1950 Baltimore, Maryland

Millicent Marcus
Born 1946
Baltimore, Maryland
Interviewed on January 29, 2019
by Kristina Cuello

It was a Dean Martin film. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. I don’t remember the title, actually. I wish I did—I could probably Google it now. But I remember I must have been younger than ten years old, because it was before we moved out of our old neighborhood in Baltimore, and we left when I was ten.

I might be conflating this, but I think it was a scary movie. Yes, I remember it, I think it was a spoof of a horror film. And, you know, films back then used to be preceded by shorts: they would play a newsreel or a cartoon, or documentary piece. Kind of a paratext. I don’t remember what it was they played that day; it might have been a Bugs Bunny film. But they would play actual news before the movies, you know—news of the world.

And of course the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis films—a lot of the films I remember us seeing—we were so young and they were funny, but they were also scary to us. I wish I remember what the film was.

I do remember someone throwing their gum during the movie, and it got caught in my hair! They had to cut out the piece of hair to get it out, I remember that. And I remember exactly what candy I used to eat: Good & Plenty. My parents would just drop us off at the movies, and we didn’t even think about it. We were so young, you know, but it was different, they weren’t worried to leave us alone, and we went every Saturday.

I might’ve been with my younger brother—there were other children my age, of course, but I think he came with me. The theater? Oh, it would’ve been at either the Crest Theater, or the Uptown in Baltimore. Ushers? You know, I have no memory of that. I couldn’t say.

The film that really changed things for me—made me fall in love with cinema—that was Bicycle Thief. I remember I was a freshman in college, and my parents drove me to see it at Cornell (they were film buffs, you know). And I was just absolutely… What can I say? I was captivated. And another one was Fellini’s 8 ½. I saw it before Bicycle Thief, in my senior year of High school, I think. And I was just fascinated; I was mystified by it. That was in the sixties, after the postwar reconstruction era. Film was one of the signs of recovery and foreign acceptance: films, and European cars. But the first one: that was Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. I just can’t remember what it was called.