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I REALLY FEEL as if I’ve missed something because back in 1958, I didn’t get a chance to see “Never Love a Stranger.”
That flick must have been something spectacular. At least the big ad in the Wilkes-Barre Record on Dec. 3 made it sound that way.
According to the paper, if you’d trekked on over to the West Side Drive-in you’d experience “the bullets, the blondes, the booze, the blood of the roaring twenties.” Good lord – and I missed it. What was I thinking?
Old-time movie ads didn’t just engage in overkill. They were practically an art form. In a space sometimes as small as two or three skinny columns wide by a couple of inches deep they’d fairly scream at you that you would live a lifetime of regret if you foolishly chose not to go down to the local movie house that night and plunk down your 35 cents or whatever.
Actually, if I had managed somehow to commandeer transportation and get over to Larksville I’d probably have been unfit to sit in geometry class at school the next day. “Never Love a Stranger” was packaged on a double bill with “Joy Ride,” which promised “hot cars, easy dames.” Who could care about finding the area of a trapezoid after that?
Recently a family member tried to look up a movie in the newspaper. It took us a couple of minutes just to find the dinky little ads that gave nothing more than times of showing.
Pathetic!
I wonder who composed those old blurbs and did the design. On March 7, 1953, The Times Leader reported on page one that Soviet dictator Joe Stalin had died. But, for my money, the most compelling item in the whole paper was the ad deep in section two for “Seminole,” with Rock Hudson and Barbara Hale.
Trumpeting “the flaming fury of the Everglades Indian wars,” the ad for the Comerford showed Hudson alternately battling Native Americans and bending Hale backward, about to plant a wicked kiss on her. I don’t think the showing times were even listed, but I didn’t care what time it started. I just wanted to see the damn movie.
If the ads truly were an art form, they were one that has since vanished. Today’s movie trailers, whether online or on TV, merely hype the stars and show people getting blown up. The technicians who make them probably have trouble writing coherent grocery lists.
I was never permitted to visit the Roxy theater, in Lee Park. But, oh how I wanted to. This movie house’s 1953 Times Leader ad for “Devil in the Flesh” (an award-winning French flick) promised that it “makes most of the love stories you have seen on the screen appear as pallid as kindergarten romps.”
The tagline “Not recommended for children under 16” probably sealed the deal for every male who headed down to Hanover Township after telling the wife that his model railroad club had just called a special meeting.
I looked up this movie online. There’s plenty of information about it, but nowhere in cyberspace am I told that I would be committing a good majority of the seven deadly sins by buying and watching it.
Yes, we live in truly depressing times. Maybe one of these days, though, I’ll get my hands on “Never Love a Stranger.” A good dose of bullets, blondes, booze and blood might be just what I need.
ON THE WEB
For more columns by Tom Mooney, visit www.timesleader.com.