My father taught me many things – how to ride a bike, how to catch and throw a baseball, how to tie a necktie, how to swim, how to throw a Frisbee, the pleasure of drinking Beaujolais, the pleasure of listening to jazz piano, and many other things. He also introduced me to the pleasure of movies. That happened in 1967. I was fourteen; he was thirty-seven. We lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. He took me to at least three movies that year – Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, and In the Heat of the Night. They impressed me immensely. There’s a scene in Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman eats a whole lot of boiled eggs. I’ve never forgotten it. Newman is my father’s favorite actor. He’s one of mine, too. But that year, the actor who made the strongest impression on me was Rod Steiger. As the blundering Mississippi police chief in In the Heat of the Night, he was transfixing.
What did Pauline Kael think of these three movies? Kael’s writing was unknown to me in 1967; I discovered it nine years later, when I started reading The New Yorker. She disliked Cool Hand Luke, calling it “a tearjerker for hip high-school students” (“The Freedom to Make Product,” The New Yorker, March 16, 1968). Of In the Heat of the Night, she said, it “isn’t in itself a particularly important movie; amazingly alive photographically, it’s an entertaining, somewhat messed-up comedy-thriller” (“Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Going Steady, 1970). Of Bonnie and Clyde, she wrote, “I think that Bonnie and Clyde, though flawed, is a work of art” (“Bonnie and Clyde,” The New Yorker, October 21, 1967).
All three of these movies are significant to me. They hooked me on the pleasures of cinema, an addiction that – half a century later – still grips me.
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