1959, New Haven, CT
David Koskoff
Born in 1939
New Haven, CT
Interviewed on February 1, 2026
by Alastair Rao
David: I’m afraid you’re wasting your time, I don’t have anything profound to say.
Alastair: You don’t have to say anything profound. It’s all about the personal memory. So, you said the first movie you remember seeing with more than a vague recollection was Black Orpheus. You were 19 or 20?
David: Yeah, one or the other. The movie came out in 1959, and I was born in 1939. So it must have been either just before I turned 20 or just after. I don’t remember the month, so I don’t know which it was.
Alastair: What do you remember about the movie?
David: Principally, that it was so beautiful. The scenery is so beautiful. And the excitement of the movie was, it was an exciting movie, and it was a fun movie, and it was a joyous movie, even though it’s a tragedy. It’s only the plot line that’s tragic. The production was not tragic. The production was just so enriching and beautiful and lovely. Did you see the movie?
Alastair: No, not yet. But I know it’s an adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice, right?
David: It is.
Alastair: What’s different about it?
David: It’s the Orpheus legend transposed to 1950s Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. Orpheus is a streetcar conductor, and when the movie opens, Eurydice is getting off a ferry boat, and she’s running away from death. Death is played by a man in a skeleton costume. Of course, because it’s carnival season—costumes. Lots of people have costumes. And there’s nothing noticeable about him being in a skeleton costume. You could wear a skeleton costume at Carnival and not be uncomfortable. Death in the skeleton costume was chasing her, and she was petrified of him. And she gets on the street car that Orpheus is conducting and when she gets off the street car and they part, she goes to her cousin’s house, and her cousin is preparing for the Carnival. And Orpheus follows her to her cousin’s house and they reconnect there, and she’s still petrified all the time about death. And the cousin’s boyfriend is a sailor and he comes back during, when they’re about to start their participation in the formal presentation. In Rio, the Mardi Gras is organized around so-called schools, which is collections of parade units. Eurydice’s cousin, Serafina, tells Swans to stay home from the procession, so she can make love with her boyfriend, who is a sailor and just been released and got some time off. Eurydice wears the costume that her cousin Serafina was gonna wear with a mask down and she goes to the formal procession. And Orpheus, who knows who she is, recognizes her and they dance a lot.
Charlotte (David’s wife): You’re leaving out that he’s engaged to someone else
David: He’s engaged to someone else, yeah, and meanwhile death is still following her, but doesn’t recognize her because she’s wearing Serafina’s costume. Well, Serafina and her boyfriend, after they’ve made love, go out to join the crowd. Death sees Serafina and then realizes that Eurydice is wearing Serafina’s costume and he goes over to approach Eurydice and he and Orpheus get in a bit of a scuffle and Eurydice runs away. And Orpheus follows her as she goes into the streetcar garage and she ends up hanging from a wire and Orpheus follows her into the street car garage and turns on the power.
Charlotte: He’s not the one, it’s death that turns on the power
David: No, he turns on the power.
Charlotte: He turns on the power?
David: One or the other turns on the power and kills her. Then the next important scenes take place in the morgue, which is the equivalent of the other side of the river. And the morgue is a very, very interesting expressionistic scene. The morgue is flooded with papers, all over there are the papers. And the caretaker of the morgue leads him down into the basement, which is the “crossing the river sticks” analogy. And in the basement, he joins a Santeria ritual, a voodoo-like session, in which an old woman is possessed by the spirit of Eurydice. The old woman mouths Eurydice’s words, among them being: “don’t look back till we get out of here.” And as you know, if you know the legend, he looks back incidentally, and she disappears.
Charlotte: Don’t tell him the ending!
Alastair: I know the ending. It’s been around.
Charlotte: Yeah, but the ending of this—
David: The ending of this is quite interesting…(David hesitates) I’m gonna tell him!
Charlotte: Tell him, yeah. The ending is very moving.
David: Are you gonna watch it on Youtube?
Alastair: You can still tell me the ending, I’ll watch it later, but don’t worry about it.
David: In the end, Orpheus carries the corpse of Eurydice back to the Pavala, which is set high on the hills. And when his fiancé sees him carrying her, she throws a rock at him, and hits him, and he falls over the cliff, carrying Eurydice, and they fall down the cliff, and he’s killed that way. And moments later, throughout the movie, he has a sidekick, a little boy. And the little boy picks up his guitar. (David starts crying) And starts to play the theme. It’s a whole thing. And then he plays the guitar on the cliff as a little girl joins them and it’s two little boys and a little girl dancing. He plays the theme…it’s supposed to emphasize the universality of the story. It was a beautiful film. Do you have streaming services? It’s available.
Alastair: Yeah, I’ll watch it.
Cassie (Alastair’s friend): I really feel like I need to.
Charlotte: Yeah, we watched it the other night. I had seen it and remembered nothing.
Alastair: David, when you saw it in New Haven, did you see it at a movie theater here?
David: If you go to Trumbull Street, and you walk from the Church to the highway, you get to Lincoln Street. At the end of Lincoln Street, there used to be a movie theater there called The Lincoln. It was played at The Lincoln.
David Koskoff is a retired lawyer who resides in New Haven with his wife Charlotte. The couple invited me and my friend Cassie to dinner at their apartment to conduct this interview. Without my knowledge, they screened the movie in their home prior to our interview. David graduated from Yale in 1961.
