1950s Brussels, Belgium

Lucienne Stillman

Born in 1943 in Belgium

First movie in the suburbs of Belgium

Interviewed by Eden Mendelsohn on 1/28/2018

I remember the first movie I saw here. That was the first movie I saw in this country. I saw it in Long Beach because I lived in Washington Heights and then we went to the movies – I think it was ‘Splendor in the Grass’ which some kind of blonde actor played in. Splendor in the Grass was the movie. It had to be in 1961, and the actress was Natalie Wood and the actor was Troy Donahue but you can google it just to make sure.

It was something of a romantic, happy movie, you know young people. It was my first English language movie, so I don’t think I understood too much of it. I was just fresh off of the plane.

I do remember some of the movies I saw before that…I can tell you I remember I had seen Bambi in Belgium. I remember seeing Bambi. But I’m sure that was not the first movie.

No, I don’t think it was subtitled. I think it was just dubbed.

I remember seeing that – maybe because, I mean, they had two kinds of movies they showed in Belgium…movies okay for kids because it was okay to be loud and make noise, or movies only for teens & up. I can’t remember the exact age, maybe twelve? Or fourteen? But some movies you could only see if you were older or if you looked older and can say you were older.

We used to go to the movies a lot because people had no television. We had a lot of movies all over the place. And they were individual movies. You were not talking about multiplex here. They had newsreels. Any movie, before they had the main feature, they had the newsreel with all what’s in the news that week and all that was going on, in black and white. And then there was a cartoon.

They had two different prices. That’s why we sat in the front, because that was the cheapest seat. We always sat in the front, where you had to kind of look up. You had the second-rate, and the third-rate, and all the way up you know. Two or three different prices.

It didn’t matter what time you went to the movies. People could go in and out anytime. There was no time to go, just when you went.

They went up and down the rows selling ice cream & candy. The ice cream was good and I got it sometimes. But money was tight so…

It was good. I used to love going to movies. I saw a lot of old movies in Belgium. All old movie stars you wouldn’t know. A lot of French movies.

People didn’t have cars. It was usually within walking distance. We always walked. We never took the tram. Big, famous movies were in the city. We never went there. But if you want to go there, you had to take a tram, and that would take 15 or 20 minutes. You can’t really compare distances to America. A lot of people didn’t have cars. We never had a car over there. Like I said, some of them had to walk 15, 20 minutes something like that maybe. I moved around a lot, but one time I had a theater only a 5-minute walk away.

Even when I came to this country, it was 1961; we didn’t have a TV set. The only time I went to the theater to see plays, for example, there was a school…the school put on plays.

But who would remember their first movie?

But I do remember, the movies back then were very good.