The Sound of Music and then we had to perform all the songs for our parents. I don’t remember if it was 3rd grade or 4th.
Some movie about a man about to be hanged, the rope breaks and he escapes. It shows his escape and how he makes his way back home.
Then it goes back to the gallows and he gets hanged.
It would have been 5th or 6th grade.
Gone with the Wind in junior high. I remember a lot of the other girls in the class crying at certain scenes. I thought it was incredibly boring.
Some other movie in my high school Spanish class, so 10 or 11th grade. It, of course, was in Spanish and about some young woman who was about to get married only to find out that her fiancee’s father could be her father. So she sets out to find which one of her mother’s five lovers was her true father. Fortunately in those pre-DNA days this could be determined by checking out their tushies to see if they had a birthmark that matched hers. So she found out which one was her real father and fortunately he was not the father of her fiancee. Happy ending all around with lots of laughter and celebrating.
I think that how it went.
One of my electives senior year was a class in “crime and law.” We studied assassins, serial killers, and spree killers. I did a term paper on Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield.
Anyway, we watched the movie Executive Action in class, presenting an, um… *interesting *theory on the JFK assassination… From Wiki:
Made for some interesting discussion and debate.
Apropos of nothing related, he also had us watch the film The Warriors. To this day I can still remember “Warriors, come out to plaaayaaay!”
I don’t remember watching any cool movies in class in public school except “Paddle To The Sea”.
We watched “A Tale of Two Cities” in Grade 9 English.
I just remember filmstrips with the audio tape and one kid had to actually pay attention because the teacher picked them to click to the next picture when the tape went “Beep”.
I also remember film reels and “Time-Lapse Photography” - that was cool.
Interesting in that it didn’t actually start out as a Twilight Zone episode–it was a short film made in France (even though what dialogue we hear is English, as is the theme song), and Rod Serling liked it so much that he got the rights to show it on TZ.
The story was also filmed as part of some other anthology series–it may have been even earlier than TZ. It starred Ronald Howard, son of Leslie “Ashley Wilkes” Howard–you can see the resemblance–who was also Sherlock Holmes in an early TV series.
I remember watching “A Raisin in the Sun” in the ninth grade and almost having a heart attack when Sidney Poiter shouts out “WILLY!!!” The emotion of that scene was just a little too much.
Many of the ones they showed at my school have already been mentioned. But a few more we were subjected to -
Go Ask Alice - with the very ironic casting of a 14 year old Mackenzie Philips in a bit part as a druggie teenager. There’s Something About Amelia - about a girl Amelia with vague mental illness and a real bitch of a mother.
Sarah T - Portrait of a Teenaged Alcoholic - starring Linda Blair and a pre-“Star Wars” Mark Hamill.
Of course after all those, I felt I was perfectly fine to get drunk, smoke pot and take hallucinogenic drugs, since apparently only girls developed addictions!
We also watched Gandhi. It was a hugely popular movie in the early 80s, but seems to have faded in popularity over the years. What I remember most about the movie is a brief scene in which John Ratzenberger (a.k.a. Cliff Clavin on “Cheers”) drove Candace Bergen meet Gandhi. Ratzenberger’s lines were entirely dubbed in by another actor. Evidently, the director had no idea that ‘Cliff Clavin’ would remain a pop culture fixation long after Gandhi ebbed in popularity.
S’funny that “The Red Balloon” is such a universal school experience. I heard it from some film scholars that it is actually a communist propaganda parable… the “red” (i.e. Soviet) balloon being the boy’s trusted companions, one that sticks by the boy even as it is tossed out of the school and pelted by ignorant rabble. When the violent street thugs pop the balloon, all the balloons in the city exert their COLLECTIVE power to lift the power out of his oppressive capitalist drudgery…and well, I think that reading certainly makes it seem more interesting.
OMG. I have been searching for a copy of Pollution for so many years. The only time I ever saw it was back in the late 1960s on “The Carol Burnett Show”. It was such an odd and quirky song and video at the time, and they usually never showed anything like that on her show.
Even most of the lyrics are as I remember them!
Why is it I remember this odd little song from 1967 - that I only saw and heard one time - but I can’t remember important stuff from that time?