Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (6 page)

One day it was winter. The next day there was a wet restlessness in the wind, and it was March. We knew it was March because Dan-Dan the YoYo Man always came to town right around St. Patrick's Day. He visited all the grade school playgrounds, driving up in his fat maroon Hudson and jumping out with the yo-yo already in the air. He passed out fliers for the annual yo-yo contest at the Princess Theater.

The yo-yo was the first of many things I failed to master in life. Oh, I could walk the dog and loop the loop. But I was never able to rock the baby, so I was always disqualified on the first Saturday, the day when every kid in Urbana was up onstage at the Princess with his yo-yo. Two weeks later, when Dan-Dan presided over the finals, a kid would win a new Schwinn bike. The kid was never me.

The Princess closed forever last month. Friends and relatives sent me clippings in the mail from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. "The Last Picture Show in Urbana," the headline said. It was also the only picture show in Urbana. Old clippings show it was in business as early as 1915. It was the place where I learned to love the movies.

In 1950, television was still a rumor in Champaign-Urbana. Some jerk down the street might put up a big antenna and be able to drag in a test pattern from Peoria, but for everybody else, mass media meant the radio and the movies. Over in Champaign they had the Rialto, the Orpheum, the Virginia, the Park, and the Illini, which was down by the railroad station and specialized in movies about nudist camps and the mademoiselles of Gay Paree. On campus, there was the Co-Ed. In Urbana, there was the Princess, where the program changed twice a week, and there was a Kiddie Matinee on Saturdays. The Kiddie Matinee was the biggest bargain in town. For exactly nine cents, you got a double feature, five color cartoons, a newsreel, the coming attractions, and a chapter of a serial starring Bat man or Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In March, you got Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man.

Your parents dropped you off at noon. You waited in the alley that ran down the side of the theater. Some of the older kids had just finished their Saturday morning dance classes at Thelma Lee Rose's dance studio, which was upstairs from the theater. When the Princess doors opened, there was a mad rush for tickets and seats: front row was the best. Usually your parents gave you twenty cents, which was enough for jujubes and popcorn, with a penny left over for the jawbreaker machine.

First came the color cartoons, five of them, each exactly six minutes long. After Th-th-th-at's all, folks! came the first half of the double feature, which was always a Western: Hopalong Cassidy, Rex Allen, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or those two slightly kinky, sinister figures, Lash LaRue and Whip Wilson, who are due to be rediscovered any day now in camp circles. Then came the serial, the newsreel ("In sunny Cypress Gardens, mermaids learn that what goes up, comes down!") and the ads for the Urbana Pure Milk Co. and Reliable Furniture. Then came the second feature, which in my memory is always a comedy starring the Bowery Boys with Huntz Hall.

For a kid in grade school, going to the movies was one of the few acts in life that you could undertake entirely on your own. You chose your own seat. You ate your own popcorn. You lived out the adventures on the screen with an intensity that no later masterpiece by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas would ever equal. You laughed, you shrieked, and when the hero even looked like he was going to kiss the girl, you groaned.

The Princess in those days was not without its ominous side. Every show started with a slide offering a five-dollar reward "for the apprehension and conviction of vandals." Then came a dire warning: "Ladies! Hang onto Your Bags! Do Not Leave Them on the Seat Next to You!" In the boys' room, which was downstairs off the lobby, junior high school kids clustered in corners and smoked cigarettes. There was running warfare between the ushers and kids who tried to sneak in through the exit door. And if you bumped against the back of the seat in front of you, some junior thug was likely to turn around and threaten you with a knuckle sandwich.

Eventually I grew too old for the Kiddie Matinees. I became one of the students at Thelma Lee Rose's, learning the fox-trot and the box step. One Friday night Miss Rose held a dance for her students, and I asked a girl from my grade at school. When we got to the doorway that led up a steep flight of stairs to her studios, I discovered to my humiliation that I had made a mistake, and the dance was not until the following week.

My date and I pooled our funds and bought tickets to The Bridge over the River Kwai, which was the current feature at the Princess, and it was the best movie I had ever seen in my life. And my date let me put my arm around her, and that was even better.

In the Princess Theater I saw Lawrence of Arabia and The Long, Long Trailer and Pat Boone in April Love and Doris Day in Young at Heart and hundreds of other movies. Eventually I made my way across town for Citizen Kane and Bergman and Fellini at the Park (which had become the Art) and The Immoral Mr. Teas at the Illini.

One day, after I left Champaign-Urbana for the big city to the north, I learned that the Princess had been renamed the Cinema. And it seemed to me that in the very change of name, an era had passed and a crucial mistake had been made, because who would ever rather go to the Cinema than to the Princess?

Eventually they divided the old theater into two smaller auditoriums. They experimented with cheaper ticket prices. Business fell off. The students at the nearby University of Illinois were presumably looking at videos or logged on to the Internet. A giant multiscreen megaplex opened south of town, on U.S. 45. You could walk to the Princess, but the new extravaganza wasn't even in Champaign or Urbana.

In the movie The Last Picture Show, the last movie shown in the local theater was Red River, with John Wayne. At the Cinema, the final double bill was Ed Wood, a comedy about a 195os exploitation film director, and Red Rock West, a triple-cross film noir. The night before they closed, they took in fifty dollars. Admission was three dollars until 6 p.m. and five dollars afterward. Still the biggest bargain in town.

y first movie reviews were written for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois. I asked Kit Donahue, the current publisher, to plunder the files for what could be found, and the results were reviews of King of Kings, Two Women, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and La Dolce Vita (below). This is not a good review and is substantially mistaken, but it is where and how I started.

The Daily Illini experience was one of the great times of my life. As a freshman at Illinois I had edited and published a weekly newspaper on politics and the arts, named the Spectator. If we'd had the wit to give it away, we would have invented the alternative weekly, but no; it struggled for a year, I sold it for two hundred dollars, and joined the Daily Illini as a weekly columnist.

The paper then and now was one of the great college dailies, published independently of the university and with its own clankety rotary press roaring away at 3 a.m. every morning. We had a union print shop, and dealing with the realities of professional printers and pressmen was more educational than all possible injections of journalism theory.

The writing staff was awesome; it included William Nack, later to become the great Sports Illustrated racing and boxing writer, who even then was addicted to horses. We had one photo engraving of a horse, which as I recall we ran to illustrate whatever horse had just won the Kentucky Derby. At least a dozen other graduates of that period of the DI rose to become editors, publishers, columnists, and writers.

La Dolce Vita

OCTOBER 4, 1961

There is in La Dolce Vita a great deal to be puzzled about, and a great deal to be impressed by, and perhaps a great deal which we as Americans will never completely understand. Yet it is a fine motion picture. And we have the feeling that even those students who sat through its three hours with a measure of boredom came away convinced that something was there. It is this something, this undefined feeling being hammered at beneath the surface of the film, which gives it power and illumination. And it is this hidden message which contains the deep and moral indictment of the depravity which La Dolce Vita documents.

In technical excellence, the film surpasses every production this reviewer has seen, except a few of the Ingmar Bergman classics. Photography and the musical score are together almost as important as the dialogue in conveying the unmistakable attack on "the sweet life."

This attack is also made clear in frequent symbolism, although sometimes the symbolism becomes too obvious to fit into the effortless flow of the total production. For example, in the final scene where merrymakers gather around the grotesque sea monster which represents their way of living, and then the protagonist is called by the "good" girl but cannot understand her, the symbolism is very near the surface. Yet this tangible use of symbols might account in part for La Dolce Vita's fantastic success. Too often the "new wave" fails through symbolism that is simply too subtle for most moviegoers.

The acting itself is startlingly realistic, and for a very good reason: too many of the players are portraying themselves. The greatest surpriseand one of the greatest successes-in the film is the Swedish sex goddess Anita Ekberg, cast as a "typical" American motion picture star. She plays the part with a wild, unthinking abandon which far surpasses her previous roles in "B" pictures designed primarily to exploit her impressive physical attributes.

But there can be no real award for best actor or actress in the film, just as in a sense it does not seem to be a film so much as a simple record of "the sweet life." The characters, in their midnight parody of happiness, are all strangely anonymous. Only their life, their society, comes through-with a sad, burnt-out vividness that sputters briefly through a long night and then dies in the morning on the beach, dies with the sea monster who has blank, uncomprehending eyes.

In the film, the wild but bored house party comes just before the dawn. It is this party, in all its depravity, which has become one of the most widely known segments of the film. Yet it is probably the one area of "the sweet life" which misses the mark for many American audiences. The scene is meant to show a last, desperate attempt to find something beneath the whirlpool of animalism which finally engulfs them all. Yet as the girl lies still beneath the mink stole, bored and restless eyes look away-still looking.

We are afraid that too many Americans might consider this scene as a sharp, immediate event. Its message, of complete and final meaninglessness, might not come through to an audience which may not find such things particularly everyday. And so, despite the almost extreme good taste with which the scene was filmed, we are afraid that many of the thousands who queued up before the theatre had rather elementary motives.

This is excusable. We wonder how many years it has been since a film as intellectual and meaningful-and as basically moral-as La Dolce Vita has attracted such crowds here. We suspect it has been a very long time. The greeting it is getting is a tribute to one of the finest motion pictures of our time.