My Dad's Favorite Movies, An Introduction

James Gregory Bowen, my father, was born on December 15, 1929. That same year, in October, the Stock Market had crashed, initiating the Great Depression. Dad was always quick to point out that he was in no way to blame for that mess.

Dad grew up in the small town of Burlington. North Carolina. Money was scarce and entertainment venues few. Dad liked comic books (he had in his collection Detective Comics # 27, Action Comics # 1, Batman # 1, and Superman # 1 – unfortunately, they all disappeared while Dad was in the service). He liked radio, which in those days meant The Shadow and Gangbusters and Jack Benny and Fred Allen and Fibber McGee and Molly.

But what Dad loved most, were movies.

It’s difficult for anyone under the age of 70 to understand the importance of movies in the 30’s and 40’s. There was no television, and movie going was a regular social event for many, many people. Even with finances unimaginably tight, people managed to get to their local theater, often once or twice a week, since the programs usually changed that often. And a night at the movies was not unlike a night now watching television. There would be news (a newsreel), a cartoon, reality programming (travelogues or short documentaries), and often a double feature. There were even game shows of a sort with giveaways and raffles in the theaters.

But for my father and countless other boys his age, the real draw was the Saturday morning programs. If you could scrounge up a nickel from your paper route or part-time job, you could see a cartoon, the next chapter of an action serial, and a B-Western double feature. For Dad, his source of revenue as a boy was selling vegetables from the family garden. And throughout his life, his love of a good western never diminished. Even near the end, in the hospital, he was thinking about westerns.

For Dad and others of his generation, a strong memorable scene was what kept a movie alive in memory. With no VCR’s or DVD’s or On Demand, a movie was seen when it was in the theater, and then it was gone. Eventually, it might show up on television, perhaps even regularly, but many movies simply faded into obscurity. Perhaps that is why John Ford famously told Peter Bogdanovich that the trick to making a good movie was coming up with three memorable scenes.

Dad passed his love of movies on to me. We would catch “Destry Rides Again” or “The Quiet Man” or “Charade” or “The Haunting” when they aired on broadcast television. The day a Betamax VCR capable of recoding an entire movie on one tape was commercially available, Dad bought one. The first movie he recorded was “The Maltese Falcon.” Suddenly, it became even easier to share the movies he loved with me, even more so when video rental houses starting cropping up.

This passing of the torch is at least partially if not solely why I ended up teaching Film History and Theory and Production at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, why I spent 15 years working in various capacities on various feature film productions, why I ended up producing and directing and writing.

There were lots of movies that were his favorites. Now I share those movies with my wife Christi, and have begun to do so with my three year old daughter Kate, who loves “Singin’ in the Rain.” My Dad would be so proud. That was one of his favorites.

The key journey of this blog is to explore those movies my Dad loved and perhaps why he loved them, in no particular order, and with a few side trips along the way.

© 2009 Edward Bowen