1941 – Cotulla, Texas

John Lewis Gaddis

Born April 2, 1941

Cotulla Texas

Interviewed on January 16, 2025

by Salvador Gómez-Colón

Salvador Gómez-Colón (SGC): What are your impressions of silent films?

John Lewis Gaddis (JLG): They are very interesting to watch. They go at a completely different pace, and if [The Big Parade is] like the ones I’ve seen in the past, they assumed that reading speeds on the part of the audience were extremely slow, so the slides that go up, which you can read and five seconds might be up for twenty seconds or thirty seconds so the whole pace of it is a lot slower. But the facial expressions have to do much more with the films than would normally be the case.

The one I watched most recently with Toni [Dorfman], which was quite a lot of fun, was Wings, 1927, which was made in San Antonio, and it’s about the Army Air Force and their first aviation experiments in World War I. It was filmed at Kelly Fields, which is where a lot of that originally happened. The young Gary Cooper is in it and others, and it has some dog fights. It’s pretty impressive, the way it’s done––and silent, so it’s a whole new way of looking at movies.

What you’ll have to watch at some point is Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, 1950, which is a sound movie, but Gloria Swanson was a silent movie star. The movie is about a silent movie star whose fame has faded as she aged, and the real Swanson was exactly that kind of character. So she plays that role, which is really true to life and it’s the young William Holden and the elderly Gloria Swanson, in an old mansion, which is decaying along with her. It’s full of classic shots and whatnot. All right, so what do you want to know?

SGC: So the first thing is, was there a movie theater in Cotulla [TX, interviewee’s birthplace]?

JLG: Yes, there was a movie theater. It was from at least about 1910 or something like that. So it would have started out as a silent movie theater. Every little town had one, and they were known as picture shows, not movie theaters. When I was growing up, [the movie theater] was called Majestic, but they all had very impressive names. So you would go down and they would not show movies necessarily every evening, but it would be two or three nights a week. I know that the admissions fee in the 1920s was twenty-five cents for adults, and ten for kids. It probably was not greatly different when I was going there as a kid in the 40s.

Because we had no television, of course, in that period, we went to the movies all the time. There was no effort made really to keep the kids from seeing unsuitable movies–there were not really unsuitable movies. There were some that were pretty hard to explain, or to understand as kids and, but we would be taken there as well. There would always be some kind of a serial before the movie, a 30-minute or 25-minute serial. So this could be the Lone Ranger, it could be Hopalong Cassidy, it could be a number of things. It also could have been from an earlier period:
Buster Keaton or WC Fields. There would also normally be a cartoon, so it could be Bugs Bunny, but the coyote had not been invented yet. Mickey Mouse was.

The other thing I remember that was really quite difficult to understand in retrospect is that nobody bothered about the start time of the movie. You could just wander in at any point when the movie was going on and if you saw half of the movie, you just stayed there and then they would start it up again. After you went through the comedy and the serials and whatnot, then when you got to the point where you walked in, you just got up and left. Nowadays, we think about the continuity of movies. It didn’t seem to matter very much for us. We were just used to this in-and-out business.

The other thing I remember about it was that we would go twice a week. Kids would go, the town was small enough that the kids could just go unaccompanied.

The other thing that became pretty notorious as time went on and as the picture shows building kind of faded, was the mice and the rats in the theater, which would just run over your feet while you’re sitting there. You’d be sitting there and you feel something creep like that.

The movie theater was still running when I went on to college. By then, it was running technicolored movies. It had a wider screen so they could do what I think was sort of out of VistaVision or whatever, and this would be in the 1950s. So they were capable of running some of the epics like the Ten Commandments or mostly biblical epics that were made in that period. I don’t remember really what the last movie I saw there was, I’m sure it was when I went off to college and then saw a real movie theater, not just the Majestic in Cotulla.

That’s the other thing that was very impressive because the city theaters were giant palaces, and they were made to look like the insides of Egyptian temples or something like that, so it was great ornate decorations and balconies and whatnot.
So there was a Majestic Theater in San Antonio. It was a fabulous place, you know, and I think it may still be there. Some of those have been refurbished and rehabilitated. I remember there was the majestic theater, there was some Aztec theater in San Antonio, and they were much bigger and they had better projection devices. The Cotulla movie theater was locally owned but part of a franchise, but that was expected.
It was part of a small town life that everybody had a picture show and they went to it. I think there was probably a segregated separate picture show across the tracks in the Mexican part of town, showing Spanish language, movies, but we never went to that, so I don’t have any direct memory of that, but I wouldn’t be surprised because I don’t remember seeing a very many Spanish speaking people at our movie theater. So I think that was part of the segregation system that was going on there.

The theaters–it’s what we did, in the absence of television. Television came in the early fifties for us, it was so very primitive, but very small screen, blurry so it was not like going to the movies for sure. So the movies survived, well in the 1960s. It was part of town life, just like the soda fountain and the drugstore. All the stores in town were on the same street. No supermarkets or anything like that. Everything was within walking distance.

SGC: So how old were you the first time you went to the movie theater? Because you said kids would go?

JLG: I was going to the theater by the time I was squalling and misbehaving. Certainly by the time I could walk I was being taken to the movie theater. And it could be with our parents, it could be our grandparents, it could be neighbors, relatives, uncles, aunts. It was a form of recreation, just like the city swimming pool.

SGC: Do you remember the first movie you watched?

JLG: I’m sure it was probably one of the great classic movies of the 1940s. I can’t remember the first time I saw Casablanca.
I have a sense that I saw it long before I could understand it. I’m sure that while the war was going on, we were going regularly because there would always be newsreels before the movie.

So there would be about three different preliminaries before you actually got to the real movies, so there would have to be the serial, particularly on Saturday afternoon for the matinee, and this was for the young kids. but there would also be a comedy or some sort of cartoon, which would go on for ten or fifteen minutes. And then there would be a newsreel, and that was a big deal during the war because that’s how we saw how the war was fought, through the newsreels. Those would be twenty, twenty-five minutes or so, very patriotic.

SGC: Were these films like the films that, for example, Army cinematographers were filming in Europe and then bringing back?

JLG: Yeah sure it would be that, but the news organizations themselves had correspondents on the front. Everything they did was censored, of course, by the military. So we didn’t get anything that was not authorized.

SGC: You mentioned you don’t remember the first time you watched Casablanca. What was maybe the second or third time.

JLG: It’s kind of iconic, I have seen it six or seven times. So there was a point where I came to understand that it was not just a goopy story, which is what it looked like to little kids. Our response to these romantic movies was that they were too goopy. I came to understand learning something about the history of the war. What kind of like it was all about? And then further came to understand the circumstances in which it was made, it was not really made in Casablaca. It was made in Hollywood, but just the ability of those people to throw something like that together in a very sharp period of time with the quality of the acting and screenwriting and all of that, and it was a golden age as your instructor, I’m sure, has indicated to you.

Every now and then there was something, some movie that you just came out, which was perfect. Have you seen To Have and Have Not?

SGC: No, I haven’t.

JLG: Bogart and the young Lauren Bacall, who was 19 years old at the time. In real life, you know, she seduced Humphrey Bogart or he seduced her. So you can see their first interactions, which is this movie.

SGC:
What’s the plot for that one?

JLG: It’s not a war story. It’s a kind of a crime story. A lot of these were set in the Caribbean, and particularly, a lot were set in Cuba at the time. So Florida, Cuba, you going back and forth, all of that kind of thing. To Have and Have Not is famous for the line, which she delivers, “Is there anything you need?” And he says, “no.” And she says, “well, if you do, just whistle.” And then she pauses, and she says, “you know how to whistle, don’t you?” That’s so classic.
That’s so Hollywood.

SGC: One more question: if you could take any of these classical movies that’s not Casablanca, it’s not to have and have not, and have that be the movie that you can watch forever. Which one would it be?

JLG: I don’t know.
I think anything that would have become so obnoxious after a while. What I might think about is Toni’s particular enthusiasm for the Laurel and Hardy movies. These are shorts for the most part, and they were made in the early days of talkies. And they were immediate comedian air. Stan Laurel is very skinny, very quiet. Oliver Hardy, he’s very fat, aggressive and all. They made several hundred of these short twenty minute clips to be shown, before the main feature in the theater. And Toni is so fond of these, you know, that she has certain ones, that she will just insist on rerunning and rerunning and rerunning. So if you will look up Laurel and Hardy, County Hospital, from about 1933 or so, something like that or look up, Berthing Games, and that’s B-E-R-T-H-I-N-G Pains, then you’ll see what’s going. And these guys were masters of slapstick, started in vaudeville.

The other classic movie, which, as you probably know, I use in my freshman course is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.
In the you’ve seen that, and that’s 1935.

SGC: Why do you always show that clip and haven’t been interested in showing any other clips of the movie?

JLG: I show that clip because it’s perfect. It’s grace in motion. There’s not a wasted moment in it, and yet they’re doing extraordinary things. And that’s the way I want my students to write.
So they say, what does good writing look like? And I show them the clip and say it looks like that.

SGC: That’s an amazing way to end the interview. Thank you for that.

Note: John Lewis Gaddis, Robert Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale, is Salvador Gómez-Colón’s longtime professor. The interviewer also works as his teaching assistant. Interview transcript is produced from highly detailed notes. The interview was conducted over Zoom, with Professor Gaddis at his residence and Salvador in his dorm room.