Henrietta Hay's Column

Most of us watch the Academy Awards program to see what the women are wearing, but the ceremony does put the movie industry in the spotlight. Discussion of this year's big winner, Schindler's List, goes beyond the film itself and into the social consciousness. All together, March was a big movie month.

I have been a movie fan for more years than most of you. I remember the movie house - no one could call it a theater - in Englewood when I was a little kid. It was called the Pioneer, a very appropriate name as it turns out. The comfort of the audience was not a big priority. It still amazes me a little bit to sit in the comfortable, padded seats of today's movie theaters and remember those splintery wooden seats that we sat on when we didn't have to sit in the aisles because the place was overflowing with kids.

Although I probably saw all the movies that came to town the only images still in my mind from those early days are those of Charlie Chaplain and Harold Lloyd. The Kid starred Charlie as the little tramp with Jackie Coogan as the scroungiest kid in the history of the movies. The Gold Rush pitted the little tramp against the Yukon and I'm almost sure he won. My other image is of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, hanging from the hands of a clock high on the side of a building as the hand moves slowly downward to 6 o'clock. My memory stops there. Did he fall off? Nah!

Those early movies were silent. Well, not exactly. Only the films were silent. The audiences felt free to comment, cheer, boo and express any other noisy emotion they happened to feel. Often they were accompanied by the town piano player banging out "mood music" on an elderly, loud and usually out of tune piano.

And then came the talkies.

A recent issue of the New Yorker contains a re-print of an essay by Robert Benchley printed in 1928, called Enter the Talkies. He says, speaking of Hollywood, "Firsthand reports from the scene present a terrifying picture. Perceiving the advent of the Film Which Talks Like a Man, hundreds of movie stars who have attained their eminence because of a dimple in the chin or a bovine eye, but whose speaking voices could hardly be counted on to put across the sale of a pack of Fatimas in a night club, are now frantically trying to train their larynxes into some sort of gentility." The coming of the talkie ended many a movie career.

Once again -- memory, which loses the important things, brings up the trivia. The first talking picture I saw was Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer in 1927. This was a major event. The theater in my mind's eye was on the northwest corner of 15th and Curtis in Denver and was, I think, called the American. For pure drama, Jolson's version of Mammmy in that film may never be quite equaled for those of us who heard it for the first time coming out of that big black and white screen. I find now, that The Jazz Singer was not really a talkie. The only sound was Jolson's songs and a few lines of dialogue he ad-libbed on the set, including, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." He was so right.

Now, more years later than I care to admit, filmmaking is a major industry and has tremendous artistic and technical talent and skill. Hollywood has brought us wonderful entertainment through the years, ranging from very bad to very, very good. And occasionally it tackles a deeply emotional issue as it did in this year's Oscar winning story of the Holocaust, Schindler's List. I watched the last part of the Oscar program. Far and away the most dramatic moment in that whole glitzy evening occurred when the dignified, gray-haired co-producer pulled up the sleeve of his tuxedo and said, "My number was." He gave the number that had been tattooed on his arm when he entered the concentration camp as a little boy.

Sometimes Hollywood rises above itself. I think the Little Tramp would have been proud.