1952 Kiryat Haim, Israel

Ephraim Feig
1948
Kiryat Haim, Israel
Interviewed on February 1, 2022
by June Sun

It might well have been a movie with Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan. It’s one of the Tarzan movies, I remember seeing those when I was a kid. Oh I was probably way before school. My first nine years I didn’t live in this country, I lived in a different place. I lived in Israel. So we didn’t have television sets, we didn’t have telephones, we didn’t have automobiles. My community didn’t, I mean some people did, of course. My town didn’t. So Sunday… no Saturday… Saturday afternoons a lot of times were movie days. And we’d go out and watch movies. This was in Israel, we just watched whatever they brought over.  That probably started when I was three, four years old already. I remember watching American westerns and Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan, I remember Tarzan. I remember his scream in the jungle, I remember Cheeta, I remember Jane… I remember everything about those movies! It was all I watched.

I loved it. I loved it. The guy’s swinging on trees in the jungle, I mean, I was a four year old kid or so, of course I loved it. No family at all, just kids. That could’ve included my brother, but it was kids. Absolutely no parents, as far as I remember, maybe they went, but most of those days, the kids hung out by themselves. Three, four, five years old, the parents didn’t hang out with them. The kids hung out by themselves, played ball outside, went to the movies on Saturday. One movie, there was no double header or any of that. Just kids. It was very cool, it was really fun.

We walked pretty much everywhere, and bicycled. So from as long as I remember, as soon as I was able to walk I also learned how to ride a bicycle. To the movies, we walked. It must’ve been a fifteen minute, twenty minute walk, something like that. It seemed that way. It was all just kids getting together walking. And then hanging out after the movies, just hanging out. You know, walking back, hanging around the vacant areas in the neighborhood afterwards, then going home. For kids, it was paradise. For the parents it was very difficult because they were immigrants themselves, just moving up to a new country. They worked very hard. But the kids, let me tell you, we lived walking distance from the Mediterranean. We were on the beach all the time. It was just an amazing place.

The town was called Kiryat Haim. We lived in the western part, so we lived much closer to the Mediterranean. And I remember we had to cross train tracks, from the west to the east, to get to the theater. So the theater was in Kiryat Haim, the eastern part. (Kiryat Haim is like a suburb of Haifa.) So the first time I went to a movie, I was four years old. I’d been going there until I left at nine years old, so I’ve gone to that theater many times.

I remember my first movie in America. I remember my first “Wow!” movie experience in America. Those are very clear. Are you ready? It was Godzilla! Yes, it was Godzilla at the RKO Theater in Washington Heights. And my brother and I had to walk, it must’ve been five, six miles each way. Well it seemed that way. To get to Washington Heights, ‘cause we lived in the northern part of the Bronx then, so we had to get to the baby George Washington Bridge. That’s not the big one that connects New Jersey, it’s the one that connects the Bronx to Manhattan. We had to get there, cross that bridge, then walk all the way to 168th Street, Fort Washington Avenue. And there was a theater there! No, no I’m sorry it was right off 181st Street. And I remember going in there with my brother and watching Godzilla. And it was a blast! It was fun. Now, there was a second movie and I have no idea what the second movie was. I’m not even sure if we stayed for the second movie. I think we might’ve had to rush back home, it was a long walk. But I remember Godzilla, that was a striking… movement for me. What a funny memory. My brother, he’s three years older than me. I’m nine, and he’s twelve. Yeah, we just got to America. We got here in the summer, this was towards the end of that summer. We walked across, we watched the movie together. I was nine, he was twelve. And we walked back home.

The next thing I remember is watching The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston at the Loew’s Paradise in the Bronx. And the Loew’s Paradise was a magical movie house. Huge screen, gigantic, thousands of seats! The ceiling was the sky. It had sparkling stars and pictures of the moon or the sun (something like that, one of the two, probably the moon). But anyways, it was ornate. It had chandeliers, it was like a Radio City musical but a little more kitsch… and in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse around 187th Street, something like that. Those days it was one big theater. I remember many, many years later, decades later when they split into three, when theaters became split and got small screens. But this was a giant screen! And I saw this marvelous Technicolor movie, The Ten Commandments, a grand movie. It was just awesome, watching on such a big screen with big sound and everything. Oh, I remember that.

I have a lot of really wonderful memories. So movies were not a big thing for me throughout elementary school and high school. They just weren’t. I wasn’t that much into movies even though I enjoyed them a lot. Now we had a television set, so after I came home I could watch TV which I never did in Israel. Basically just had homework and television and hanging out. But there were some moments. I remember watching, not in a theater, but on public TV in New York. I remember seeing Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water. And that to me was an incredible movie. It was the first genuinely sensual movie that I saw and it got me just aroused. It’s incredible.

Oh I forgot one thing, I forgot one thing. Another very important movie to me, again this is going back to right when I came to America. I was nine years old. I had the TV and I could watch TVs, and I saw Boris Karloff in The Mummy. Scared the living daylights out of me! I’m telling you. I remember one time waking up in the middle of the night, having to go to the bathroom, and I was so scared to go alone and I made sounds to wake my brother up — we shared a room — just to wake him up so I know that he’s awake before I went to the bathroom. It was so funny. I forgot to mention it, so that was The Mummy.

So anyway, many years later, probably a decade later, I started getting exposed to more interesting films and Knife in the Water was the first one. I remember that one distinctly. I really loved it. I really loved it. And then, when I got to college, I discovered a place called Thalia in New York. I believe it was 95th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. Thalia was an artsy type movie house. And we’d go see these so-called artist movies. People would talk about them like, “Oh I don’t remember these. How do you remember any of those?” But again I remember one, again Roman Polanski, and this was Cul-de-sac. I loved it! And I saw that at the Thalia. I saw Knife in the Water, which I loved, and actually opened me up a lot. And then I went to see Cul-de-sac with Roman Polanski again and I really enjoyed that one. It was really good.

And then there was another movie that I went to a special theater in Midtown Manhattan for. It was another one of those theaters, I really don’t know if they have them anymore, with a massive screen. This was a massive screen, and this was another one of those 70mm productions, and there was Lawrence of Arabia. And I saw Lawrence of Arabia on this massive screen and that’s the place to see that movie. It was so… that one I’m sure you’ve seen. But I’m not sure if you’ve seen it on a gigantic screen. It’s so amazing. Just on a giant screen and the resolution was so fantastic, the quality was so wonderful.

So when I got your message, I actually was thinking, “What were the movies that I really remember?” Not many. I remember The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I loved it so much I must’ve seen it seven, eight, nine times. It’s incredible. I loved the movie, the cinematography, and I loved the music. I became an Ennio Morricone fan. I just fell in love with his piece. The music was fantastic. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly I saw in theaters, on TV, everywhere. Another movie I saw that really struck me, it was way after it was made, I saw a movie called The Quiet Man. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that movie. And I was struck by the beautiful scenery of Ireland. It’s a John Wayne movie, of all movies, this is not like any John Wayne you’ve ever seen. I think I heard it was Maureen O’Sullivan and John Wayne. Anyway, I remember the movie was entertaining. It was a nice movie. But more importantly for me, I was just struck by the scenery. And then many years later, I found out that this movie won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, and it didn’t surprise me. His film was just beautiful.

The RKO Theater, opened in 1920, had the third largest seating capacity of any theater at the time: 3,500 seats. After being denied landmark status in 2011, it was demolished in 2020 to make space for a shopping mall. The empty lot, as of four months ago, can be seen on Google Street View. The 3D Google Earth snapshot captured slightly earlier shows the skeleton of the theater during its demolition.

The Thalia was born in the basement of its building in 1931.  Their doors closed in 1987 after their lease ended, with a real-estate development on the horizon. From The New York Times archive, a neighboring tenant spoke, “They’re erasing all this wonderful cultural space to put up another stupid apartment building.” Today, Symphony Space, an arts organization, is reviving old elements of the Thalia.

Loew’s Paradise was built in 1929. It was deemed a New York City Landmark in 1997 and still stands today at 2417 Grand Concourse in the Bronx.