1952 Windsor, Connecticut
Richard Celio
Born in 1943
Windsor, CT
Interviewed on January 20th, 2025
By Vien Le
What was the first movie you remember seeing?
So before I tell you about the movie, I’ll tell you a little bit about the time in which the movie was released. This is back in the 1950s when I was a kid and in those days, we lived in a small town, Windsor. Children had a lot of time on their hands, which was unsupervised. In the summertime, we would just go on our bikes and ride around all day and never go back home. No one ever asks where we were or what we were doing. Everyone in town sort of knew everyone, so in case you did something that was rambunctious, someone would cue in and say, “I know your dad and I know your mom, I think I’ll just mention what you were doing here.” That was the kind of social control that we had in those days.
Every Saturday afternoon, they showed movies at the theater in town. There was always one movie theater in the suburban towns. Hartford had about six or seven good ones, but we had one called the Plaza Theater in Windsor, and it was the only movie in town. Every Saturday afternoon, they had a kid’s program, and it was all children. The movies were designed for all children, but they were invariably no good. They were built off the same template. They were cowboy movies for the most part. Roy Rogers and Gene Audrey were the stars of those kinds of movies. They always managed to sing a song in between shooting Indians and killing bad guys and robbers. All of them were kind of blended together.
They also showed a cartoon. Mickey Mouse was in there a lot, and there was a serial that they showed us – a flash Gordon, sort of a superhero spaceman of the times. But they were not any good movies, so I wrote all those off. They would however, inspire us to go out and play Cowboy afterwards, often it was a pair two of them, double feature.
But the movie that I’m gonna tell you about is called High Noon, and was released in the 1950s. I remember we saw it after a couple years of its release, but when it finally got to our town, it was a well known movie. It was not in color, it was in black and white. It starred Gary Cooper as a sheriff in a small sort of leather beaten town, very desolate, looking out in the middle of nowhere. He was a big star at the time, made some good movies I think. Sergeant York, which I think he made and won an academy award earlier. I never saw that.
The woman lead was Grace Kelly who eventually became the princess of Monaco, very pretty young woman. The story was very stark and very simple. These were anxious times in the 1950s. As children in school, we would have atomic bomb air raid alerts, and from time to time, we would get a warning in our classroom. The term we used was “duck and cover.” All the kids would climb under their desks and kneel in position, and that was the way you were supposed to survive an atomic bomb. How naive we were. But those were the kind of tensions that were existing in the world at the time, and we were not really connected to those when we were children.
The movie’s story is very simple. The sheriff of the town is about to get married, but he knows that his arch enemy has been sent to prison some years back, and that he has vowed to return to the town and shoot the sheriff. The woman is a Quaker, by the way, she’s non-violent. So they are supposed to get married around noon time, and we see constantly that they refer to the clock that’s ticking on the wall, kind of building the tension. As the morning goes on, the sheriff, who is a strong, silent type, doesn’t show a great deal of emotion at all. But the townspeople advised him to clear out and run away. He refuses to do so. He refuses to leave the town unprotected to this gang of bad guys coming back from prison. The bad guy has a couple of henchmen with him.
There was a song that was released with the movie. It became quite a popular song. Singer named Frankie Lane did it, popularly, although in the movie, a Western singer named Text Ritter was the one who actually sang it. Oh, can I even remember? I was nine or ten, or eleven years old, and I can even remember the song. It was something like: “Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding day. Although you’re grieving, don’t think I’m leaving, because I need you at my side. He made a vow while in state prison, vowed it would be my life or his and, I’m not afraid of death, but oh, what will I do if you leave me? Do not forsake me, oh my darling, you made that promise as a bride. I only know I must face a man who hates me. Will I, a coward, a craven coward, or lie a coward in my grave?”
That really sums up the theme of the movie. And then they keep going back and showing you the clock. The grandfather wall clock type thing ticking toward noon. And the woman says, “if you fight these guys, I’m going to quit you, I don’t want to be with you.” She’s being a Quaker. He says, “I have to. I’m torn between my love for you and my duty to the town. I have to carry out my duty.” And then when the bad guys show up, they chase each other around town, shooting each other, and eventually he shoots them and kills them and survives. And so, it’s a happy ending because he’s alive.
The film won a couple of academy awards at the time. But it’s very stark and very simple. But most importantly, to a young boy watching it, it showed you what a man was supposed to be. Beautiful, unemotional, sometimes violent. Placing others’ welfare above his own safety. And for a lot of kids, that became a model of what it was to be a man. For a long time, guys acted that tough. Nowadays, we called it macho, but they didn’t use that phrase back then. But that kind of model deeply impressed the generation of kids growing up in that Cold War era. The resolution to fight, if necessary, was part of that.
Do you remember who you were with when you first saw High Noon?
No. We always went with a group, a couple of our friends from the neighborhood. In those days, we would just walk to the theater, it was a 20 minute walk there and walk home. No one bothered us. My younger brother, two years younger, would often come with us. Sometimes we would get on a bus and go into the city of Hartford and see a movie there too. We were 11 or 12 years old, and no one worried about us. We just went ahead and did it.
I will say this. Movies cost 25 cents for a kid under 12. When you got over 12, you had to pay the adult price which was 75 cents or a dollar. So by the time you were 14 or 15, you stopped. You couldn’t continue to fib about being 12. I had to own up to it, but we were still able to get in for a quarter in the afternoons. And the movies were in the afternoons and not at night.
Do you remember eating anything at the theater?
We had a big candy counter in the lobby, which my aunt happened to run, and it was fun to visit with her because for a nickel, we could buy anything at the counter. We often got double rations of stuff because she knew us, so that was good.
My brother was a sweet guy. He liked candy. I didn’t care much for candy, even then. One new thing that came out in those days was something called a Skybar, which was a little chocolate bar that had four smaller wedges of chocolate and inside each wedge was something different. One had peanut butter flavor, nougat flavor, and something else, I don’t know. If you had a nickel, you would buy one of those, and some popcorn, which came in those days, came in paper cups about the size of a milkshake.
Richard Celio is my neighbor.
