Your Uncle Alvin and
I have just watched the movie “Hugo”, Martin Scorsese’s paean to the magic of movies.
Elsewhere in my readings, I came across an
account of the audience’s startled reaction to the image of an onrushing train
during the early days of this art form.
Its depiction in the movie brought back pleasant memories about our
family’s long-standing love affair with the movies.
Like most people of the
post-war generation, your grandparents were avid moviegoers, a trait they
passed-on to us, their children.
Watching movies was a part of their monthly sojourn to Naga City for “dry
goods” – grocery items considered necessary to supplement our mother’s quotidian
purchases at the Buhi public market on Tuesdays and Fridays as well as her weekend
trips to nearby Iriga City for beef, seafood and Baguio vegetables. The two-hour trip to Naga City was always a
special treat to whoever was chosen to tag along, usually the two youngest in
our brood of seven or as reward for good behavior.
Your grandfather was
a creature of habit so our experience of these excursions was, more or less,
similar. Upon arrival in Naga City, we
would invariably go to the now defunct Cosmos Restaurant where we would take
our snacks of siopao or marcasotes, a cakelike item on the menu served in
diamond-shaped servings, finished off with a bottle of soda. Coming from a household where calamansi juice
was the norm on account of your grandmother’s economy and insistence on our natural
Vitamin C infusions, soda was a rare treat we only got to enjoy on these trips,
during our town fiesta and from what was usually left of that served to guests
at home.
Thereafter, our
parents would part ways – our father would go about his business, usually a
visit to the Napolcom, the provincial police headquarters. With us, children, tagging along, our mother
would methodically go through her checklist: canned goods at a grocery owned by
Indian nationals, noodles from another place owned by a Chinese family,
clothing materials from establishments of her choice, medical supplies from the
South Star Drugstore and the occasional hardware items for home use. Around lunch time, we would meet our father
at the New England Restaurant fronting the Plaza Elias Angeles where, along
with meat and vegetable items on the menu, they would invariably order the special
pancit canton, a dish by which all others of the same kind in other places were
judged and usually found wanting.
With the main
reasons for the trip already accomplished, the afternoons were, without fail,
spent at the movie theatres in the city – Emily, Bicharra, El Rey, El Vic,
Jade and Albe – whichever featured the double program which suited our parents’
eclectic taste. With our parents and your
Uncle Junior, I remember watching Charlie Chaplin shorts, the James Bond movies
in the Seventies, a good number of sand and sandal epics churned out by
Cinecitta, Biblical extravaganzas, the instalments of the Tarzan franchise, various
Disney features including the David Crockett and Blackbeard films, movie musicals
like the Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, the Sinbad series, countless police/crime
flicks and, in those pre-political correctness times, the occasional
blaxploitation title. At sundown,
shortly before the commute home, a visit to the Quality Bakeshop for a bag of pan
legaspi would complete the experience.
Our family lore is
peppered with stories at the movies.
There’s your Aunt Marivic’s unfortunate first movie experience where,
unable to get over her fright of Leo, the MGM lion, she spent the entire theatre
time slung over our father’s shoulder. Horrified
by the animal stampede in one of the aforesaid Tarzan flicks, I was supposed to
have ducked and reduced our maternal grandmother Petra to uncontrolled mirth
when I disappeared under her tapis or ankle length skirt. Not knowing what it was all about, your Aunt
Miner cried herself to sleep when our parents refused to allow her to watch “Uhaw”,
one of those local Bomba or flesh films that proliferated before the imposition
of Martial Law. To our mother’s
consternation at our father, your Uncle Alvin was haunted for a very long time by
the murder spree in an obscure massacre film called “The Town that Dreaded
Sundown”.
In a particularly
suspenseful moment at the movies, on the other hand, your Aunt Tingting
memorably popped open a Coke bottle, to the general amusement of the rest of
the audience. I remember your Uncle
Junior growling and replicating Bruce Lee’s martial arts posturings for a whole
week after viewing “Enter the Dragon”. Watching “Jesus Christ Superstar” as a
High School student at St. Bridget’s School, your Aunt Eva and her classmates
swooned over Ted Neely, a crush no doubt renewed everytime songs from the movie
were sung at mass – usually during communion – back when miniskirts and bell
bottoms were the order of the day. In
her teens, your Aunt Marivic never missed those Nora Aunor Films where dialogue
was drowned-out by screaming Noranians of which she was a diehard member.
Rarely a creature of
impulse, your grandmother once left her groceries with our Naga City-based Uncle
Ayo and Aunt Sisa and, with me tagging along, went looking for the theatre showing
“Gone With the Wind”, the ne plus ultra moviegoing experience of their
generation. I have since memorialized
this incident with a framed movie poster of this legendary David O’Selznick production at
my home in Fairview. Coming home from
Naga at another time, she decided to stay overnight with our Uncle Jorge and
Auntie Salve in Iriga City just so she can take me and your Uncle Junior to watch
“The Fall of the Roman Empire” at the nearby Allan Theater. When the same moviehouse featured Cecil B. De
Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”, your grandmother took all seven of us to the
movies, along our two housemaids who lugged a big native basket of family-sized
coke bottles and a whole batch of balisoso, a delicacy of ground rice, young
coconut meat and sugar wrapped in banana leaf, laboriously prepared the day before.
Those years were certainly
innocent and magical times. With TV yet
to attain a foothold in households, movie technology had the power to completely
amaze. As a boy, I thought real people
fought behind the movie screens and mistook the audience illuminated by the red
fire exit signs as bloodied actors resting in between the action. I even remember getting quite frustrated
trying and failing to run in slow motion.
As kids, we tried to make our own movies with cut-out figures illuminated
by a kerosene lamp behind a white cloth, charging coconut shells as the price
of admission. For days, we would talk
about movies we watched – from the free ones shown at the town plaza by
manufacturers promoting new products to the features enjoyed in the dark of the
theatre.
