I was born a diehard movie buff. When we were kids in the 1950s, going to the Paramount Theater was like dying and going to heaven, over and over again.
My two sisters, three brothers and I were St. Cloud southsiders who grew up just west of the college. We would walk the mile to that theater at least once a week in all weathers, our quarters, dimes and nickels jingling in our pockets, our eager minds anticipating the excitement of a big-screen spectacle while munching popcorn and slurping on boxes of Juicy Fruits, Junior Mints and Black Cows.
Before the films began, we pint-sized movie addicts would sit there in our seats squirming with anticipation. Then, at last, the lights would begin to dim in two oval chandeliers, the curtain would begin to open and we’d hear the roar of the MGM lion or the trumpet-blaring flourish of 20th Century Fox just before the movie started. We would be thrilled beyond words. Many a Sunday, after sitting through catechism classes at St. Mary’s (or, just as often, while playing hooky from catechism), we’d rush over to the Paramount and watch the same matinee over and over all day, sometimes three times in a row.
When we were very young brats, our favorites were westerns, war movies and sword-fighting spectacles – the bloodier the better. Later, I began to enjoy more sophisticated pictures, especially those spellbinding Alfred Hitchcock movies, which always came to the Paramount, not the other two theaters in St. Cloud – the Hays and the Eastman. To this day, a half century later, Hitchcock is my favorite movie director. I still associate his movies with the Paramount Theater because that’s where I first saw some of his very best – To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960).
After seeing Vertigo, the eerie images and soundtrack from that movie haunted my mind like ghosts for weeks, and I begged everybody I knew to go see it. At the time, it was considered a critical flop, but I knew, young as I was, that it was a genuine masterpiece. It remains to this day, after so many viewings, at the top of my Top-10 movie list. Every time I’ve seen Vertigo on video or CD, my experience of viewing it in the Paramount is still palpable. That theater with its drafty popcorn aroma is indelibly entwined in memory with that movie – and so many others.
It’s the same with Psycho, that other macabre work of art from the Master. I saw it in the Paramount with my cousin from Benson, Mary Lou O’Malley. What a stunner it was. And what spooky ambience, what with a couple actual bats flying through the flickering darkened air above us. Yes, indeed. In those days, sometimes bats did fly and flutter in that theater.
Nearly 40 years after Psycho first shocked and thrilled me, I saw it again – lo and behold – right in the Paramount again during a special showing. After seeing it on video many times on TV, what a treat it was to view that moody classic again digitally projected on the great big screen in the very place I’d first seen it.
From the early 1950s through the 1980s, I must have seen at least 500 movies at the Paramount, which is the greatest movie palace of all time, as far as I’m concerned. Its plush ornamental elegance, its glimmering chandeliers, its lacey filigreed ceiling, its scalloped balconies hanging there as if by some magic levitation made the movie-going experience extra-special. In the 1950s, so long ago, the Paramount’s magnificent grandeur and its big colorful movies were special treats because back home, all we had for viewing pleasure were clunky TVs whose picture screens looked like ship’s portholes through which we could see rather fuzzy images floating around in a hissing snowstorm caused by bad-signal reception. The Paramount, in contrast, was the Real Thing: Technicolor! CinemaScope! Bigger than Life! Thrilling!
Some of the classic movies I first saw in the Paramount and still associate with my experience of them in that wonderful theater are Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson, The Searchers, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Some Like It Hot, Summer and Smoke, The Godfather, Chinatown and so many more, too many to mention.
When I returned to St. Cloud in the late 1990s, I was astonished one day when I walked into the Paramount for an art exhibit and beheld that theater’s magnificent restoration, of which I’d been unaware, having lived elsewhere for years. I’d assumed it was still a decrepit shadow of its former glory. Words cannot express my amazement upon seeing that restoration, and it still astonishes me every time I enter that theater, which in my memory and even now is one of the happiest places of my long life. Its restoration is like a vivid dream revived.
Long live the Paramount!
