If you’re like me, you’ve seen many movies that you have just forgotten whether you liked them or not. But surely there’s some early movie experience that you still consider to have been a good one.
The very earliest of those I probably have forgotten, but at least these still hold up for me:
Shane
Samson and Delilah (Mature and Lamarr)
A Place in the Sun
From Here to Eternity
Jim Thorpe, All American
High Noon
I saw all of these before high school age.
Some Like It Hot, which I saw at the tender age of four in 1959. I have never, ever in my* life* been as turned on as I was watching Marilyn Monroe singing on stage in that so-called dress she sort of had on.
I got to see it because my mother, who hated going to the movies alone, took me along with her (apparently, neither my dad or my older brother wanted to see Marilyn, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, and Joe E Brown in a Billy Wilder flick :rolleyes: ). When one of her friends told her she shouldn’t take me to see movies like that, she replied “Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s looking at!”
My only response was a dumbfounded stare. I wanted to say “Of course I know what I was looking at! I’m not stupid, you know!” :mad:
Star Wars, i was around 2 or 3 when i saw it.
*It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. * When I was in (Catholic) elementary school in the '60s the nuns took us to see it at the Cinerama as a school treat. Today I own it on DVD; I think I’ve watched it within the past year.
Logan’s Run beats out Star Wars by a year. I was 6. My parents were not happy that my brothers took me to see it, but I loved it.
The Sound of Music was among the first movies I ever saw (age 4), and it still holds up for me.
Empire Strikes Back. I was very young and choose to pee myself in the theater rather than miss any of it. It’s still the best in the trilogy.
The first movie I remember seeing is Vacation; still a great movie. I would have been about 6 or 7.
According to my parents, when I was around 2 or 3, I loved The Jerk; also still an amazing movie.
Dr. Strangelove, which I saw when I was twelve. I knew it was the best movie I’d ever seen.
I know there were many before that, but the one title the sticks in my mind, Sleeping Beauty, is inferior Disney.
My father took me to see 2001 - A Space Odyssey in the theater in 1968.
I was astonished. I was an 8-year-old who knew the names of the Mercury Seven and could recite stats about them in much the same way as other guys could rattle off RBIs and HRs for their favorite baseball players.
It is still a really good film.
So far as I can remember, SLIH was the first movie I saw in a theater/cinema. Before that, I remember watching Disney’s Dumbo and Snow White on TV. I also remember watching The Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy shorts (I got to stay up late a lot), plus the courtroom scene in Duck Soup, which really creeped me out.
A few years later, I remember watching The Dam Busters and Sink the Bismarck on TV. By then, I had seen the following on the big screen:
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Guns of Navarone
Hell Is for Heroes
Journey to the Seventh Planet
Journey to the Center of the Earth
13 Ghosts
The Time Machine
The Parent Trap
101 Dalmatians
Lady and the Tramp
Operation Petticoat
The Sad Sack
Little Shop of Horrors
Taras Bulba
I’m sure there were others (my brother was a big Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye fan), but these are the ones that made the strongest impressions on me.
Hmmm. Probably The Wizard of Oz, but I’m honestly not sure.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw The Court Jester, maybe 6 or 7? I think I love it even more at 50+.
I do remember seeing 1776 at age 10 and it holds up for me as well four decades later.
During February Vacation, as a kid, we’d stay with my Aunt, in Boston, every year, she’d take us to an old-time, majestic theater (all gone, now) to see a big screen epic. 50 years later, they still are remembered as classic.
Lawrence of Arabia(At intermission, they sold over-price OJ, and we were thirsty from all that desert. Best quench ever!
Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (in Cinerama)
Goldfinger (My Aunt didn’t realize the movie would be so racy and almost made us leave)
Dr. Zhivago
2001
And you know, all these years later, all of them still stand up very well.
I know the first movie I saw in a theater was All Dogs Go to Heaven, and I was told that I liked it, even though I don’t remember seeing it. I still think it’s pretty good, albeit a little strange for a kids movie.
The first ones I remember watching and liking were The Princess Bride and Disney’s animated Cinderella. That was in daycare, so I would have been about age 4 or so. I have them both on DVD now.
Mom took me to a bunch of forgetable disney stuff (Escape to Witch Mountain, Mary Poppins, Cat from Outer Space) that I remember finding incredibly dull.
Even when I saw Star Wars in 76’ (when I was 6) I just wasn’t that wowed by it. The marketing of toys, cards, everything more or less forced it in your lap.
The one that really blew me away was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Saw it a couple times in the theatre at age 7. I was mezmorized and still love that movie.
I was 6 when I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and it was love at first sight. Gene Wilder as Wonka was my hero, and had a pretty strong influence on the kind of guys I like to this day. It’s still one of my favorite movies ever.
Saw The Aristocats around the same time and I remember it having a heavy influence on me at the time (I already loved cats, but the movie turned me into a jazz lover (that didn’t really stick) and made me name all my stuffed cats after characters in the movie). I still like it but it didn’t really stand up to the test of time.
Probably The Sting. I was 11 or 12 when it came out.
Of movies I saw in the theater, probably Star Wars or maybe The Empire Strikes Back (I’m not certain which of the two I actually saw first, as opposed to picking up through cultural osmosis). But I probably saw The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz before that, as they’re fairly often on TV (and TSoM is my mom’s favorite movie).
Probably the first movie I ever saw in a theater was an animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I remember absolutely nothing about it except that Aslan’s pounce on the White Witch near the end was very impressive.
Another one that must have made a big impression on me was The Apartment, which I saw with my dad when it first came out. I didn’t really get the story at the time (though I thought it was funny when Jack Lemmon used a tennis racket to strain his spaghetti), but I saw it on TCM this time last year and I was amazed at just how much of it I remembered anyway.