1951 Houston, Texas
Dr. Mahlon Hale, MD
1941
Houston, Texas
Interviewed on September 20, 2019
By Nicole Westfall
Putting it in perspective, I’m 78. I was born in New Orleans, lived in Houston from age three or four until I was 13 and we went back to St. Louis where my father had died. I saw a lot of movies. Now everybody watches Netflix, but we watched movies. The theater: it seemed far away to me in Houston, but as I looked it up, I realized it was two and a half blocks away. So I could walk, and I didn’t even take the bicycle. This was the theater where we would see My Pal Trigger, Hopalong Cassidy, the first Bob Hope movie, which I think was probably in 1948, The Paleface—something they would never write about now. But it was very hot stuff because it had Calamity Jane, Jane Russell, who was a real sexpot. So everybody went to see Bob Hope, but the boys were sort of wondering about Jane Russell, so that was fun.
I saw lots of movies there, with my parents and with my friends, after moving back to St. Louis—’back’ because my family had lived there for many generations—and saw lots of movies there. I saw movies when I was at Brown, I saw movies when I was in Palo Alto, I saw some movies back at Yale—I was not addicted to movies, but that was what we went to do. I’ve seen a lot, and I still go back and look at some that I’ve seen before because there’s Turner Classic now. The thing about these movies is that they’re still sort of with you.
So, to go back, I have a first movie that I remember, and I have a second movie that I remember. The first movie I saw was Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves with my parents, probably 1945 that I remember, and that would’ve been in Nacogdoches, Texas. We sat in the back seat. It was a very famous movie. It had all kinds of characters and flying carpets and so forth, so it would appeal to families.
And the second movie I saw that I remember well—there was a very, very popular actor, named Tyrone Power, an Irish-American swashbuckler. He had a movie that was very, very famous in the 1940s called The Captain from Castile. He goes off with all the heroes to kill the Aztecs in Mexico, and he has a romance—because he always has romances—with Jean Peters. I was a great fan of this swashbuckling era, and this was the second movie I remember with my parents sitting in the backseat. And then there becomes an array of movies that he put out in theaters, that I saw either with my friends or by myself. I remember seeing The Prince of Foxes, and The Black Rose—that one starred Orson Welles. The universe of entertainment was smaller back then: the movies were there, and you went to see them. Simple as that.
In Houston, I went to St. John’s. I had a music teacher, Mr. Kevin, and he brought all these movies from Canada. Many starred a famous actor called Errol Flynn. There was a saying in those days, “In like Flynn.” I think you can guess what that meant. We saw Robin Hood and Captain Blood. We were inundated by these movies, these actors were all larger than life to you. But at the same time, they were all real to you. And the theaters: there weren’t all these cineplexes. Maybe in Manhattan, but not in small-town America. Going back 50 years, the concessions were very primitive, and we would just get popcorn—at a cheaper price, too. I don’t remember ushers in many of these theaters, either. Sure, there were ushers that, on Saturday mornings when kids were throwing popcorn about, they would say “shut up,” but no real ushers or usherettes. These were small, simple theaters and they all had the same names—either The Majestic or The Alameda. I went to The Majestic in both Houston and St. Louis. Of course, they’re all torn down now.
Anyone who was my age and a male would always be sent off by their parents on a Saturday to see Hopalong Cassidy and his pals chase the desperados around. Because I was in Texas, they had rodeos. Once a year all the kids would be taken by someone to the rodeo. One year there was Gene Autry and Champion the Wonder Horse, another year it would be Roy Rogers and Trigger, another year it would be William Boyd—Hopalong Cassidy—ambling around, and all the kids would go “hooray” and cheer, and then run off and see the movies again.
In the 1950s, westerns came back, and they came back in a modern way. John Wayne made one last movie that I and everybody I knew—girls and boys—went to see in 1956, and it was called The Searchers. It was the end of a long line of John Wayne westerns that had his whole gang, but it was the most famous. So this interest in westerns keeps cycling back, over and over.
One of the earliest experiences I can remember was watching The 39 Steps. I was probably 10 years old, and I’ve seen it a couple of times since. This was in Houston, one of the films Mr. Kevin showed at St. Johns in the auditorium, so I would just walk across the street to get there. I watched it with a lot of classmates: Ted, Marilyn, Tommy, Penny, three Bills, one George, and one Paul.
It’s a black-and-white mystery with a well-known actor named Robert Donat. It’s very edgy. There are mysterious people afoot. He hooks up, so to speak, with this young, beautiful blonde in Scotland, where he’s pursuing some leads, then they’re chased by villains. The actress was Madeleine Carroll. She’s very famous in her own way; everybody almost knew her better than Robert Donat. And they’re pursued across Scotland while finding a villain, who is involved with a foreign power. This is all pre-World War Two, so I think there’s not much secret as to who the foreign power is.
They are looking for a place called the 39 Steps, which is the core of the mystery. And by hook-and-crook, they find themselves back in a place where our hero had been to before, which was a vaudeville theater, in which there was a man who remembered everything, and his name was, of course, Mr. Memory. Our hero, Richard, has the idea that maybe Mr. Memory knows what the 39 Steps are. So he says, “What are the 39 Steps?” And automatically, Mr. Memory begins to repeat the 39 steps that have to do with the secret aircraft engine, not some abbey in Northumbria or something like that. So this was the way that the spies were going to get the message out of England. Mr. Memory gets shot, of course, and Donat and Carroll are the heroes.
It had some striking images of suspense in it: trains going through tunnels, shadows outside, mysterious shots being fired, police not believing the heroes. And it also had moments of comedy: our hero is about to be captured by police, because they’re stupid, so he joins a political parade and goes into a hall where he is announced as a visiting candidate, and he has to give a speech. It’s a very funny speech, and he has to escape after the real candidate arrives late. And maybe he’s arrested for that afterward.
This is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first films. As his movies got to Technicolor and became Americanized because he lived in Hollywood, you would find that all kinds of famous actors and actresses were in his movies. This was a time when roles in the movies went to a very narrow group of people. Jimmy Stewart was with Kim Novak in Vertigo, and again with Grace Kelly in Rear Window. Sometimes the usual heroes would have to play the villain to get a role because they had already cast the hero and the heroine.
I was totally engaged with this movie. I thought the villains were real villains. I loved the romance and liked the mystery. It made me want to go to Scotland and see what it was really like. There was humor in that, too, towards the end. The kids loved the humor. I thought Richard was heroic, I thought Madeleine Carroll was beautiful—she was. I think a term that I would use, thinking about a number of these male actors—Robert Donat, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power—is that they were all dashing. They all had a piece of someone you would like to be. They enveloped you in that. You knew they were fictional, but ‘dashing’ is what comes to mind. And in those days, ‘dashing’ went a long way. You sort of felt like you knew these people, that’s the other thing. Now, that’s also publicity by the production companies, but they were extremely effective about it, in terms of the connection people felt with these characters and actors.
I don’t recall any sensory details. The school was pretty spartan. I don’t remember this movie having any impact on emotional connections either, only that we would all talk about it after. I don’t remember anybody not liking these movies or walking out. I think that they were very much engaged in it. These school sessions were very popular. The theaters, though, were extremely popular. I don’t remember ever being in an empty theater.
If we’re talking about sensory details, two movies come to mind. This may have to do with production values, but one would be Giant, which had this sense of the Southwest and parts of its desolation. The other would be The Searchers, with these vast landscapes of Arizona and Utah, and its ‘cinemagraphic’ effects. Later on, maybe around 1956, it’s hard to explain unless you see it, but the scenery and scenes of Around the World in 80 Days remain spectacular, whether it’s boats in Thailand, steamers crossing the Pacific, hot air balloons flying over France, the steamer being torn apart to get back to England so they can make it in time while the music plays in the background. There was a very touching song that played as they approached England: “Rule Britannia!” (laughs) So you sort of knew they were getting close.
