1944 Trenton, New Jersey

Robert Muth 

1933

Trenton New Jersey 

Interviewed on February 8, 2024

by Esther Munoz 

 

I grew up in a suburb of Trenton, New Jersey. My parents were middle-class. My father worked for an insurance company. I have two basic kinds of memories

of films. First of all, you should realize that I was born in the depths of the depression. My father was very happy to still have a job. He only had to take a 10 percent pay cut. I can remember when my mother and father and I would go to a movie. 

 

Q: Could you tell me about your experience going to the movies? 

 

The first thing to understand is that we’re middle class people in the Depression. Going to a movie was a big deal. There wasn’t very much entertainment available to folks like us except movies. We would go to a movie and that was a major night-out-event. I remember specifically we would go to a Chinese restaurant, where you could get either chop suey or chow mein for 50 cents. So we would go to a restaurant and spend 2 dollars and then go around the corner to a motion picture theater. And there were 3 motion-picture theaters in Trenton, New Jersey. When you went to the movies, you saw what was called a short, which was sometimes a Walt Disney kind of thing. You might see a very short film about some true event. And then you would see what was called a news reel, news of the day. In those days, a lot of it was about what was going on in Europe and the rise of Adolf Hitler or something about the US military. You might see news about film stars.You have to understand, film stars occupied a space in the popular press far beyond what you would see today. And then you would see what was called the feature film. 

 

In those days, movies gave people something uplifting—music, happy times are here again, good times are coming—and you would see films that would show you the glamorous life. Glamorous apartments in New York City, people dressed in glamorous fashion—and it was all trying to revive your spirits in a time when people were having a difficult time. So I remember going to those kinds of movies with my parents. 

 

My family originally came from Philadelphia and we would go visit my grandparents there for a day. And I would go with the other neighborhood kids to a matinee performance. The evening movies were probably 35 cents but the matinee might be 20 cents and it was mostly for kids. We’d see a short, maybe a couple of them. We might see a double feature. The movie might be about Tom Mix (a cowboy). 

 

Q: Is there a favorite movie or actor you remember? 

 

This might have been a little later in time. Movies about a swimmer, a great swimmer and diver. She was an Olympic swimmer who turned Hollywood actress and you would see her do synchronized swimming with 30 other women in some sort of very gymnastic kind  of arrangement. I remember a swimming scene where they would all surface at the same time and then swim in unison around the pool. The name escapes me (edit: Esther Williams). It was consistent with the idea of seeing upbeat entertainment. 

 

The cowboys were the Lone Ranger and Tonto. 

 

Q: Is there a movie you particularly like, even if later in time? 

 

I especially liked The Third Man. It’s a movie set in Vienna right after the Second World War. The theme is about a very bad actor that is supplying watered-down penicillin to the hospitals in Vienna and children are getting sick and dying. It has a song that goes with the theme. It had several famous lines. There’s one where the bad guy is talking. He says “The Renaissance was dominated by terrible characters but it gave rise to beautiful architecture and art and so forth whereas in Holland there were years and years of democracy and what did they produce? They produced the cuckoo clock.” It’s a stark film with no special effects—there are no sound effects, no visual effects; it’s all very plain, a realistic kind of film, which I happen to like. That’s about all I can tell you.