Your parents/guardians favourite films? And did they themselves influence you?

Me ol' mum loved musicals of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

My father loved westerns of all sorts but would never miss "High Noon" if it came back to town, usually at the drive-in. I got my John Wayne, Randy Scott, Joel McCrea education from him. And don't forget Rod Cameron. He would also never miss a WWII war movie as a veteran of that conflict. I think his favorite may have been "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo."

My uncle's favourite movie is The Bridge on the River Kwai.He is also a fan of James Bond character and especially Sean Connery, of whom he can't talk enough. He had a large collection of movies on VCR cassettes.

My aunt's favourite movie is The Sound of Music. She is also a massive fan of Ben-Hur and the Hitchcock movies. Her favourite Hitch movie is Strangers on a Train. She is also a fan of horror movies such as The Haunting (1963) & The Innocents (1961). Her fav is Jack Nicholson and Bogart.

My parents knew a lot of actors names but I don't recall them discussing films. An exception: their description of entire theaters of bawling people watching pre-Code weepies with Jackie Cooper:



That gave me an early realization of the synergistic effects you get from large excited audiences. Staying home and watching a film (as I do these days) loses that.

My father was a WW2 vet and his description of negotiating mine fields has always made those film scenes vivid for me.

I had a grand aunt on my mothers side who I've been told often went to the cinema, her favorites were Rudolph Valentino and Fred Astaire, She went to see Valentino in The Eagle every day for two weeks. I guess there is at least one influence. From her I got a lot of Film fan magazines from the 1920s, she was still alive then, she thought I was the right person who would understand how great movies are. I've read them and I guess there are many unique pictures in them, and reading the letters section was very interesting too, fans asked the same questions then as they do nowdays, "Is He Married?", "Does He have a girlfriend?", "Do He have any pets?" and so on.



My other influence would be my mother, she loved movies and movie stars and had scrapbooks with pictures of her idols. Her idols were Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra and Burt Lancaster. Gable in It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind, Sinatra in Higher and Higher and Anchors Aweigh, and Burt in From Here to Eternity, those movies have been mentioned a lot. Humphrey Bogart, Melvyn Douglas, Ronald Colman and Walter Pidgeon were others she also liked. Fred MacMurray and Victor Mature were two she didn't like, she called them big blunt buffalos.

My father too went to the movies when young, but he never memorised any movies, except that they were cowboy movies and the only name he could remember was Ken Maynard. He gave me something else though, my love for jazz and jazz influenced vocalists.

I think my first film was "Fantasia" (1940) - not when first released, I ain't that old! I think I was about 5, and being unused to the routine of cinema I squirmed about, asked for explanations in a shrill voice, embarrassed the neighbors who had been so kind as to take me, and spoiled the enjoyment of most people within ten rows. There are posters on this board who think I am still hell-bent on spoiling folks' enjoyment of movies. They can attribute it to that formative experience.

In the immediate post-WWII years in the UK there were three cinema chains that, between them, showed nearly all the new Brit and US releases. There was no TV, of course, and my parents were at that time of limited means. Movies were a cheap entertainment, so we went once, twice, or even three times a week. You normally had to queue and it was quite normal to enter the cinema in the middle of a feature film and afterward walk out once it came round again to scenes you had already viewed. Entrance was 1/3d (one shilling and three pence - about US 8 cents). If you felt flush, you could often jump the queue by paying 1/10d, and savor the resentful looks of the proles in the 1/3d line as you swept pass them. My elder brother, who had just started dating girls, dreaded the doorman shouting "Seats only at 2/6d" and being torn between saving his pocket-money and having to show off to his date by parting with such an exorbitant sum (about US 16 cents!).

As to my parents' taste, they had none, but Dad was the decider. He was not big on musicals but pretty much anything else was acceptable. English films were, with a few exceptions, regarded as inferior substitutes for "real" movies (that is, American movies). Nothing much has changed there after seventy years.

Dad's favorite was Humphrey Bogart, and he did look a bit like him. His favorite female star was Grace Kelly, and my Mum was of that type (not quite in the same league of course!)

Films were rated "U" (universal entrance), "A" (children under 12 not allowed, over 12 only with an adult) and "H" for horror (children under 16 banned). There was no rating which discriminated against sexually explicit or violent films until the "X" certificate appeared in 1950 to replace "H". I remember being indignant at not being allowed to watch The Big Heat (1953) as I had a crush on Gloria Grahame (still do).

The period of my most frequent cinema going (late 40s to mid-50s) exactly coincides with the Film Noir epoch, which is why I am hooked on that "genre".

A running family joke which I did not understand as a child surfaced whenever my mother looked up the local rag to see what was showing. My father always suggested "Richard Dix in the Iron Road". Apparently in the pre-war years this was a movie that was repeatedly shown ad nauseam. I had no idea who Richard Dix was. I had never knowingly seen one of his movies. I still have not.

I have used the word "movies" here, but we never referred to them as that. It was always "the pictures" as in "Are we going to the pictures on Saturday?" or "My favorite picture".

I don't know. Both of them liked the Marx Brothers,Will Hay etc, and they also liked foreign films like Bicycle Thieves etc, but I don't remember either of them ever mentioning one film specifically as beimg their.favourite. They had been keen cinema goers when they were younger, but They didn't go to see new films very often when I was young, apart from taking me to kids films, but I do remember us going to see Discreet Charm of the Boirgeoise and enjoying it. And they liked Day for Night.