Classic Films

Posted by Dan Lalande

She remained the stuff of total male devotion. The waiter, in fact, was around her like a bee on a blossom.

Eventually, he pulled himself away to scout my wife and I a table.

His walk cleared a path that put the object of his ardor fully in my sight, and my mind turned the object of our initial introduction: Barbra Streisand.

I was not a fan but there Barbra was, gracing the cover of a movie magazine I regularly purchased.

A few days later, in class, I overheard her - the woman now before me in the restaurant - talking about Barbra's latest romantic entanglements.

Using knowledge gleaned from my magazine, I weighed in, and was soon enveloped in small talk with the Goddess of Grade Nine. I even had , I informed her, the latest publication on Miss S.

The next day, I brought the magazine to school, and handed it over like Sir Francis Drake offering his cape.

Out of nowhere, a beehive of girls showed up, completely enveloping the magazine, the drop-dead gorgeous creature holding it, and the entire area between myself and her. They swept her away to an area I knew not where, leaving me in the manner of the time's hit song: alone again, naturally.

This time, however - wife and waiter occupied with one another - I had her all to myself.

"Hi," I began. "I'm -"

Her head turned violently away, into a world of walls, plants and uninteresting wall hangings.

After lunch that day back in junior high, she shyly returned the magazine.

Barbra's likeness was scarred and torn. She was nothing special now, robbed of anything that made her attention-worthy.

It was her intelligence, I now knew after all these years, that had kept Barbra, then and now, off my list of favorites.

What's so lucky about people needing people?

Posted by Dan Lalande

He was the greatest romantic singer of the twentieth century.

Small wonder, then, that my wife and I had our biggest fight to his music.

One rainy afternoon, back when we were just dating, I entered the car she was driving and informed her that it was all over. It wasn't of course but I desperately wanted a specific reaction, namely, a "don't do this to me...I love you...I can't bear to be without you."

I was looking for her to violate her stalwart character in the most dramatic and inconceivable way possible.

This was something she had never done - not when her parents brought her to the brink of vulnerability with the Greek drama familiar to so many families, not when her troubled sibling had asked her to serve as his human shield, not when school or work tried to cripple her with dire commitment.

So if she did it for me, just me, I would truly know that she loved me.

Surely Frank Sinatra, egging her on through the stereo, would inspire her to action. Frank, half tough guy, half sentimentalist, like her. He had overcome the fickleness of show business, had built palaces in the desert, had elected a president. A man of such milestones, of such persuasion, could move one even such as she.

'"Fine," she replied fliply. "It's over."

I don't know which it was that was filling the sudden silence: the singular pounding of the rain against the windshield or the pounding of my disappointed heart against my chest. Where had Frank disappeared to? Where was his emphatic purr, not long ago filling the entire car?

The tape, like our relationship, had ended unexpectedly.

Frank could sing like he did because he was no stranger to heartache. He had company now, another fallen romantic made hard by reality.

Posted by Dan Lalande

I hit him over the head with a carrot.

That was our introduction, the squeaky bonk the plastic carrot with the smiley face made the first words, in effect, I ever said to him. The first he ever said to me came in the form of a long, loud wail, enough to rattle the windows of every home in the neighborhood. We all laughed at this - myself and the slightly older kids I managed to impress with my half hearted torture of the little newcomer - as we watched him peddle off, still crying, down the street on his tricycle.

Later on, as we aged, there were other forms of torture - worse ones, like being excluded from the experience of the movies. Not that we went that often but we knew that it was harder for him; that, being younger, it would take a lot more begging to see things with guns and car chases and girls.

Then there was that legendary late afternoon in his garage where his father attacked his mother, and his mother implored him to grab a mop and to hit his father repeatedly so that he'd stop hitting her repeatedly.

I'm sure it created a long, dark hole inside him, one he went on feeling for a long, long time. I'd like to think that as he grew, he flirted with replicating his father's behavior, realized he had a problem, and sought help. I'd also like to think that he is now a model human being, kind and appreciative towards all.

And that whenever he hears of a movie that he'd like to see, he goes.

Or, if he remains full of hurt and rage, that he goes anyway, and that it is his one form of escape and triumph over those armed with carrots, mops, and denial.

Posted by Dan Lalande

I had no idea what to expect.

Only that in a few short moments, my mother and I would stop rifling through these racks of brightly colored dresses and head off to a movie theatre - an environment I had yet to investigate.

We left he store and entred the theatre. I felt both suffocated and comforted by the daunting-soothing darkness. The film rolled. Great swathes of color danced funnily before me, in time, music and logic that soon formed a story - the tale of Snow White and her seven dwarves.

I began to wonder whether this was a glimpse into a viable alternate reality, one my parents simply hadn't informed me of yet; that there were other kinds of people, fun-loving cherubs with rosy noses, who lived somewhere on the same planet as I, only on some outer edge.

When the Wicked Queen converted herself into a decrepit old crone, I knew, somehow, that I had been mistaken; that such a world was not possible, that whatever I was seeing was something that existed entirely for its own sake; not a reflection of a real world but something that enhanced reality, something that we all, for whatever reasons, needed periodically, with the same sense of need that Snow White had for the love and support of the dwarves or for the magic kiss of the prince.

We emerged into the sunlight, and I realized that the rules of the world from which I had taken temporary leave by way of this adventure remained firmly in place.

I was sorry that I would not be able to go off and play among dwarves, but happy, too, as I nestled my little hand against my mother's, that I lived in a world without witches.

Posted by Dan Lalande

It was made of thin, shiny plastic, and was certain to crack if I attempted any of the manual acrobatics he pulled off with such panache.

Atop my head, then, it would remain, as precious to me as a gold crown. As long as that bowler sat atop my head, we were spiritual brothers he and I, identical in our smallness, our sense of being at odds with the world, our funniness.

We were one, too, when it came to women; what heights he would have to reach, what physical tricks he would have to perform to win them over.

The one that eluded me was no 1920s beauty but the logic of first crushes is as difficult to explain as one of his great slapstick tricks.

When, after all of my physical vulnerability, facial gesticulating, and clever improvisation, she informed me that she was warming up to me, my twelve year old heart soared.

A few days later, I returned from school to find my crying mother sitting in a car. "Get in!," she ordered. "Where are we going?", I asked. "In!!!", she reiterated.

I did as I was told. As the car rolled past the brown towers in which we lived, I shot a look at the balcony of the girl. I knew, somehow, that I was never coming back to her, that my mother's most recent marriage had suffered a serious severance, and that we were on our way, possessions be damned, to a new life God knew where.

I knew then all that he, Chaplin, had known: life at the hands of an emotionally unbalanced mother, an unwitting kinship with the road, the inability to form lasting connections.

But I was worse off, even, than he - not even able to take my hat along as life's companion.

Posted by Dan Lalande

"I'll never write again!"

The words were aimed at a notebook I had just snatched it from his hands.

"Don't be ridiculous," he answered. His voice had taken on the cool of a lion tamer in the face of a raging, unpredictable beast.

I wanted to dig my claws into the pages, into him - my own father - for not bringing to light that I was a natural, a boy wonder, a fifteen year old who wrote like a man of forty.

He talked some more, until I bid him a diplomatic goodbye and boarded the bus back to my mother's. She'd be complaining about how the booze she was holding was burning a small hole in her chest. For the first time ever, I would know how she felt.

How tempting it was to liberate each page from the flimsy metal rings that confined them to narrative coherence, and to let the wind from the bus window do with them what it would. I could see them populating the downtown streets, like paper pigeons. But I didn't do it.

I got home, bid my mother hello, and went up to my room. I examined the white pages of my script, and held each one with a mix of tenderness, pain and resolve, like Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, cradling his dead birds. I see, you can hear him saying behind the eyes in that famous sequence, so now I know the true scale of what I'm up against.

I put the notebook in a drawer, then sat down to write. I paused, rose, and let the drawer out just an inch or two. I wanted it, my father's eye, to see me, see me write and write and write. I wrote remembering the final images of the film: Brando, bruises and blood...triumphant.

Posted by Dan Lalande

Mine was nowhere as good as his.

For one, he had the height. While I stood 5' 10', he towered over almost our entire inner circle.

Two, he had the mask. They had just come on the market, these hard plastic likenesses of Darth Vader, and cost what was then - and still today - a small fortune, particularly to us sixteen year olds. But, thank to his tallness, he was the first of us to have secured a job; lying about his age, he was hired by a local a bar. So there he was, in dark clothes, cape and impressive, expensive mask, a dead ringer for this new villain who, since summer, was fast capturing the public imagination.

I had to make do with the only character from the just released Star Wars I could get away with; given my everyboy looks and my lack of anything larger than life, it was going to be blandest. The saving grace was that he was also the hero.

I found a robe-like karate outfit, and made a makeshift light saber from the cardboard tube left over from a roll of wrapping paper; thank God it was close to Christmas, or Darth would have gone to this community center dance as the only representative of the movie.

If you were on the streets of downtown Ottawa that December of 1977, you would have seen the dynamics that energized the film completely disrupted, for there were Luke and Darth, mortal enemies, walking and laughing together.

At the dance, the predictable happened: everyone was impressed by Darth - including a miniature version of same, with whom he danced all night. When, just to be sure, Darth The Taller asked whether or not the presence inside Darth The Smaller's mask was male or female, he disappointedly heard a distinctly female voice answer, "Male!"

I had to work much harder to explain who I was, particularly when separated from Darth, in whose company my appearance became self explanatory.

I did, however, manage to get into a long, engaging conversation with a cute-as-a-couch-full-of-kittens brunette, whose costume, unlike her endearing smile, I can't remember.

After a night's worth of chatting, the fateful moment came - the obligation to ask for her phone number. I got as far as the first syllable. I was interrupted by a protracted "Ahhhhhhh! That's what your costume is!," just as Darth rejoined me. "You're the cute guy in the movie!" Wonderful! Wonderful!!! I could have de-masked Darth, gotten on my tippy toes, and kissed him full on the lips; after that comment, procuring the phone number would be a cinch! "Except," she added more quietly, "that you're not cute."

I smiled a smile hollower than my best friend's unattended mask. I allowed her to take her leave, and Darth and I, as single as we were before the evening began, set out a few songs before evening's end into the cold and dark.

What good were our presences with no princesses to procure?

Posted by Dan Lalande

Like most of the population, thirty years ago this week, I said goodbye to the King.

That August of 1977, his posthumous presence plastered the planet: he was all over the news, of course - clips from his films, excerpts from interviews, concert footage - but was just as visible on t-shirts, posters and enough commemorative knick knacks to fill a gaggle of Gracelands.

A close friend of mine had just returned from Israel, where, she told me, young and old were mourning Elvis.

My mother, estranged from my father some seven years, cried like a teenager in the throes of her first break-up, replacing the curses she usually hurled may father's way with fond reminiscences of the husband she first met to Elvis' music.

The National Enquirer - the only tabloid there was in those days - published a controversial front page photo of the King in his coffin. The photo (the story came out later) was taken by a cousin of Elvis' on the take, with a camera concealed in a tie pin. The public as outraged - but the Enquirer pleaded good corporate citizenship; "We gave people what they wanted," they explained, "proof that the man was really gone."

It didn't work. Theories that Elvis was alive and well lasted for the next fifteen years.

In the end, of course, even the most stubborn of theorists was forced to say goodbye to him.

My goodbye took place to the sound of Elvis' greatest hits, as they blared across the crowded grounds of local fair. While exiting the premises with my girlfriend, I spotted a small photo in the left hand corner of a newspaper some kid was hawking.

There it was, for only the squinting eye to see: Groucho Marx, dead at 87.

To have made that contribution to film, to television, to wit...only to be footnoted, I lamented.

We reached our bus to the sounds of the musical tribute that had just started to climb the charts that week:

"The King is gone...the King is I gone...but long live his name."

You bet your life.

Posted by Dan Lalande

A dozen pairs of eyes were upon me, each with that same cynical expression.

They remained me as I shuffled humbly about the room, doing my best to look impoverished, desperate, in dire need.

They continued to look on as a dialogue developed between myself and the grey haired man in the non descript suit, just off of the noisy concession stand from which the smell of melted butter wafted.

"No," he explained in a tone kind but firm, "those have to go back to the distributor."

The "distributor"- whatever that was. I tried again, a little less quietly this time, working in my all-consuming passion for the movies.

When I got a small smile out of him, I thought perhaps that that was it: the turning point. What would surely follow would be a, "Welllll...if it means that much to you.":

But it was not to be. He stood fast to his professional obligations, and no movie-crazy 13 year old was going to change his mind, no matter how sweet, sincere or obsessed tat greasy-haired adolescent appeared to be.

The expressions of the members of the army that he kept behind him - in their regulation uniforms of suit, cigar and walking stick - remained unchanged...and yet, their sneers seemed to have intensified. I would not be taking them home after all, these photos of W.C. Fields which just last week graced the theatre while it played W.C. Fields and Me , and they, to a one-dimensional man, were reveling in the pain of my failure, happy, in the manner of the toddler-hating fusspot in whose image they had been created, that a child of need had had an adult back turned on him.

I considered trying yet again, but by the time my eyes fell from the silent sneer of the endless Fields' to the off-white head of the theater manager, he, like Scrooge confronted by Cratchit, was bidding his goodbye through a devotion to the matter of making money.

I left, realizing that no matter what argument I presented, I had no right to those photographs - not because they had to go back to some "distributor," but because that it was he who belonged in Fields'company and not I.

He was not the kind to give a sucker an even break.

Posted by Dan Lalande

Earthquakes. Tidal waves. Fires.

We withstood them all, valiantly flirting with death and bravely rescuing whoever was losing that same gamble to the fickle fatalism of the elements.

Torrents of water took apart walls, sending brick-littered spray all over us. Raging flames pursued us up every floor of the highest of high rises, until only the roof brought relief. Great chunks of street were torn in half, as easily as a sheet of foolscap, and only a few hurried steps prevented us from plunging into the crudely created chasm.

In short, the small confine that was the continual prey to each of these debacles, week after week after week, should have been declared an official disaster area.

Instead, like us, it emerged from it all more or less pristine, the only consequence of these incessant acts of vengeful nature a rumpled bed sheet or a fallen pillow.

It was a private world created by the confluence of my giddy cousins and I - usually high on sugary, homemade banana splits - and the proliferation of disaster pictures then flourishing in movie theatres.

With wide eyes and leaping hearts we took in The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno, and, in lulls between major releases, poor Japanese cousins like Tidal Wave, or pale imitation Airport rip-offs like Skyjacked.

They were the precursors of today's special-effects extravaganzas, these films, the last big, action-packed events before the advent of CGI. They were also metaphors for a deteriorating world, one being torn apart, tornado-style, by controversies such as Vietnam and Watergate.

We, of course, all of 12 years old, knew none of this - only the giddy, what's-going-to-happen-next thrill that came with confrontations between Charlton Heston and falling lamppost, or Paul Newman and a ten foot flame.

Seconds Away we called our homegrown amalgam of these films, the one we enacted and embellished - piling disaster upon disaster - every time we gathered in our grandmother's smallish bedroom, hitherto an ad hoc Catholic shrine.

What Jesus, who looked upon us from his picture-frame porch atop grandma's bureau - which shook with every rapidly stomped foot and trembled with every fallen body - thought about all of this, I can't begin to imagine.

Perhaps, in his own, quiet way, he was contentedly reveling in the sight of children at play - and not looking on indifferently, as he seemed to be doing in the movies and the adult world.