Washington’s principal movie palaces were on the east side of Fourteenth Street. The Capitol was the grandest, with a stage show and an orchestra leader called Sam Jack Kaufman, whom I once saw in the drugstore next to the theater. He wore an orange polo coat that matched his orange hair. He bought a cigar. Between each movie showing, there was an elaborate stage show. I also remember Peter Lorre’s hair-raising and ear-deafening impersonation of himself in M. Then, there were the Living Statues. Well-known historic tableaux were enacted by actors and actresses in white leotards. Sex could often be determined only by wig. Even so, the effect was awesome in its marblelike stillness. Boys in puberty, or older, affected lust when they saw these figures, but those of us who were prepubescent sternly looked only to the beauty and verisimilitude of the compositions. Thus, in many a youthful bosom, a Ruskin—or even a Rose LaTouche—was awakened.
The Metropolitan was my favorite of the small theaters. I think it was here that Warner Brothers pictures played. The atmosphere was raffish. And the gum beneath the seats was always fresh Dentyne. The Palace Theater was also congenial, while the Translux, devoted to newsreels and documentaries, was the only movie house to open in my time, and its supermodern art deco interior smelled, for some reason, of honey. At the time of the coronation of George VI, there was displayed in the lobby a miniature royal coach and horses. I wanted that coach more than I have ever wanted anything. But my father made an insufficient offer to the manager of the theater. Later, I acquired the coach through my stepfather, to add to a collection of three thousand soldiers kept in the attic at Merrywood. Here I enacted an endless series of dramas, all composed by me. If ever there was a trigger to the imagination, it was those lead soldiers. Today they would be proscribed because war is bad and women under-represented in their ranks. But I deployed my troops for other purposes than dull battle. I was my own Walter Scott. I was the Warner Brothers, too, and Paramount as I played auteur, so like God, we have been told by film critics.
The most curious of the movie houses of my childhood was the Blue Hen at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the family went occasionally in the summer. What a Blue Hen had to do with a movie house I puzzled over for half a century until a young Delawarean in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre told me that the Blue Hen was the state university mascot.
At the Blue Hen I saw Love Song of the Nile with Ramon Navarro and Helen Broderick: a film that I can find no record of anywhere except in my memory. But I do know that Egypt was on my mind as early as 1932 when I saw The Mummy, with Boris Karloff. The effect of that film proved to be lifelong. Also, it must be recalled that in those days if you saw a movie once, that was that. The odds were slim that you would ever see it again. There were no Museums of Modern Art or film retrospectives. Today, thanks to videocassettes and DVDs, one can see a film as often as one likes. But since we knew back then that we would have only the one encounter, we learned how to concentrate totally.
In a sense, learning a film at a single screening must have been something like a return to that oral tradition where one acquired a Homeric song through aural memory. In any case, at seven I confronted not the rage of Achilles but the obsession of a man three thousand years dead. I was never to forget my first sight of the mummy in its case as, nearby, an archaeologist reads a spell from an ancient papyrus. Slowly, the linen-wrapped hand moves. The archaeologist turns; sees what we cannot see; starts to laugh, and cannot stop laughing. He has gone mad.
Fifty-eight years later, I watched the movie for the first time since its release and I became, suddenly, seven years old again, mouth ajar, as I inhabited, simultaneously, both ancient Egypt and pre-imperial Washington, D.C. Then, as the film ended, my seven-year-old world dissolved, to be glimpsed no more except for the odd background shot of a city street, say, in a 1932 movie, where now-dead people are very much alive, unconscious of the screening camera as they go about their business, in the margins of a film where they are forever, briefly, alive.
What appeals in The Mummy, other than the charnel horror? Obviously, any confirmation that life continues after death has an appeal to almost everyone except enlightened Buddhists. No one wants to be extinct. Hence, the perennial popularity of ghost stories or movies about visits to heaven that prove to be premature since heaven can always wait even if hell be here.
For a time, after The Mummy, I wanted to become an archaeologist, though not like the one played by Bramwell Fletcher, whose maniacal laughter still haunts me. (Years later, Fletcher acted in the first play that I wrote for live television.) I preferred the other archaeologist in the film, as performed by David Manners, who also appeared in Roman Scandals (1933), another film that opened for me that door to the past where I have spent so much of my lifelong present.
From earliest days, the movies have been screening history, and if one saw enough movies, one learned quite a lot of simpleminded history. Steven Runciman and I met on an equal basis not because of my book Julian, which he had written about, but because I knew his field, thanks to a profound study not of his histories but of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades (1935), in which Berengaria, as played by Loretta Young, turns to her Lionheart husband and pleads, “Richard, you gotta save Christianity.” A sentiment that I applauded at the time but came later to rethink.
Thanks to A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Marie Antoinette, my generation of prepubescents understood at the deepest level the roots—the flowers, too—of the French Revolution. Unlike Dickens’s readers, we knew what the principals looked and sounded like. We had been there with them.
In retrospect, it is curious how much history was screened in those days. Today, Europe still does stately tributes to the Renaissance, usually for television; otherwise, today’s films are stories of him and her and now, not to mention daydreams of unlimited shopping with credit cards. Fortunately, with time even the most contemporary movie undergoes metamorphosis, becomes history as we get to see real life as it was when the film was made, true history glimpsed through the window of a then-new, now-vintage car.
My first and most vivid moviegoing phase was from 1932 to 1939—from seven to fourteen. Films watched before puberty are still the most vivid. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Mummy, Roman Scandals, The Last Days of Pompeii. Ancient Egypt, classical Rome, Shakespeare when he was still in thrall to that most magical of poets, Ovid.
Although Roman Scandals was a comedy, starring the vaudevillian Eddie Cantor, I was told not to see it. I now realize why the movie, which I saw anyway, had been proscribed. The year of release was 1933. The country was in an economic depression. Drought was turning to dust the heart of the country’s farmland, and at the heart of the heart of the dust bowl was my grandfather’s state of Oklahoma. So bad was the drought that many of his constituents were abandoning their farms and moving west to California. The fact that so many Oklahomans, Okies for short, were obliged to leave home was a very sore point with their senator.