Forbidden pleasures in a darkened movie theater
by Jack Neely
The temporary closing of the Tennessee Theatre reminds me of one of the ironies of the information age: long ago seems more recent than it used to.
A quarter-century ago this summer, the Tennessee Theatre was at loose ends, and so was I. It had closed down the previous year, given up on being Knoxville's premiere place to see new movies. Live shows weren't part of the picture. It seemed as if the poor Tennessee had already seen its best days.
I suspected the same of myself. My first couple of years in a small liberal-arts college had been inspiring to me, but only in non-academic ways, and I finally gave up on it. With no particular direction, I was back in my hometown, driving a delivery truck, wondering, albeit not strenuously, what to do next.
I had a car, a wrecked 1965 Karmann Ghia, and knew my way around, but few of my old high-school friends lived in town anymore. A young single guy who could afford to blow maybe three dollars on an evening's entertainment had few options. I developed a peculiar solitary habit.
What I spent so many hours doing that summer requires some explanation, for those who weren't there, of the strange, contorted decade known as the 1970s. On the one hand, everything was new: hairstyles, like morals, seemed headed toward bizarre extremes.
But there was also a contrary dynamic: oversimplified as "nostalgia," it was a worshipful veneration of a previous era. Moreover, there seemed to be a particular preoccupation with one lone figure of that era.
You saw him on posters in punk-rock bars. He was mentioned in pop songs, and was the subject of sitcom episodes and variety-show skits. His character inspired several new movies: Elliot Gould in The Black Bird, Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Peter Falk in The Cheap Detective.
He was an unlikely icon for the disco era; his hair didn't poof out. He wore a suit and tie. In a time when we all wanted to believe we could get along, he carried a .38, just in case we didn't. Humphrey Bogart wouldn't have liked the '70s, but he was as big a part of them as Leo Sayer or John Travolta were.
One of his movies got more than its share of attention. A couple of years earlier, guys in my freshman dorm bought swanky high-backed wicker chairs. They weren't comfortable, but they were, reputedly, just like the one Sydney Greenstreet sat in in Casablanca. I had never seen the movie. I'm not sure my friends had ever seen it, either. But we knew the song and bits of dialogue, and all agreed it was the greatest movie, ever.
Suddenly everybody wanted ceiling fans, which had been, the year before, unstylish relics of a pre-air-conditioning past. But there were ceiling fans in Casablanca. Or so we'd heard.
We had the fedoras and the trench coats, too. We had all the Bogart accessories, but we didn't have any way to see actual Bogart movies. Local TV never showed black-and-white movies. I didn't know anybody who had cable. VCRs were audiovisual aids in some rich kids' schoolrooms. Old movies might as well have been banned, and were therefore fascinating.
All we were allowed to see was the pop culture of the moment. And if your moment happens to be in the 1970s, you may find yourself looking hard for something else. That's why, after a day's work, I would end up at the Tennessee Theatre. At the Tennessee that summer, UT economics prof Tony Spiva was showing old movies. He'd looked at the numbers, thought he saw a bull market on this nostalgia thing. He didn't show them just occasionally, but three or four different ones every week. With nothing else to do, I went nearly every time.
Sometimes, for the well-known classics, there was a crowd. More often, it was just me and four or five others. We sat in different parts of the magnificent old theater, and never spoke.
Dr. Spiva eventually gave it up, quoted as saying the only old movies that made any money were the Bogart ones.
But I had, at long last, discovered I liked old movies: they seemed more fully integrated than modern movies: they were complicated, and funny, and cynical, and suspenseful, and satisfying. I saw a lot of them that summer: The Big Sleep, Captain Blood, In a Lonely Place, Dead Reckoning, To Have And Have Not—and then there was Casablanca.
It seemed an ideal place to see it: the Moorish Tennessee could have been designed by the same architect who designed Rick's Café Americain. It was so perfect that maybe I shouldn't mention that I was disappointed by the actual movie. Nothing could have lived up to years of anticipation, but it just wasn't as mysterious, or as complicated, or as profound as I expected it to be. And after seeing Bogart in so many rougher-edged roles that summer, as a killer, or a madman, or a two-bit gumshoe, I could never quite deal with him as a restaurateur.
Still, I watched carefully. I wondered if it was the last chance I would ever have to see this movie that had launched a thousand allusions, jokes, and lines of ceiling fans and wicker furniture. But times changed in unexpected ways. What was exotic is now routine. The past is more present than it was back then.
To my kids, who are almost a century younger than Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca isn't quite the cultural icon it was in the '70s. Nor is it any big deal. They've both seen it on video, over and over, enough times to fall asleep to it.
May 29, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 22
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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