How Far Would You Go To See A Movie?

When you’re a teenager, you lie to your parents. About sneaking off to a party. Getting drunk with friends. Hooking up with a girlfriend/boyfriend/teacher. What I did was much more mortifying. I would tell my parents I was going over to a friend’s house, when in actuality I rode my bike 10 miles on the highway just to see a movie.

For me, seeing movies was kind of a religious experience. I kept notebooks on the films I had seen. I had a separate list for directors I liked and the movies they made. I would even design different posters for the features I admired on cardboard. Pitiful, huh?

Hercules In The Haunted World was one of the first movies I saw on my one of my untruthful jaunts by bike. I think I was 12 or 13 at the time.I knew director Mario Bava from Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, but this was a swords-and-sandals epic starring beef-bag Reg Park as Hercules who travels to Hades to get a magic stone to free his lady love from possession. The evil wizard was Christopher Lee, no less. The scenes in the Underworld were wonderfully surreal- with rock monsters and zombies and filmed in a riot of expressionistic color. I was transfixed.

Station Six-Sahara was the second trek into the city, and I knew this was a more adult film because it starred Baby Doll herself- Carroll Baker. Baker plays Catherine Star and she and her ex-husband crash their car into a remote oil rig in the Sahara Desert one night. In no time, she is lathering up the men working there to fight amongst each other for her affection. Baker is sexy and great in this one, lasciviously eating a peach at the breakfast table, sitting around outside in a bra, or taking a nighttime stroll while nude in a white fur coat. As expected, it doesn’t end well. Years later I saw this at Lincoln Center as a selection of one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite movies.

Night Of the Iguana was another one my parents did not want me to see. But I’d already read the Tennessee Williams play at the local library, and wasn’t about to let them stop me. I was really blown away by John Huston’s adaptation and that cast was amazing, with a fiery Richard Burton as the defrocked preacher, Deborah Kerr as the prim spinster traveling with her ancient poet father. But it was Ava Gardner who stole the film as the lusty owner of the hotel,  especially her nightly swims with maraca-shaking Mexican boys. It was worth every callous on my tired feet.

Bus Riley’s Back In Town, was one I was dying to see because it was an original script by another favorite playwright- William Inge (although he asked to have his name taken off the credits when it was finished).  Small town stud Bus Riley (Michael Parks) returns home after a three-year stint in the navy. But when he tries to get a job at the local mortuary, the male mortician makes a pass at him. His married, vixenish ex-girlfriend (Ann-Margret), rich and very bored, tries to get Bus back in her clutches. And his new job selling “atomic” vacuum cleaners door-to-door gets him hit on by lonely, horny housewives. Parks is in full faux James Dean mode, but it was a lot of junky fun, and I’d kill to have it on Blu-ray.

Lilith was a haunting Robert Rossen film about a mentally ill girl (Jean Seberg). Warren Beatty stars as the new orderly at the sanitarium she resides in, who falls under her spell. I think there were 4 people in the theater when I saw it, but I loved it so much. Several years ago, while I was in Paris, I made a pilgrimage to the Montparnasse Cemetery to lay flowers on Jean Seberg’s grave and I was flooded with images from Lilith while I was there.

The Secret Of My Success was a 1965 British dark comedy of a young man’s (James Booth) rise from Constable to ruler of a South American country. But it had one unforgettable segment with the gorgeous Honor Blackman (Goldfinger’s Pussy Galore) living in a castle where scientific experiments in the basement resulted in giant spiders, which get loose and chase everyone down. It was a great section of the movie, and unfortunately has never made its way to home video. I would tell friends about the movie for years but no one ever believed me, and it wasn’t until I caught it on Turner Classic Movies that I was relieved I hadn’t imagined that scene with the huge spiders.

One of the most cockamamie trips I ever took was when I was living in Boston and I found out the Swedish film 491 was playing in a small theater in Vermont. I had read the Grove Press book, which was about delinquent teens, and it was pretty racy. The movie was also directed by Vilgot Sjoman, who made I Am Curious, Yellow. But it wasn’t opening in Boston, much to my disappointment. How the hell I found out it was playing in Vermont is a mystery. This was years before the internet. But I climbed on a bus and traveled miles to some town just to see the movie. I vaguely recall the film was in black and white and pretty dour, but there was a troubled blonde girl in it and she had a suggestive scene with a dog that did shock me. I guess it was worth it, for that movie has never shown up since. Every time I mention the title people think I’m confusing the number for NY Government Services.

I talked my good friend Cyndi once into going to a horror movie marathon at a local Connecticut drive-in. It was because one of the movies was David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within, which I was dying to see. I’d seen Rabid and was immediately a fan of Cronenberg’s darkly perverse body-horror film and I’d heard about They Came From Within, but could never find a theater playing it near me. Unfortunately, this was Christmas Eve night when we went to the drive-in, and it was freezing. They provided in-car heaters but it did little to keep us warm and the movies that proceeded the Cronenberg film were just God-awful. Cyndi, understandably, was beginning to fume. But suddenly the movie did come on. Set in a modern high-rise complex in Canada where little slug-like creatures are passed from resident to resident (often by kissing) which turns them into sexually voracious predators. It was like Night Of the Living Dick, and the best Christmas present anyone could ever hope for.

When I lived in Provincetown in the 1970s my good friend Frankie G and I would hitchhike 50 miles to Boston to see the latest Robert Altman film. Frankie’s favorite movie was McCabe & Mrs. Miller. That movie really felt like an anthem to Provincetown at that time- dreamy and stoned and filled with loveable losers. But Altman’s films were always unexpected treats and I had no problem riding in the back of some rickety-old truck to see movies like The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, or our favorite- 3 Women, Altman’s dreamy surreal masterpiece starring Shelley Duvall in an unforgettable turn as Millie Lammoreaux, a clueless cosmopolitan nursing-home attendant. Sissy Spacek plays her oddball roommate who slowly assumes her identity. It’s a crackpot Persona, but images from that movie have haunted me for years. One thing that I thought Altman did so brilliantly was when he repeatedly showed Millie’s dress caught in the car door, which first made you laugh and eventually breaks your heart.

I did break down and take a bus into Boston to see The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie, though. John Cassavettes was another director I was obsessed with, and aside from A Woman Under The Influence, starring his astonishingly gifted wife Gena Rowlands, his movies didn’t exactly open wide. What flipped me out about his films was that they felt unscripted, improvisational, and yet heightened somewhat, and dangerously off-kilter. I’ll never forget getting into Boston for the first showing of Chinese Bookie and I literally was the only person in the theater. The movie was mesmerizing. One of Cassavettes’ repertoire-  Ben Gazzara was absolutely brilliant as the seedy owner of a strip-club with gambling debts to sleazy loan sharks. The movie felt messy and rambling and dark, like a neo-noir, and I was mad for it. It broke my heart there there was no one else there in the theater that morning to share that experience.

I think the dumbest, and costliest, long trip to the movies happened one summer while I was managing a movie theater on Cape Cod. I had one day off and there were two movies opening in Boston that I just had to see. So, I splurged and actually took a plane into Boston to see them. And a flight back that evening. The first film I bought a ticket for was Ridley Scott’s Alien, and a half-hour in to this sci-fi shocker about a monster stowaway on a space ship I thought to myself, “this is a rip-off of It! The Terror From Beyond Space.” But it didn’t lessen the suspense or my enjoyment of the surreal H. R. Giger sets. Then I high-tailed it across town, by cab, to see Russ Meyer’s Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens. Meyers was a favorite of mine. Very little can match the psychedelic insanity of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, which he co-wrote with film critic Roger Ebert, about a female rock band’s rise to fame in swinging Hollywood. But Ultra-Vixens was a tired affair. Meyer is terrible in some of his later films because he’s in on the joke. What I loved about his early work is the way he dropped his big-busted females in the middle of these ripe, rural melodramas, like Vixen, Mudhoney or Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and plays it straight. Aside from Meyer’s new “discovery” Kitten Natividad this movie felt forced and unfunny and I was weary on the plane-ride home cursing myself for spending two week’s pay just to see a couple of movies, especially when I worked in a damn movie theater.

I used to get annoyed when a movie opened here in New York and a friend would say “Oh, that’s playing on the East Side- it’s too far.” It was just two subway rides and you were right at the theater. How difficult is that? But lately, even I sometimes plan to see a movie uptown and get to the subway station and hesitate a minute, wondering if maybe I shouldn’t wait for it to come out on DVD, or show up streaming on Netflix. But then I think back on when I was a teenager pedaling my bike dangerously along the highway just to see Carroll Baker nude in a fur coat in Station Six-Sahara. Suddenly I’m on the subway platform waiting for the train, and the infinite possibilities of cinema.