1939 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

AnnMarie Gerardo

1932

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Interviewed on February 22, 2021

By Erin Gerardo

The first movie I remember in detail was The Little Princess.  I was surprised [when] I looked up the dates and it was around the same date, about 1939, as Gone With the Wind, or The Wizard of Oz. I may have seen a rerun. People saw reruns of those movies a lot. It’s interesting to think back on what you really remember and why.

I remember a lot about the experience when I was in junior high. That was when I was allowed to go places with my girlfriends. We used to walk 8 blocks to the movie theatres. The theatre was called State Street. It might not be there anymore but that is what it used to be called. We didn’t have a lot of money to spend so we would save up. It was about a quarter. We would go in with our own candy, if you went in with 10 cents you would have a whole handful of candy. I would go with my neighbors, Jane Sheeran and Rosemary. The whole thing was an experience. The movie theatre inside was big and beautiful. We used to have a lot of fun running up and down the steps. The carpet was dark red velvet and we would go into the ladies rooms which had so many mirrors and we would pretend to be glamorous. It was grand fun to run around. A lot of times they would have a double feature. Sometimes we would hide and we would get to see the second feature. If we didn’t hide, we would sneak in. We found the ways of some of the doors that weren’t completely closed and we would sneak in the theater and that was a lot of fun. We would be there a long time.

Another important thing to note in going to the movies was the end of the war. The war was ending in 1945 and so the coming attractions were all about war. In between the coming attractions would be news, tanks coming back and forth. That was the beginning of technicolor and so movies became very vivid. I remember the colors.

When I was a child we would see movies depending on what was boring and what wasn’t boring. There were a lot of fantastical movies at that time. There were a lot of good movies. With The Little Princess, I probably read the book after because I remember all the details. I used to love to read. The story goes that a little princess was left at this boarding house and she was left at Miss Minchin’s boarding school. I still remember the name. It was a very fancy boarding school for girls. She was treated lovely and something happened to the father who was paying for her to stay there and then he was gone. They then took this little princess girl and she was put into the attic to act like a scullery maid. There was another girl up there who also was a scullery maid. There was a middle eastern man next door who would make delicacies for her to eat and when she went upstairs it was like she was transported to a fantastical beautiful world. And he would bring the servant girl to eat too. Then the father comes back and is able to pay so Miss Minchin treats her nicely again. I remember the colors in the room were dark and deep and it was like a wonderful movie that I would want to see again and again.

The movies later that I seemed to like were romantic ones.. Lots of movies also transitioned to talking about war times. When you think about these movies as classics, you have to wonder how they would do in today’s era. I was always a very feminine girl and the movies that I thought were wonderful were fun movies. I think its interesting how things have changed over time and how some things have not changed at all. There will frequently be things that happen over a 10 year period and we can base our films around that. I like dramas, I like things that have meat to them so even today I find myself watching older films. Although often times they don’t end true to the way that history actually happened.