| Chapter 8: | The Movies |
Sennett. Capra’s first box office hit, winning five Oscars, was “It Happened One Night” released in 1934. It established a new type of film, called the screwball comedy. His major movies were fables like in the Sicilian tradition. In “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” released in 1936, an honest but naïve man wins his battles against corrupt authority figures.29
Louie and I liked Humphrey Bogart in gangster roles. Bogart looked great with a cigarette dangling from his lips. On the One Hundred and Seventh Street Pier, Louie spotted two chicks. He asked me for a cigarette without taking his slanted eyes off the skirts. He took two puffs from the Lucky Strike and said: “Wait here.” With the cigarette dangling from his lips, he approached the girls and talked to them for what seemed an eternity to me. When the girls walked away, he flicked the butt into the East River and came back to where I was standing. “We got dates with those chicks for Saturday night at Jefferson Park”. That Saturday he had a great necking session with his date. My girl was a divorced woman with a child and she devoted all of our time explaining why I was too young and inexperienced for her. I struck out. Grandma would have been relieved had she known how my date had turned out.
My mother would occasionally come to One Hundred and Seventh Street to visit my grandmother and those were the only times I saw her. My grandmother always had high praise for my mother and I grew up considering my mother a woman of impeccable values. However, grandma had nothing good to say about my father. To me dad was Dracula married to Snow White. She would take me to the movies in places that looked even better than the