Jogging Memories Through Film

In the summer of 1968, my brother and I would stay up and watch TV at night. Channel 11 out of Tacoma would show the TV series “Twelve O’clock High” and “Secret Agent” from 11 PM to 1 AM (I forget which was first). After that we would often find some old movie. I don’t remember many of them. But there is one film from the late ‘40’s that I thought about from time to time. I didn’t remember what it was, but I remember that the bad guy was a writer of some kind. He tricked a young woman, a relative, into writing a suicide note. And I remember a pickup truck speeding down the road.

Now, I often will scroll through the cable TV grid and see what is playing on TCM, and I will record a movie if it looks interesting. A couple of weeks ago, TCM played a film called The Unsuspected with Claude Raines as a host/writer of a radio program that talked about real murder cases. He had a ward who had, mistakenly, been thought to have been killed in a fire on a ship. She returned, much to the chagrin of her relatives who were looking forward to the large inheritance from her estate. I thought it looked interesting, so I recorded it. As I watched the film, I thought that it looked like it might be the film I had seen in 1968. It was.

Was it an enjoyable film? Yes. Was it the greatest film I had ever seen? No. But to see a film that I somewhat remembered after all of these years was a joy.

One of the things with old films is to see things that your recognize. I think I have told of seeing American Graffiti for the first time. There is a scene where Richard Dryfus tries to open his old locker. Not only did I recognize that locker as being in “C” wing of Petaluma High School right across from Mrs. Stonitch’s room, his “old locker” was two to the right of my real life locker when I was a senior.

Sometimes an old film shows you something you only know from movies or TV. This week I was watching a Joan Crawford/John Wayne film on TCM called Reunion in France. Early in the film, Joan Crawford is at a party. At the party she is introduced to a couple of wives of Nazi officers in Paris. One of them is a blond. I recognized her voice and her mannerism of holding her hands in front of her chest as she spoke. It’s Mrs. Thurston Howell III! I looked it up, and it was Natalie Schafer.

I like old films. Maybe because they are so familiar – even if I had never seen them before.