Last weekend, while I was watching the 1961 version of West Side Story on the big screen at an old theater in my hometown of Columbus, it started to rain outside.
The storm caused weird sounds to echo inside the cavernous, ornate building, which was constructed in 1928. The emphatic rumble of rain hitting the rooftop competed, at moments, with the equally forceful music by Leonard Bernstein and words by Stephen Sondheim. But I did not mind.
To the contrary, I had learned early in my moviegoing career that there were few things more agreeable than to be inside a movie theater, cocooned in a plush seat and braced by wooden armrests, while the world continues to turn. Outside, news keeps churning, wars keep raging, and sports teams keep winning or losing, but inside, we—at least those of us who have honored the theater’s request to put away our smartphones—are merrily oblivious to it all. Yes, the weather announced itself during West Side Story, but knowing that it was pounding the streets made it all the more satisfying for those of us whom it could not reach—the ticket-buyers clustered around the big screen.
I am reminded of the time when I saw John Frankenheimer’s Ronin (1998) amid the threat of a hurricane barreling toward the state of Louisiana, where I was living at the time, or the many times when I have gone to a movie during events of global importance (including at least one presidential inauguration). In effect, I am screening out real life, and at first glance, my attitude might seem to resemble that of the failed documentarian Clifford Stern in Woody Allen’s great film Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Upon exiting a showing of the effervescent screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Clifford, played by Allen, touts the tuxedos and evening gowns in the movie before he takes a view of the dreary city around him and glumly says, “This is awful”—that is, awful in contrast to the movie he has just seen.
Yet as much as I luxuriate in the potential of movies to insulate me from the world, I find that I am frequently bolstered by them as I reenter the world. In other words, I would not have been depressed in confronting daily existence after seeing Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as Allen’s character was, but invigorated by it—encouraged, somehow, to find ways to incorporate its elegance and joie de vivre in my own daily existence, however unalike it might be to those of the characters.
Very often, my sharpest memories of certain movies are not of seeing them but of thinking about them in those fleeting but distinct moments just after I have seen them. How vividly I remember crossing the threshold of the theater door and stepping onto the sidewalk after attending revival screenings of Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) or Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) or Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940)—to name three specific screenings that come vividly to mind even decades later.
If I were to put it into words, the sensory overload of fresh air after two or more hours inside a musty theater becomes an invitation to meditate further on the intellectual and emotional stimulation of the movie—a chance not to leave the movie behind but to bring it out with me. And the simple act of walking—the literal locomotion—after so much time spent sitting carries with it the possibility of putting into effect the lesson of the movie, whatever it might have been. For example, when I first saw Bringing Up Baby (1938) so many years ago, I certainly thought, striding outside afterwards, that I should slough off the nerdy side of my personality and learn to embrace my untapped capacity for spontaneity—essentially, the message of that screwball classic starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
In his 1997 book Who the Devil Made It, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich wrote a particularly lovely account of “the wintry day” in 1955 when he saw George Cukor’s marvelous 1938 comedy-drama Holiday. When I first read this passage eons ago, I experienced a shock of recognition, especially in his memory of what he was thinking after the movie was over—an experience so similar to my own ebullient mood following many movies: “After the film, as I walked home on the dark Manhattan streets, I was feeling buoyant, happier than I could ever remember, positive about the vast possibilities of life.” I am happy to say that I had a similar reaction while leaving a screening of Bogdanovich’s own film, They All Laughed (1981), where I met and chatted amiably with Bogdanovich himself—a meta moment for me if there ever was one.
I think, too, of those times when I leave a church service after having been given the exhortation to “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord” (as some services conclude). The mere fact that I am on the move—even in the simple journey from the pew to the car—persuades me that such service to the Lord is possible.
As fun as it was to have been shielded from the storm during that showing of West Side Story, then, it was even more fun to have stepped into the still-lashing rain after the credits had rolled. Whatever I took from the movie seemed especially clear as I navigated the cloudburst, walking briskly and confidently back into my life.
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