Cane sold the theater to Edward Clawson (1880-1959). In 1930, Clawson installed the sound equipment for talkies and put up the famous Spanish Curtain that still hangs in the theater. Clawson sold the theater to Charles Fickinger (1902- 1955) in 1934. In 1941 movie star Joan Crawford actually visited the theater and watched a movie there. In 1951 John Rigas bought the theater. John passed away in 2021, but the Rigas family still owns the theater. The price of a ticket now is $6.00, but because Stacey and Hannah work for the Rigas family, we get to go to the movies for free, and we go fairly often. And Stacey works with the family in selecting which movies they show.

The Spanish Curtain in the Coudersport Theater.

In addition to going to the movies, I also have always loved watching old movies on TV, first with an aerial antenna, then with cable, and on through all the technological advances that have given me greater and greater access to films over the years – VHS tapes, DVDs, satellite, fiber optic, Plex, Netflix, Prime, Roku. In our house, we have quite a library of movies. As my cinematic tastes matured, I came to especially love films from what I consider to be the Golden Age of Cinema – the 1930s through the early 50s. When I was in high school, I faked being sick one day so I could stay home and watch a Bette Davis (perhaps my favorite actress) movie marathon on TV. Some of my favorite movies are the Film Noir masterpieces from the 40s and 50s – like all those atmospheric Bogart and Bacall classics. We watch a lot of movies at our house, old and new, but there is still nothing quite like seeing them on the big screen. I get a little tingling thrill when the house lights go down and the curtain parts and the screen starts to glow.

One of the things I have learned to appreciate about movies are the soundtracks that accompany them. I have always been attuned to the power of music and nowhere is it more apparent to me than in the movies. If you’ve ever watched a scene from a movie without the soundtrack and then with it, you can see how much the music affects you. A great movie soundtrack can make an okay movie seem a little greater. I even listen to some of the best soundtracks by themselves. The great composers of movie music – John Williams, Elmer Bernstein, Max Steiner, James Newton Howard, Michael Giacchino, Howard Shore, Ennio Morricone, Thomas Newman, John Barry and others – write movie music so good, that their scores can hold their own even without the movie.

I passed my love of cinema on to my children. In some ways their passion might exceed mine. We sometimes play a game at our house where we set up a random queue of music from movies and then see who can guess first which movie it comes from. We also do the same thing with actual film clips and quotes from movies. I’m pretty good at these games, but my children surpass me. They know so many quotes from so many movies that they can even communicate with each other coherently using only lines from movies. It scares me sometimes.

Having such a long and deep association with cinema, we have also become accomplished film critics. We know the difference between an excellent, good, mediocre, and bad film. Sadly, it seems the movies coming out these days tend more toward the mediocre and bad than the excellent and good. I often go to highly touted films with high expectations, only to be disappointed. It seems there are not many fresh ideas. The only thing that makes a movie innovative these days seems to be doing the same old things but to excess – bigger explosions, wilder car chases, more graphic sex and violence.

A side effect of being a cinephile is that I sometimes expect real life to come with a soundtrack. At times, the mood of a day, or whatever experience I’m having, makes the music turn on in my brain. For instance, the other day I went out in the morning on my usual walk. It was a calm morning, warm, the sun was just high enough to touch the tops of the hills. My brain said “This is an Aaron Copland morning.” And then, as I walked, music from Copland’s Our Town, played in my head. It was perfect. Sometimes the soundtrack that pops up is odd. On another day while I was crawling down the edge of the long border ripping out weeds, for some reason O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was my soundtrack. Several times lately, my morning walk soundtrack has been Vaughan William’s The Lark Ascending. The soundtrack for a house cleaning day is usually big band music. And I can’t watch fireworks now without the music at the end of Meet Joe Black playing in my head. There is almost always some music playing on my internal soundtrack, even when I’m asleep. My dreams usually come with a soundtrack.

And speaking of dreams, I dreamed the other night that I was back in our house on Bridge Street. In the dream, I was a child maybe ten years old, it was summer, and it was hot. I was sitting on the stairs that lead up to the second floor where we lived (my father’s chiropractic office was on the first floor and my grandparents and cousin lived on the third floor). I was eating an ice cream cone and waiting patiently for the mail to come because I knew there would be a Weekly Reader in it. The dream was so vivid. Remembering it now, I can recall the taste of the ice cream – teaberry, and the smell of the old house. The accompanying soundtrack was a tinny rendition of the theme from A Summer Place coming from somewhere distant, a song I always associate with shopping at the Woolworths with my mother and grandmother. I don’t know what prompted the dream. I haven’t thought about Weekly Readers in decades and decades, but they were a big part of our summers back then. My dad always referred to them as “Wrinkly Readers” because they usually arrived a bit tattered and with a lot of extra creases. Perhaps the dream was kindled because I’d received an email from the library earlier that day saying that a book that I’d ordered had arrived and I could pick it up. I’m sure the dish of teaberry ice cream (a flavor newly available at our local dairy that I very much associate with my childhood) that I’d eaten that evening had something to do with it. Dreams are funny that way, the oddest things can trigger them. When I awoke, I felt a longing for that simpler and more innocent time. I felt sad that that age of the world is gone away, and yet happy that my brain still conjures up memories of it from time to time to haunt my dreams.

The house on Bridge Street as I mostly remember it.

Me at age ten.

Weekly Readers.

Rakestraw's Teaberry ice cream was a favorite.

So it was a week of ordinary things for the middle of July – morning walks, garden work, a haircut on Thursday. There were two un-ordinary events. Kurt and Julie’s grandson Cash had his tenth birthday on Wednesday and we had a fun celebration. And on Thursday evening, our friends Jim and Cathy Felip came to dinner. After dinner we showed them photos from our trip to France. They are considering a trip next year. Oh, and on Friday we went to the movies – not at all unusual, but noteworthy, I guess.

Cash's tenth birthday.

On one of my morning walks last week.

Stacey and I went to see Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. To refresh our memories in anticipation of this latest MIF movie, we recently watched all the previous installments in the series. True to form, each film tries to outdo the previous one with more outrageous stunts and lucky escapes from unbelievably perilous situations. This newest installment follows the pattern, but it was fun to watch. It was full of action, tension, and mayhem. It ended with a cliffhanger to set us up for part two which will be released a year from now. I was a big fan of the Mission Impossible television series, which was more subtle and cerebral than its movie counterparts.

Out in the garden, things are progressing. This sultry weather has turned the world into a temperate jungle. We are engulfed in lush vegetation. Some of the best things that happen in the garden are accidents. Last year I dumped all my spent poppy plants in the compost pile. I thought I had harvested all their seed before I did that, but I didn’t and the compost pile didn’t heat to a temperature high enough to kill the seeds. This spring, Kurt tilled that compost into the row where we planted onions and the poppies grew – better than the onions. Right now they are the most beautiful flowers on the compound. They are breadseed poppies, Papaver somniferum, from which opium is derived, but these do not produce high levels of the alkaloids used to make opium. We use the seeds in poppy seed cake and on bread and bagels. But mostly we love them for their floral beauty.

My favorite color of poppy.

Breadseed poppies in the onion row.

Yesterday we went to the Amish Auction over in North Bingham. We go every year. It raises funds for their school. It’s a big event. They had four or five different auctions going on simultaneously – livestock, farm equipment, food, outdoor equipment, quilts, plants. We don’t usually bid on anything. The only thing tempting was the garden plant auction. They had beautiful potted perennials and shrubs, but the bidding always goes way too high. It was fun just to go and walk around, look at the quilts, watch the livestock bidding. We bumped into people we know, Amish and English.

In the livestock tent.

In the main auction barn.

Test driving pony carts.

It rained in the night. My morning walk was short because everything was dripping and I didn’t want to get my church clothes wet. Church was good, but I was hungry and the meetings went long and that made me impatient. Now we are home and lunch will be ready soon. We’re having breakfast for lunch – pancakes and bacon and eggs. It’s warm again today and humid. I will take a nap and when the day cools toward evening, I’ll go out to walk the garden and plan my week. We are going to visit Sarah and Tosh this weekend. The Thayns will be there too. That will be fun. The Journal will be late next week. I hope you have a good and restful Sabbath.