Patton's tribute filled me with nostalgia, reminding me of the days when I was madly in love with movies. A happy early memory is of watching The Invasion of the Body Snatchers when I was about four. From age six to ten, every Saturday saw me at the Roxy Theater, where for a quarter I was guaranteed a pleasant afternoon. Later, after my family moved to New Paltz--and my parents finally bought a television--I discovered channels 5, 9, and 11, all of which still showed decent movies fairly regularly: the Bergman festival I've mentioned before, some Italian fare, even The Four Hundred Blows one day when I was home with a cold. On a boat to England when I was twelve, I passed my afternoons with whatever movie was being played, even missing out on the first sighting of the White Cliffs of Dover because I was watching 8 1/2 (later, on another ship--the Lermontov--I got to see all kinds of Communist propaganda films, featuring mad, bad White Russians and noble revolutionaries). It was in England that I first encountered Michael Powell, when the entire student body of Stroud Girls' High School was marched two-by-two to see Is It Heaven or Hell? Whenever I lived in a city, I gobbled movies up. In Boston, for example, I loved nothing more than to go to theater after theater, traveling all around town to see as many as I could squeeze in over the course of a day (my record was four).
I could go on and on, but this reminiscence is already too long. It's just that Patton reminded me that I used to have passion. Ahimé, as they like to lament in Italian opera.
