1956 Brooklyn, New York 2
Patricia Neuwirth
Born 1943
Brooklyn, New York
Interviewed on September 15th, 2019
by James Grad
One of the first movies I remember was Carousel, which was from the early 50s. I was born in 1943, so I was about eleven or twelve years old at the time. The movie is a musical – it’s about girls who work in a mill and live in a mill town. On their day off, they go into town, and there’s an amusement park and ferris wheel. There’s a boy, whom they call a barker, who encourages people to get on and buy tickets. One of the girls falls in love with him. It turns out to be a very sad love story because he doesn’t know how to make money, and she becomes pregnant, and he turns to robbery and ultimately dies. That’s the overall gist.
It was surprising that she gets involved with him. She’s a real working class girl, and he’s a rougher type. It was a very typical story at the time – a good girl gets involved with a bad boy. But he’s really not such a bad boy, just a good person at heart who struggles. She has a friend who marries an uptight, stuffy guy who becomes very rich and has several children. There’s also a very supernatural part to the story, in that she has a child with him, but he gets shot when he’s attempting this robbery, and she has to raise this child alone without him.
I went with my family, which was actually pretty rare. We went to the movies with our friends, for the most part. Somehow, I went with my mother, father, and brother for that film, perhaps because its themes were darker. Going to the movies was a big deal for us. In the early years, going to the movies was a big outing – it wasn’t like going to the movies for the kids today. We had a lot of local theaters, and tickets were so inexpensive – it cost twenty-five cents, and you’d see two films. Instead of seeing trailers and coming attractions for other movies before the feature film, they also showed news from the day. Television was brand new then, so going to the movies was a really big deal.
There were theaters with ushers, but at the theaters we went to in Brooklyn – one was called The King’s Way, another was called The Avalon – I don’t remember seeing ushers there.
I wasn’t paying for the concessions with my parents, so I don’t know if it was as overpriced back then. But I don’t remember eating popcorn; I remember BonBons. They were vanilla ice cream with dark chocolate on the outside. They looked like the Nespresso capsule boxes – each box would have six, and they were similar to the size of a capsule of coffee, except with vanilla ice cream and dark chocolate on the outside. By the time I got to the last one, it would be pretty soft, but I ate them so quickly they never really had a chance to melt.
When I was eleven, I would have walked to the theater – it was only three or four blocks away. I’d stand on line with all my friends – we didn’t have Fandango back then. It was what we did on Saturday afternoons. Because there were two films and a news reel, it was an all-afternoon activity. We’d enter at noon and not leave until four or five in the afternoon. We used to go every couple of weeks. Seeing movies in the theater was our only chance to watch them.
My parents picked and chose what films I was going to see. I don’t really remember seeing anything that would be X-rated today. I don’t even think they had ratings in those days, but they thought some films would be too scary or risqué for me to see. There certainly wasn’t as much violence or sex in films as there is today. There were a lot of Westerns, and they were very formulaic. The good guys wore white hats, and the bad guys wore black ones, and the Indians were the bad people, and the white hats always won. That was about as rough as the movies got – a shootout. It’s entirely different today. We were raised on real family sitcoms with completely intact families where everyone got along. The mother would be dressed in an apron and dress, cooking in the kitchen – they were all a reflection of the classic 1950s lifestyle.
We normally walked or were driven – we definitely were not taking ubers to the theater. Our parents would pick us up at the end and drive us home.
By the time I entered high school – I must have been fifteen at that point – we were going to see films on dates. That was what we did on weekend nights. It was much more formalized than the way you kids socialize nowadays. A boy called you on the telephone, and would ask you on a date – he’d pick you up, and more often than not you went to see a movie, then would grab a bite to eat, and then went home. Since we were living in Brooklyn, if we went into the city, we would take the train or buses, until we started driving – and that was much later in high school.
Your generation is used to streaming movies, and picking them up whenever you want. There isn’t such an urgency, nor is there the excitement about going to the films today like there was back then.
