Damn, I wish A.O. Scott had been MY dad...

Well. I thought the vogue for Benjamin-Spock-inspired/derived "permissive" parenting had come and gone, but I suppose I thought wrong. I'm sure many of you caught New York Times lead film critic A.O. Scott's Friday front-page Arts piece headlined "Take The Kids, and Don't Feel Guilty," in which he regales readers with anecdotes concerning his childrens' reactions to R-rated films, e.g., the fact that his sixth-grader son totally dug Sweeney Todd and was more concerned with the foreign policy implications of Charlie Wilson's War than with the toothsome hot-tub nudity of its opening minutes. "Damn," I thought, "If only my folks had let me have it so easy with R-rated movies when I was a kid!" Also, having met Scott's entirely charming boy, I can report that Tony (as Scott is known to friends and colleagues) allows the child to wear his hair way longer than my own parents did back in the day.

And back in the day indeed it was; I joke in my own head, above, about wanting to have Tony for a dad, but he's a full seven years younger than my creaky self, and besides, I don't mean it. (I'd send hugs and kisses to my own father here, but, as he tries to follow the example of Anthony Lane in all possible respects, he doesn't read blogs.) But Scott's free-and-easy (only to a point, as we'll see) attitude brought back some amusing memories of my early days as a freakishly young cinephile.

My own dad was, as a matter of fact, remarkably patient with me with respect to my enthusiasms, which struck him as a little odd. I recall begging him to take me to some community film society screening of Un Chien Andalou in the early '70s, and breaking into tears when, instead of unspooling Chien, the "society" showed Le Mistral,because the print of Chien they had rented was so damaged as to be un-projectable. I later compelled him to take me to another such screening of Vigo's Zero de Conduite, shortly after I purchased my first movie book, P.E. Salles Gomes' biography of Vigo. ("Purchased" is the operative verb there—the first movie book I owned was Clarens' Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction, which I out-and-out stole from a classmate.)

This weird-ass French stuff was one thing, but the R-rated material I had clamored to see was something else entirely. Back in '69, a summer-school teacher had rhapsodized to a group of his charges about Easy Rider, a film that said A LOT, he insisted, about where "this country" "was at" today, and I begged my folks to let me see it, but they said, no, I was ten and that was it. Then I got pneumonia and they bought me the movie's soundtrack album as a sympathy gift. By '72, as students of that era of filmmaking may recall, almost every picture worth seeing was R-rated, but my parents weren't budging. It wasn't as if, pace Mr. Scott, they were gonna feel guilty for exposing me to this material. They just DID NOT WANT me exposed to this material. But I was insistent, a.k.a., whiny. When Slaughterhouse-Five came out in early summer, I touted its literary value. Come on—I already KNEW what the adult content would be (mass death, Montana Wildhack's beautiful tits—I didn't say "tits"), having read the book. What further harm could be done? My folks gave up, kind of. Their terms: If I could get an adult other than themselves to take me (it was tacitly understood that said adult needed to be a relative), then, fine.

Score. I enlisted an uncle—my mom's younger brother, about ten years older than me, a with-it guy who was kind of a buddy (he used to get a kick out of reading my MAD magazines) and who'd been in 'Nam. This was a pretty cozy screening. Richie (the uncle) brought a girlfriend. I don't remember if he had read the book or not, but I recall we both agreed that the casting of Valerie Perrine as Montana Wildhack was just right.

So far, so good, I thought. Soon after Slaughterhouse Five, master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock was making a comeback of sorts, with his first feature since 1969's rather flat Topaz: Frenzy, an apparently daring and "modern" variant on his "wrong man" formula, about a down-on-his-luck fellow mistaken for a notorious rapist-strangler. The real rapist-strangler is, of course, a prosperous, well-liked "friend" of the suspect.

Well. Frenzy was rated R, too, and my parents weren't having it, but they held out the same deal they did for Slaughterhouse Five. And so I appealed to Nanny Kenny, my 73-year-old grandmother on my father's side. The last Hitchcock picture she had seen was Rebecca, and she recalled it fondly. I was set.

Things went smoothly enough at first. The nude female corpse floating in the Thames was a little grisly, but at least she was face down, and Hitchcock's funny cameo was around that time, so it was okay. What neither Nanny Kenny nor myself were prepared for was the first scene in which we see the necktie strangler, Robert Rusk (played by Barry Foster) take a victim—in this case the estranged wife of the "wrong man" Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), a rather prim woman who runs a matchmaking agency.

It's not, as those familiar with the movie know, that Rusk kills Brenda. He first submits her to humiliating exposure, baring her breasts and pronouncing them "lovely." He then rapes her in her office chair, repeating the word "lovely" with every thrust, as Brenda, poignantly, tragically, recites the 91st Psalm. This seems to go on forever.

And it's only after Rusk is, um, finished that he strangles Brenda to death with his necktie.

And there I am, twelve years old, sitting next to my grandmother, watching this.

Man, that was some awkward drive home that night.

Fortunately, shortly after this, I had a freakish growth spurt that shot my height up to six foot four inches. I could be my own "adult guardian," or rather, my pals' adult guardian. And so we went—to Magnum Force, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, etc. And we lied to our parent about it. "What did you and Joseph do today?" "We went to the movies." "What did you see?" "Mame." [pregnant pause.] "With Lucille Ball?" "Yup." [equally pregnant pause.] "Did you...like it?"

Early in his piece, Scott says: "I'm not going to advise anyone to subject young eyeballs to the cruelty of There Will Be Blood [...] or the menace of No Country For Old Men."

And there's the rub. Because, honest to God, I know that if I was 12 years old today, those are the movies I'd be clamoring to see.

Comments

[Aaron Aradillas]

My parents were like Mr. Scott. The way my Dad saw it he wasn't going to sit through something boring if he had to take his children to the movies. We were going to see something worth seeing.

My older brother has a vivid memory of Joe Buck hopping a bus for the Big Apple in Midnight Cowboy at the age of 3. Granted he fell asleep soon after, but Dad did take him to a X-rated movie.

I can clearly remember July of '87 when Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was released. There we were, Mom, Dad, Sister, and me at the 10:00 pm showing of Jacket. I was 8 going on 9. If you recall the first sequence you know it was an eye-opening moviegoing experience.

Later in life my Mom would take me to certain off-the-path movies on football Sundays. (My dad is a HUGE Cowboys fan. He would only go to the movies on Saturdays or a bi-week.) My Mom was no prude, but it was odd to see stuff like Clerks or Trainspotting with her. (She loved the soundtrack.) I still reemeber the time my Mom took me on a Saturday afternoon to see Menace II Society. We also went to a radio station hosted sneak of John Singleton's Higher Learning. The sneak took place at one of San Antonio's more motorious multiplexes.

Needless to say all this corruptive moviegoing made me resist Disney product for quite awhile. I'd rather have seen The War of the Roses than The Little Mermaid.

And I turned out relatively normal.

[don lewis]

See, I'm younger than you GK so I was "lucky" enough to have HBO and Showtime at our house when I was 10 or 11. Before we got it, I remember going to my grandparents house and just pouring over the little guide they would send out that had what movies were playing that month and a little synopsis of them.

I would watch anything and everything that came on and at night when the good stuff was on, I'd pretend to fall asleep in front of the tube and then I'd watch all the sleazy stuff my dad was watching. Ah, the joys of the 80's and single TV households...no internet...classics, cult and art films on pay TV to fill space. Sigh.

[Z]

My father took me to see Scarface on a school night when I was 11 years old and it was the greatest film-going experience of my life until I saw Goodfellas in Santa Cruz when I was 18, high on some of the kindest bud I've ever smoked.

[Stu]

A group of friends and I went to Trainspotting in the 6th grade for a birthday. Our chaperon pulled us out of the theater after the shit the bed sequence. That poor woman.

[demimonde]

I really loved that piece of Tony's because it's such a wise reversal of the "adults will like/get this" endorsement of smart or reference-heavy kids' movies like "Ratatouille" and the "Shreks." But I think grown-ups forget how utterly impressionable kids can be. Whole movies have been spoiled for me because of one moment or scene: Large Marge (horrifying!), Christopher Walken's suicide in "Four Friends," which I saw in high school with three friends (what we were thinking I don't know); Sashi Kapoor's suicide in "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid." I'm still damaged.

But I'm a very gullible viewer. I begged to see "Jaws" with the boys on my block, and my brother, who were all "Jaws"-crazy (insert photo of all of us holding up the actual shark jaws one of us had procured). So someone's mom took us and was tasked with physically covering my eyes when something gory happened. I shut them tight like a good little prude. And to this day, "Jaws" lives somewhere in my mind as the grossest movie ever, despite many viewings. And "The Exorcist"! I was flat-out forbidden to see it, so I didn't (good girl-itis) and I still think of it as the most terrifying movie ever. I caught a trailer for "Burnt Offerings," a forgotten '70s horror flick, at some kids' movie or other and still haven't recovered. Oh brave new world, that has such movies in it.

[Randy C Ford]

The strangling of Mrs Brenda Blaney(Barbara Leigh-Hunt)still ranks as the most gruesome murder I've seen. The sound of her gurgling coming to an end - her fingers slipping down her neck - and her eyes slowly stopping their blinking and fixing in her death stare are all horrifying. But the brutal close up of her raped and strangled in her chair - eyes bugging out of her head and her tongue protruding grotesquely leaves no doubt at all. Mrs Brenda Blaney is DEAD!

[Randy Ford]

I was fourteen when I saw Frenzy for the 1st time and as Mrs Blaney Gurgled her last breath and her eyes popped out of her skull in a bloodshot death-glare and her tounge stuck out dead-I came in my pants as the camera kept showing her stiff in her office chair and staring - bugeyed - at her her killers still stiff dink in his pants. When her secretary screams her lungs out after finding this blond bitch dead,you know that poor Mrs Blaney just sits their starin' sightlessly at her prim secretary - so dead she could care less how gruesome she was in her last horrorgasm!

[pete]

Not even Hitch could have predicted that 37 years after the release of Frenzy we would all still be so entranced with poor,dead Mrs Blaney.
For years the scene was cut so that we never got to see Mrs Blaney with her staring eyes, open mouth and lolling tongue.
Happily the scene has now been fully restored in all its gurgling,tongue glory.
The scene is exciting in more ways than one and I enjoyed it even more when I watched the film with a girl cos her eyes lit up and she gave a little smile as Mrs Blaney gave her the bug eyed tongue stare.

[Beats by Dre]

Politeness is to do and say the kindest thing in the kindest way.

[Cheap Canada Goose]

Childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.

[Buy Canada Goose]

Bring up a raven and he'll pick out your eyes.