At the Movies

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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Mother’s Day snuck up on me this year, so it was not until this past Sunday itself that I devoted some time to thinking about my mother. And that made me think about our common interest in movies. The following is adapted from a memoir of sorts published a few years ago titled Promise: A Collection, about a visit that took place a few years before she passed away in October 2019.

Movie lovers of a certain age will recall that Pauline Kael was the film critic for The New Yorker and a hugely influential writer about cinema. Her I Lost It at the Movies book was a collection of some of her essays. It was published at a time when I was putting the Hardy Boys and similar series behind me and ready for a true reading challenge. A new library had recently opened in the Long Island hamlet where I lived, and my mother brought me there every weekend, when my father could drive us. (He remained in the car, listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes.)

She had been an avid reader and very good student, graduating high school in the Bronx after only three years. She went to work for New York Telephone, where her mother worked, but that stab at a career ended when she married and became a full-time homemaker. She was also a teacher in that until my sister arrived four years later, she taught her only pupil how to read and write. Once that door to the world of words was opened there was little doubt about what I wanted to do with my life.

My mother was very encouraging and delighted when I would read aloud from a book or newspaper. The creation of an original paragraph with a pencil on paper was received as though I was a Nobel Prize laureate. Some years ago when the publisher of my book on Jack Nicklaus and the 1986 Masters told me it was time to decide on a Dedication, I immediately knew what to do. At the Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters is conducted every year, fans are not called “fans” but patrons. When One For the Ages was published in March 2011, readers saw this Dedication: “For Gertrude (O’Brien) Clavin, my first patron.”

Taking the plunge one day at the library all those years ago, I borrowed the brand-new I Lost It at the Movies. The deeper joys of movies were revealed to me, that they could be both art and entertainment. Actually, I was already deeply smitten. Both my parents enjoyed motion pictures but because of babysitting requirements – or so I like to believe – they did not go to theaters together. One exception was during a vacation in the Catskills where at a drive-in we saw The Naked Edge with Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr. I wasn’t impressed with the movie but I was by my parents’ discussion afterward about Cooper having died a couple of months earlier. This was fantastic to me, that a dead man could be in a movie. How did they do that? Movies were magical indeed. I could not separate what was on screen from real life. In many ways, I still haven’t managed that feat.

My mother was the much more frequent movie-goer, and she had fewer boundaries in her cinematic taste buds. My father watched only war movies and John Wayne westerns. My mother went to see westerns with Wayne and others like Glenn Ford and Alan Ladd, comedies, melodramas, musicals, thrillers and everything in between except war movies. From the time I was six, I went along.

The first few years we walked up the street to Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx and took seats in the old theater there. After moving to Long Island, there were the theaters in Deer Park and North Babylon. We almost always went to weekend matinees because my mother didn’t drive and my father had to, with my younger sister and brother fighting in the back seat. (My mother finally passed her driver’s license test, on her eighth attempt, but by then we had long ceased going to movies together.)

If I were to make an indelible list of my 25 best movie experiences, at least 15 would be ones that I saw with my mother. This does not mean, however, that they are all great motion pictures, but that I enjoyed them and that time spent with my mother in happier days, and furtively observing her eyes and expressions as she participated in the movie experience. (This was replayed over the years on my children’s faces.) For two hours – or more, if a double feature – my mother existed in the world that Hollywood created, and I went there too. It was certainly kinder and gentler than the one we had.

We saw King of Kings, Where the Boys Are, The Misfits, Beckett, To Kill a Mockingbird, any Elvis Presley movie, Lawrence of Arabia, Birdman of Alcatraz, How the West Was Won, Cat Ballou, Father Goose, Hud, The Birds, Fail Safe, My Fair Lady, and dozens more. The last time together was probably when we saw Where’s Poppa? with George Segal and Ruth Gordon which, if you’re familiar with it, is not a film you should see with your mother, especially when you’re an adolescent.

Some years ago, when I was still teaching, I impulsively cancelled my last class of the day. I drove west for a long-overdue visit with my mother at the assisted-living facility that had become her home after 48 years on Villa Avenue in Deer Park. She had become increasingly forgetful and fragile after a mild stroke, and her declining eyesight made it frustrating for her to read even the large-print editions of books. This did not stop her from carrying a copy of one of my books whenever she tottered out of her room and went downstairs. She smiled when, answering the inevitable question, she said, “Yes, my son is a writer.”

We chatted in her room for an hour. She seemed content. Apparently, as her memory slipped away, the recollections of the hard and painful years went along with it. Then I fetched her cane and escorted her downstairs, where she would spend the rest of the evening.

I was set to leave when we saw that beginning to be shown in the home movie theater was Donovan’s Reef with John Wayne. I knew that look from long ago, and of course I stayed. Once more, I was at the movies with my mother.

Tom Clavin is the author/co-author of 25 books, including, most recently, Bandit Heaven and, with Bob Drury, Throne of Grace, both published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase copies, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.