1945 Frankfurt, Germany

Mrs. Nomita Brady

Born 1936

Frankfurt Germany AND Palm Beach Florida

Interviewed on February 8th, 2024

By Lance Brady

What is the first movie you remember seeing?

My first movie experience was in Germany after the Second World War was over. During the war, there were no movies. We just couldn’t see them. I was 9 years old. I’d never seen a movie before. I think it was dreary black and white, but to see something like that on this big screen was really a big deal. It was an imported American movie—it was something serious. It wasn’t a musical, or a comedy, or anything like that. 

So did you watch it in English?

Well I spoke no English then, but it was an American movie and didn’t have subtitles. America was the enemy of the state, you know, so we weren’t going to be seen speaking English. Especially with my mother being American, we had to be careful so they didn’t think she was a spy or something like that.

What did you think of the characters, actors, and story?

Having never seen a movie, I wouldn’t know about characters or anything like that. It was all vastly new and overwhelming. I had been to a couple of plays in my younger years, but nothing like that. I don’t remember anything about it at all other than it was a huge experience. My brother and my mother were with me. My mother had seen movies before because she grew up in Maryland, but I don’t think anybody saw any movies during the entire war. Nobody had seen anything as long as I was alive.

Do you remember the theater?

No! I mean, we probably walked (to the theater). We didn’t have a car… nobody had cars. Maybe we rode our bicycles. I really don’t know anything more about it, just that it was my first experience.

Were there any movies once you got to America that you remember a lot more?

Yeah, plenty of them!

What is the first movie you could name?

Well then we came to America and I remember several times we were taken to movies, when there was something going on at the house where they wanted us out of there. I remember getting boxes of candy. One time my brother got very upset because he bit into candy and it was a moth ball, and he screeched loud. I remember everyone looking at us.

Most of the movies then were Westerns and they all had a newsreel and they all had, you know, some kind of cartoony short, and then you’d get the movie. I don’t remember what we saw. That was a looooong time ago.

The first movie I remember sort of was The Merry Widow. 

Image 1: Poster of The Merry Widow (1934)

Then I went to boarding school in Palm Beach and there my big experience was we got to go to the movies once, without a chaperone! I remember that movie. It was with John Wayne. It was something like, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli,” because there was a song associated with it. I remember being very upset because there were a lot of movies during that time about the Second World War, and having come from Germany, it bothered me so much that they made them all so ugly, so awful and the way they were played were always stupid and wrong. I thought it was unfair as a kid.

Afterwards, we went to a drug store, and they had these soda fountains and booths, and it was the first time I ever had vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce. To this day, I love it. That has nothing to do with the movie, but it does connect to the movie for me because it happened the same day.

How old were you at boarding school?

I was a freshman, so I was 14. 

Who was with you for that movie?

It was like two or three other girls. Only other one I remember was Mary Flynn, who was my best friend.

Do you remember anything about the theater or venue?

Not really, it was a typical kind of movie theater. Popcorn wasn’t very available in those days. Now, you spend more money on candy and drinks than on the ticket but in those days, they didn’t have much of that.

Being in a girls school, we didn’t have too many outlets. Movies were super important to us. All those famous actors like Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe were alive in our thinking because we had no television; that was our outlet. We lived for the weekends to go to these movies. At that time, the Catholic Church had this “Legion of Decency,” or something like that. Every year you had to stand up in church and put your hand up and swear that you will not go to R-rated movies. Can you imagine? A lot of the best movies, we never got to see. We stuck with mostly musicals and comedies and things like that.

Image 2: Poster from the Legion of Decency

Any other childhood movie memories?

Then, I was in another school, and I remember I went to go see movies with my friend Sandra Moore, it was in South Jacksonville. There were a lot of musicals. And I think Marilyn Monroe with Some Like it Hot or something. But then we were much more interested in the actors and actresses. We were big on following their lives. They had at least four or five various movie magazines that we just bought avidly that had everything about the movie stars. We ate that up. We all had crushes on different actors. 

It was a year after I finished high school when I worked for a company called Florida State Theaters, which owned all the movie theaters in Florida. That was big time. I started out as an Assistant Receptionist. They had this huge building where the main theater was. On the very top of the building was a turret place where you had to climb up these metal stairs to get to it, where advertising was done by this woman named Edith Smith. I would sit and watch her. Then, she went on medical leave and I took over. It was quite something! I think there were only like three or four television stations. They did a lot of advertising in theaters. I was dealing with them, putting together the ads and stuff like that. I did such a good job that the president of the company had me go to Miami to learn more tricks of the trade to become part of the upper echelons of the company. My mother decided that was not the way to go, and she sent me to Manhattanville College. The president said that if I ever wanted to come back, there’d always be a place for me. Every now and then, we’d get some movie actors in at the time. I’d have to deal with them!

Relationship to Interviewee: Mrs. Brady is my paternal step-grandmother.

Note: The Merry Widow was chosen as the featured image, due to Mrs. Brady’s memory of that film particularly.