1947 Richmond, Virginia

Marilyn Pohlig
1939
Richmond, VA
Interviewed on September 11, 2019
by Kiran Baucom

Of course [the earliest movies I saw] would be Disney movies, like Cinderella and Snow White. I’m trying to think of the first other movie…it was very interesting, you know, as a child, with no television and all, the news of the day was a big thing, because otherwise we didn’t know what was going on. And there would be war videos, all that sort of thing, and there would be cartoons, which were very nice.

I have a feeling, although I don’t remember this, but I remember my mother talking about it, that—and it must have been with this other woman in the neighborhood she was friends with who also had a daughter—that they took us to see The Snake Pit, which was pretty awful. I think it was about mental illness, about institutions. My mother used to talk about that…I think they must have taken us to that, which probably even now they wouldn’t have allowed children to go. Actually I think the first [movie I saw] was probably Song of the South, which was the Uncle Remus tale, and then probably Snow White after that.

The theaters were very nice, we had two very nice ones. You know the Byrd on Cary Street, that’s still in operation, and then there was one downtown called Loew’s, now they have live performances of big name artists there, but it used to be a movie theater. And even better was that the manager of the theater was the father of one of the children in our class, and every year he would invite the whole class down to see a movie, at some off hour. You know, we didn’t go when there were other people there. But we thought that was exciting.

Both of the theaters had organs, you know big fancy theater kind of organs, and at the intermission people would sing and all that sort of thing. There was another theater on Broad Street that would have sort of a dance revue. They didn’t have an organ but they had tap dancing and that sort of thing as a little extra added entertainment [during intermission]. Between the news and cartoons and the music they really attempted to entertain you. In addition to the movie, you got a lot out of it for probably a dollar and a half. 

The Byrd and Loew’s were the two most popular, those were the nicest ones, the ones with the organs and music. And a funny little story about Loew’s—the organist there also played across the street at Miller & Rhoads, in the very fancy dining room that ladies would go to, the tea room, it was called. We used to just like to watch him. He would play and then he would rush out, and you knew he was going to Loew’s to play. He had it all timed so he could play first at one and then at the other, because they were right across the street from each other. Everybody just loved him. He was a fixture in Richmond, everybody knew him.

It was a very special occasion that we would go [to the movies]. Now when I was a little bit older, maybe twelve or so, I would ride over to Cary Street on my bicycle with a friend or two, and we pretended that our bicycles were horses, to the extent that we would put a rope on them and tie them up to a pole outside the theater. Just down from the Byrd Theatre on the next block was a little theater called the Carillon, and it wasn’t very good, but it did a lot of cowboy films. So we saw all of the Roy Rogers and Gene Autry films. By this time we were older and could go on our own, and that would be most every Saturday in the summer. There was an occasional Hopalong Cassidy [film], but I wasn’t as much of a Hopalong fan. Hopalong Cassidy was old. I preferred a younger cowboy, someone who was able to ride his horse and look good on it.

[The Disney movies when I was a child] were in color, and there was a level of animation that I had never seen before. They were pretty well done for what they were. I think it was only later that Disney tended to have that thing that there would always be something scary, you know a gruesome witch or somebody with green eyes and long fingernails, somebody scary. But the early ones…I guess the only controversial figure in Cinderella was the wicked stepmother, but she wasn’t too bad…those other movies, Snow White and all, they were just kind of little lilting movies with nice music, they were pleasant for children. And I thought the animation was great. It seemed to me like movies seemed to you all now, like you never knew what they could do next. Of course that was back when they couldn’t do a whole lot. Now I feel that movies have lost something in that you know, no matter how spectacular they are, that they’re not real. They can make it look like anything when they’re able to manipulate the film much more. But ours, anything we saw was pretty exciting. We were always like “wow, how did they do that!” Now it’s both much more elaborate and detailed and exciting in a way, but less so in a way because you know that it’s computerized. It’s not what people had figured out how to do, it’s mainly the computerized part of it that I think takes something away from it.

Images:

Byrd Theatre, Richmond VA, 1928. https://byrdtheatre.org/about/theatre-history/.
Byrd Theatre, Richmond VA, 2019. https://byrdtheatre.org/about/.
Loew’s Theatre, Richmond VA, 1939. https://www.richmond.com/news/local/city-of-richmond/photos-richmond-centerstage-over-the-years/collection_7f574f3f-13a0-57e7-938e-cd0759647cad.html#20.