1943 Manhattan, New York
Nina Schooler
1934
New York, New York
Interviewed on 19 September 2019
By Lydia Schooler
The first movie I remember seeing was Snow White, but I don’t have strong memories of it. I know I left the theater crying because I was scared. The first movie I really remember going to see was How Green Was My Valley. It was probably late 1943 or early 1944 and I was nine or ten.
I would go to the movies almost weekly with my friends Regina and Judy. Typically, we would go sometime after lunch and walk to the theater by ourselves. I lived on 111th Street and Amsterdam and Judy lived right across the street. Judy and I would go one block to 110th Street, pick up Regina, and then walk down 110th Street to Broadway. From there, we would either walk half a block to the Nemo Theatre (110th and Broadway) or three blocks to the Olympia theater (107th and Broadway). Those were the two theaters we went to, although there were a number of others in the area. I can’t remember which of the theaters we saw How Green Was My Valley in, but it was certainly one of those. The neighborhood cinemas, like the Nemo and the Olympia, showed older releases. Once a year, on Yom Kippur, my family would go to Radio City Hall to see the new releases, which was a special treat.
Somehow, we never checked the starting time. We never knew the program – if there even was one. We would go when we went. We also didn’t have reviews to go by, which I knew existed and my father read in the newspaper. We would select the films by movie stars we recognized and the posters outside the theater, which told us what we might like.
Our secret was to buy candy outside the theater because it was cheaper. Regina and I tended to split an Almond Joy which had two little separate bars within the package. They were, at that time, twice as expensive as ordinary candies. A Hershey bar was a nickel and an Almond Joy was a luxury bar at ten cents, but you could split it which brought you back down to a nickel each. I remember distinctly that we did not buy sodas.
I paid for the ticket with my allowance, the price of which was 25 cents. Permission from my parents was required and they always wanted to know which movie we were going to see, but I don’t believe movies were rated at that time so we could have walked into almost anything. However, we weren’t interested in seeing movies that were inappropriate for us. At nine or ten, I was very busy trying to be sophisticated. My friends and I liked serious movies and serious children actors; we preferred Margaret O’Brien to Shirley Temple. We felt like the smart girls who didn’t like funny movies.
The movie theaters had a very distinctive smell. As you’d walk in the door, you’d be enveloped by this smell even before you watched the movie. I can’t describe it. I would say it smelled “dark,” but that’s just the association.
If you went to the movies alone as a group of kids, you were sat in the kids’ section. There was a woman, who wore all white like a nurse, who was responsible for monitoring the children and telling noisy boys to be quiet. We would always try to persuade the matron that we were very, very good. Sometimes, it worked and we got to sit in the adult section. If we didn’t, we were always miserable because it didn’t seem like the boys came to actually watch the film. If you were in the kids’ section, the floor was really icky. In the adult section, it was much better.
How Green Was My Valley was about Welsh coal miners and from a little boy’s perspective. He was growing up in a small coal-mining village where all the men, including his older brothers, were miners. The child actor was Roddy McDowall. I thought he was absolutely wonderful. I really thought he was exceptional and also very cute. We sat there admiring him because he was a really cool looking kid with a nice English accent, which we thought was quite remarkable. The young boy had this older mother, who I thought looked very old. She was certainly not a spritely figure. This may have been because she already had grown sons who were working in the mine. My recollection is that there’s some kind of mine disaster and many people are injured or killed, including one of the older brothers. The mother was like the Rock of Gibraltar for the family, very stoic and held everything together. How Green Was My Valley was a very serious movie, which we liked.
I remember that when we saw How Green Was My Valley we walked in after the movie had started. It was toward the beginning, but not the absolute beginning. At that time, you would have to stay in the theater long enough so that you saw the beginning of the movie that you came in the middle of. Somehow, this was just part of the idea of going to the movies: figuring out what part of the show you were in. At that time, each show would have a cartoon, newsreel, and the main feature. You would expect to see all of those, so the entire expedition was essentially three hours.
The company that did the newsreel was called Movietone. The broadcasts at that time were all incredibly positive, almost at the level of propaganda. “We have success here, we’ve recaptured this island in the Pacific…” We learned the names of Pacific islands from the newsreel. You would see airplanes dropping bombs, but you never had any sense of blood or gore. I guess we knew but didn’t necessarily process that if we were seeing people dropping bombs that there were people on the ground. But, of course, they were the enemy.
My friend Judy’s brother was around eighteen when he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. We lived across from each other and I remember looking across the street and seeing Judy standing outside in a coat with her head down. I went down to talk to her and she told me her brother had been killed. I knew about Gold Star Mothers and how not everyone who went to fight came back. Judy’s mother never recovered. I remember her before and after and it was although a shadow or cloak had dropped over her that never went away. I know we saw How Green Was My Valley before Judy’s brother died because we responded quite positively to it and would have reacted differently after the fact.
The thing about walking into a movie theater was that you felt you walked into another world. Even these small movie theaters were pretty fancy: light fixtures on the side, fancy sconces, and velvet seats. The velvet seats – I don’t know if they were real – but they were soft. It felt like you had moved from reality into another world but in a sensory and physical way. Some movies showed people who were unbelievably rich. They had apartments with staircases and walked around in clothes with feathers on them. In many movies, kids would run up and down these staircases and walk outside to have someone open car doors for them. We certainly didn’t have a car. That being said, I wasn’t jealous. It was like a science fiction movie. There was no sense of “how can that be happening to them and not me?” The movies were supposed to be different and it never occurred to me that the movies were related to real life. Even in How Green Was My Valley, you were in another place so that the world of the movie theater was totally different from the real world outside.
When you go into the movie theaters, it’s 1 pm and now suddenly it’s 4 pm. You’re in there for three and a half hours, so you’re really blinking when you come out because you’ve been in the dark for such a long time. There was no television, so there was no other visual experience of seeing another world other than the movies. It was like going through a door into another world.
