Recently, my dear spouse asked me for suggestions for movies to watch with our kids (11 and 7). We’ve run through what we can access easily through our streaming services. “What movies do you remember from your childhood that we could watch?”, he asked. I laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

This isn’t an essay about movies (if you want to learn about movies there are many people FAR more knowledgeable than I am, Kevin Smith comes to mind as your required first stop). This essay is about my dad. I’ll write another one later about my own experience of film from high school forward, but this one’s about my dad and his ideas about “movies for children.”

“Talkies Uptown Video” independent rental store incorporated in 1984 in my hometown. I reckon we got our VCR around the same time. My dad had something like membership number 3, 13, 37? (you can ask him). My parents were high school teachers. During the school year my dad averaged a movie a day; in the summer, two. I wasn’t always invited to watch with him, and I had my own activities later on, but watching movies on VHS with my dad was a huge part of my childhood.

We saw stuff on the big screen, too. Looking at “top movies of 70s 80s lists” prompts me to remember amazing movies we (my dad, mom, and I) saw in the theatre. Imagine a kid at these ages, rapt in these films:

• Terms of Endearment (1983; I was 12)
• Crimes of the Heart (1986; I was 15)
• Grease (1978; I was 7)
• Kramer vs. Kramer (1979; I was 8)
• On Golden Pond (1981, I was 10)
• Educating Rita (1983, I was 12)
• Gandhi (1982, I was 11, we saw it in the theatre and then I asked my dad to rent it for me during a no-school “in service” day so I could watch it again by myself. Which I did. But I DID see ET in the theatre as well as Annie, that year)
• Amadeus (1984, I was 13 and I saw it in the theatre twice)

In 1984 (I was 13) I started to exert my own wishes: I saw Ghostbusters AND Beverly Hills Cop AND Temple of Doom AND Gremlins AND The Karate Kid AND Footloose AND Romancing the Stone AND Splash in the theatre as well. In those years of early teen-hood it was a good mix: I saw Out of Africa AND The Color Purple AND Mask in the theatre, but I also got to see White Nights and Back to the Future and Rocky 4 and Jewel of the Nile.

But what I remember the most *without any prompting from lists or anything else* was sitting with my dad watching wonderful things, like:

• Sleuth (1972, Laurence Olivier & Michael Caine)
• Psycho — which I saw the way it was meant to be seen, without having ANY idea where it was headed or who the “psycho” was. DELICIOUS.
• Rear Window (still easily one of my top 5 faves)
• Rope!
• The Trouble With Harry
• Taxi Driver
• Raging Bull (YOU go back and look at a list of top movies from 1980 and pick some to bring home to show your child — I bet this isn’t what you’d pick, but you’re not my dad)
• Harold and Maude (which among other things gave me a lifelong love for the Cat Stevens tunes featured in this movie)
• The Exorcist (long story I’ll share later)
• Stand By Me (1986, this is later, I was 15, so it’s time to pause this list)

Plus, my dad was a Woody Allen fan, so we flew through ALL of those (I no longer watch Woody Allen films; I wouldn’t now, anyway, but I stopped before many people, because of what I feel to be intellectual dishonesty in the lack of explicit acknowledgement of James Thurber’s The Catbird Seat in Curse of the Jade Scorpion, but I digress). I was particularly blown away by The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), which I used to sneak downstairs and watch over and over while my parents slept, and Broadway Danny Rose (1984).

Much of my experience of movie watching with my dad is tied to one of two introductory phrases: “let’s go to the movies this weekend” or “I watched a movie today, maybe you want to watch it with me tomorrow before I return it.” Each of those meant magic was going to happen. My dad liked to be really, really low-key about setting my expectations — I think he was fascinated to see my reactions to movies when I came in cold, so…. I’d be prepared for a film like this (titles are at the end, in case they’re not obvious to you):

“I saw a movie today. It had fans. Maybe you’d like to watch it tomorrow afternoon with me before I return it.”

“You like Moonlighting, right? Maybe you’d like to watch this film later tonight.”

“You liked The Elephant Man [we saw it in the theatre in 1980; I was 9], there’s another movie by the same guy…”

“You think you might want to be a lawyer someday?”

“You dance.”

“Want to watch a movie with a computer?”

And at some point we began binge watching before that was even a thing, grabbing everything we could and gobbling it down:
Apocalypse Now
Papillon
The Graduate
Silkwood
and, and, and…

But it wasn’t completely out of control! — I didn’t see A Clockwork Orange or The Deer Hunter or Deliverance until I was a little older. And there were other gaps: my dad didn’t really love “old” movies so favorites such as Double Indemnity came later, when I found them on my own. He also dislikes Cary Grant and isn’t huge on musicals, so I missed a bunch of wonderful films that I didn’t see until later.

But later will have to come later. For now, I’m still wrestling with my husband’s question: “what movies did you watch as a kid that we could watch again now?” I’ll take a page from my dad’s playbook and ask: “you liked Roy Scheider in All That Jazz, right?**

*Blood Simple (1984)
*The Last Picture Show (1971)
*Eraserhead (1977)
*The Paper Chase (1973)
*All That Jazz (1979)
*2001 A Space Odyssey (1968)

**We need to watch The French Connection. Obviously.

And here’s a picture of my dad. You can tell it’s taken at the time my story is set, by the paneling. And the orange chair….