Stephen Hunter - Now Playing At The Valencia: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays On Movies

I n the fifties, Evanston, Illinois, was a paradise distinguished by a million leafy elms, a beautiful lake, a world-class university, a block-by-block array of stately homes. But who the hell even noticed? I certainly didnt.

Far more interesting were its three movie theaters.

It was in one of those theaters that I misspent my youth. From the first second Id seen a movie, I knew I had discovered a home far more nourishing than the one into which I had been born. I had an immediate imaginative connection with the images on the screen. What happened up there was as real to memore real, in factas anything in the otherwise unglamorous career in mediocrity better known as my childhood. I should have been in school, I should have been doing my homework, I should have been mastering sports, small talk with girls, simple arithmetic, all skills that to this day elude me. But I was at the Valencia, fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat.

The Valencia was the tawdry B-house of Evanston, located in the southern end of the small downtown, where the class and elegance of the Sherman Avenue corridor had begun, ever so gently, to decay. Architecturally, it expressed its affinity for the Spanish motif of its namesake by a style called El Cheapo. The screen was set in a ludicrous papier-mch castle wall, complete to parapets and ramparts, all painted a dreadful mauve. The floor was eternally sticky, the bathrooms eternally smelly. Jujubes sealed in mucus dotted its ceiling. In the lobby, the Affy Tapples snared flies in their caramel tar, the Coke cup came out of the machine crooked and wasted a nickels worth of sugary bubbles, and the popcorn had been popped before the Second World War.

Naturally, the place showed films appropriate to its location in the movie food chain: all the crumb-bum double features, a new one every week, the raw, the violent, the cheap, the sensational, the pitiful, the inept. Guns fired, blood splattered, mules talked, monsters mashed, pies flew, throats spurted, cities flattened, and planes crashed. Everyone said it was ridiculous. And, as is so often the case, everyone was wrong.

To me, the stories were thrilling, the starsthe Ken Tobeys, the Frank Lovejoys, the Rory Calhouns, the Stephen McNallys, the Dan Duryeasgigantic, the themes of heroism and male supremacy utterly convincing. I also liked the guns. Those movies were filled with guns, used in every creative way. Swords were neat too, as were airplanes, but not as neat as the guns, which dangled in low-slung gunfighters holsters or were carried with a tough sergeants insouciant I-dont-know-what as part of the cool messy GI look.

You couldnt see guns elsewhere, at least not in such weekly profusion. You couldnt see them at the posh Varsity slightly uptown, abutting that temple of Sherman Avenue upscale consumerism, Marshall Fields. The Varsity was a cathedral of swank with twinkly lights in its dome suggesting stars in the firmament. It exhibited the A pictures of the decade, the MGM musicals, the inspirational biblical dramas, the blubbery Douglas Sirk melodramas, the big-budget Broadway and literary adaptations, like Marjorie Morningstar, which I didnt and still havent and happily never will see. They actually cleaned the urinals at the Varsity. But there were very few gunsmuch less gunfights, fistfights, sword fights, dogfights, and monster attacksat the Varsity.

Nor were there many guns at the Coronet further downtown, boldly located in a yet more decayed area which was dangerously closer to the actual Berlin Wall between black and white Evanstons. This was the art house where Bergman first played, and Kurosawa, where small, dark wonderful pictures changed world cinema but no cities were ever squished flat under a prehistoric paw. Immediately upon entering itmy insane father took me a couple of times, to films he couldnt get my mother to go to; I remember Samurai and The Magician you understood you were in a different culture with different expectations. You had left the mainstream, a daring thing to do in the fifties, and were grasping at something strange. I picked up on this even if I couldnt articulate it, and I suppose I responded. But still: It was provocative, it was mind-spinning, it was different. But it wasnt me.

Left to my own devices, I far more happily spent my time in the Valencia. And that perhaps explains why I became the second film critic in America to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. I washeres the Cap-I ironyeducating myself exactly to the job I would someday be lucky enough to hold. I learned more in the Valencia than I did anywhere on earth, in any school, in the army, in a marriage, and in the features departments where I would spend my life. And thats also why I still prefer to sit in the fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat.

This volume collects what I believe to be my best work from The Washington Post, but as I assembled it, I was astounded by how much more it seemed to do with what was playing at the Valencia in the fifties than with the present; it ends up examining in a loosey-goosey way the process by which the genre pictures of the forties and fifties became the mainstream movies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It shows why the Valencia was America in the fifties and how America of the oughts came out of the Valencia.

Ive organized by genre, which of course is never quite neat enough (nothing is) and leads to a certain untidiness at the margins. Each genre corresponds to a lost pleasure of the Valenciathose vulgar categories that still proclaimed that movies were meant to be fun, not art, without really realizing that the fun was the art. I must say rereading my own work wasnt much fun, and I kept coming across little tricks that seemed funny two minutes before a deadline but now seem pretty dreadful. And at a certain point it became clear to me that maybe I dont have the true movie-mind that believes there is no other life than the life on the screen. If you want that, plenty of critics can provide it, geniuses all. I dont thrive on arcane cinema data and cant remember entire crews down to third assistant grip. Im not even sure what a grip is. Even as a critic, Ive never really left the Valencia: I want the Valencias pleasures, which are escape, excitement, provocation, most of all an emotional journey. Otherwise, I lose interest and dont care what lens was used.