Good Neighbor Sam

Good Neighbor Sam

What was the first film you ever saw in a “movie theatre”?

I saw my first such movie in July of 1964 when I was 12 years old. Starring the iconic comedian Jack Lemmon, the film was a piece of fluff called “Good Neighbor Sam”, but for me this foray into the world of cinema was the gateway to a hitherto forbidden realm of fantasy, a taste of being “grown up.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Neighbor_Sam

Until the age of 12, I lived in Georgetown, Ontario, but that summer of 1964 our family moved to London, in western Ontario. Soon after the move, which I experienced as an excruciatingly painful rupture, I returned to Georgetown to visit my public school friends for whom I was pining, having mooned about our new London abode for a couple of weeks, behaving like a hound baying and howling for a lost master.

I somehow finagled an invitation to return to Georgetown for a week at the home of my best friend Peter Francis, and we hung out with boys and girls from my former school, Chapel Street Public, now long gone without a trace.

Georgetown did not have what was called in those days a “movie theatre.” So Peter and I, along with our friends Jeanette Riggs and Janet McClure, concocted a plan to take a Greyhound bus to faraway Brampton (about 12 miles down the road toward Toronto) where there was theatre, showing, as it happened, the cinematic extravaganza “Good Neighbor Sam.”

It is nearly impossible to describe the feelings that this adventure triggered: an inchoate sense of freedom, the near unconscious prickling of adolescent arousal, a sense of being initiated into a domain of quasi adulthood that had hitherto remained hermetically sealed.

By today’s standards, the film would be deemed trite and worse, replete with every sort of “ism” imaginable.