1953 Greenwich, Connecticut

Nils Sandberg

1943

Greenwich, Connecticut

Interviewed on February 11th, 2021

By B Lindsay

The first movies I remember were movies showing at home like Mickey Mouse or Abbott and Costello. The first movie I remember coming out in the theater was War of the Worlds. I was around 10 or so, it was in 1953 maybe. There were space aliens that came and attacked the Earth and people thought it was real.

It was at the Greenwich Theater in Greenwich, Connecticut probably maybe Saturday matinee type thing. I guess I remember that it was scary. The aliens came all of a sudden and began killing everyone. The Marines came in too, but they weren’t able to keep the aliens away because there was this giant ray of light kind of like a force field thing coming from the spacecraft. One of the aliens got wounded and the scientist took their blood to try to discover the alien weakness. I think the aliens ended  up dying of disease that the humans created…it is kind of hard to describe. I don’t think I really connected with the characters, that’s why it’s hard to recall; they were supposedly humans but not really. Back at my age you don’t really associate with the killers, it was more of a storyline of the aliens coming and trying to destroy earth. I don’t remember the videography being especially great; it was not like you know Star Wars or something like this today…it seemed very fake. 

When I saw War of the Worlds I was with the other boyfriends. We would go to the Saturday matinee. Thing with the Saturday matinees was they always had the serials on before the movie with Tom Mix or Gene Audry. Tom Mix was a famous western actor; he was in all the good ones. So these serials would play every time you saw a movie and the next week they would have another segment that went with it; like a TV series where they would have a season and episode one, two thee, etc, but it was every time before the matinee of Saturday.   The other thing about the movie theater was it was a big movie theater, so it had lots and lots of seats. The theaters were big enough that they had balconies too. Nothing like today’s tunnel theaters or even the bigger theaters; back then you had hundreds and hundreds of seats. My buddies and I would always sit on the same side in the same seat; you always had your spot, if I can recall. Usually we would have our parents who drove and dropped you off and then would pick you up again when the movie was over. We never really drove ourselves to the movies. When I went to the theater of course I always got popcorn and candy sometimes, but usually always popcorn. My favorite candy had to be jujy-fruitti…what’s it called…oh Jujyfruits! Like gummy bears! Those were really good.