Thieves”

When Movies Kept Us Awake at Night

A number of years ago I bought *Halliwell’s Film Guide* to inform myself about old movies shown on TV and available in video stores. Occasionally, however, when I found it lying around, I’d open the Guide at random and start reading, usually attracted by the name of the film, something irresistible like *Calling Doctor Death*, *Isle of Forgotten Sins*, *Naked Alibi*, or *Prudence and the Pill*, about a girl who “borrows her mother’s contraceptives pills and replaces them with aspirin, causing no end of complication.” One day it dawned on me that out of the twelve to fifteen movies listed on every page of the Guide, there was at least one I had seen and more often several. Like millions of others who grew up in 1940s, I had spent a good part of my life seeing hundreds and hundreds of movies, everything from genuine masterpieces of the cinema to worthless trash.

January 18, 2012