A Little Movie Magic

By Michele Bazan Reed  |   bazanreed@hotmail.com

In July, I broke my kneecap and spent several weeks in an immobilizer. Not being able to get around, I spent hours every day just sitting.

I whiled away as many hours as I could reading books and magazines on my tablet, listening to audiobooks and playing every word game published by the New York Times and in apps on my phone.

But sometimes I needed something even more passive.

And I asked myself, what do modern people do with forced rest? Answer: Binge watch, of course.

My best friend at these times was the Turner Classic Movies channel.

In August they ran Summer Under the Stars. Each day was dedicated to the movies of one star. So for 24 hours we had Cary Grant, then Katharine Hepburn. Jerry Lewis gave us as day of slapstick comedy and Dean Martin had his moment next.

Fred MacMurray is a favorite of mine, and he got to shine not only in noir classics like “Double Indemnity” and “The Pushover,” but comedies like “The Apartment” and “The Egg and I,” where he and his bride refurbish an old egg farm with the help of none other than Ma and Pa Kettle.

Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief” took me on a thrilling ride on the hairpin turns of the Upper Corniche in Nice, a trip Bill and I made at a much more sedate speed in a tour bus in 2016.

Then, in “Dial M for Murder,” she played the intended victim of a classic Hitchcock murder plot.

Bette Davis, Donna Reed, Barbara Stanwick all kept me company on the couch.

As I write this I’m still immobilized and hoping for James Stewart day, where in “Rear Window,” he’s exactly in my position, but with much more exciting viewing.

Movies have always been a big part of my family’s life. My late husband, Bill, loved the old films from his childhood when one of the Syracuse TV stations ran the classic movies every Saturday afternoon. He passed his love of cinema on to our children.

Each year, on the last day of school, he would take the children out, individually, for lunch and a movie. Sometimes he’d let them pick a movie I wouldn’t necessarily enjoy like some giant robot movie and the Bill and Ted films. And always the “lunch” consisted of a giant banana split sundae. “Don’t tell Mom,” he’d say to them, making it not only their special outing but a shared joke. Of course, he always told me.

Then in 2013, the year Bill retired, our son Mike took him to “Pacific Rim,” a giant robot movie, for his “last day of school.”

In 1998, Bill and Katie, our daughter, marked the centennial of Alfred Hitchcock’s birth with TCM’s retrospective of the master’s greatest films. Night after night, they sat glued to the screen for “North by Northwest,” “Saboteur,” “Rope” and Katie’s favorite, “Vertigo,” alongside standards like “Psycho” and “The Birds.” Then friendly arguments would ensue about which films were the greatest.

Holiday time was a time for movies. We always made a special outing to a movie theater usually with Bill’s brother and his family for the Christmas blockbuster movies, often a Star Wars or Harry Potter film.

But New Year’s Eve was the big night. The kids could stay up late watching kid-friendly videos and eating snacks that I usually frowned upon over-indulging in, like Hot Pockets and Tater Tots and drinking soda. We carried the tradition on until Bill’s death. One year, Katie visited us in France for the holidays and we ran a James Bond marathon on French TV with subtitles. The French love Jerry Lewis and Charlie Chaplin and we saw a lot of their flicks over the holiday as well.

In our empty nest, Bill and I treated ourselves to whatever TCM was playing that night, lately the Thin Man movies, many of which were set on New Year’s Eve.

And it stuck with the kids. Mike majored in film and psychology at university. And Katie, now a musicology professor, made music in films one of her academic specialties.

And she even married a film buff. Greg studied films majoring in visual studies at Cornell and owns a collection of about 4,000 classic and modern films.

I found my own solace in films this summer, but there are plenty of ways to indulge your own inner movie buff, from streaming online to borrowing films from the public library. Many libraries host film nights and so do college campuses and historical societies.

And what better way to enjoy them than in the company of a grandchild, niece or nephew or even a neighbor. The old classics take on new life through fresh eyes and you’ll be laying the seeds for a lifetime tradition of movie magic.