Make “teenagers” singular instead of plural, and the title would serve for a memoir of my adolescence. And actually this is a bit of one.
There was (still is) a railroad track about a hundred yards behind the house where I grew up, and there were still passenger trains. Though there was no proper station for our little hamlet—Greenbrier, Alabama—you could go stand by the track and flag the train down and ride to Decatur, fifteen miles or so away. When I was in my early teens, or maybe not quite there, two friends and I did this occasionally. On a Saturday afternoon I would catch the train at Greenbrier, and Johnny and Lynn (Lynn was a boy, too) would get on a few miles further at Belle Mina, and we would go to Decatur, walk uptown to the Princess Theater, see a movie, and catch the train home. It was a big thrill for us.
This was one of the movies I remember seeing on one of those trips. I was such a timid kid that it actually frightened me somewhat, which I suppose is why I remember it.
If the movie came out in 1959, I suppose we probably saw it no later than 1960, so I would have been only twelve, maybe only eleven. Or maybe the movies was several years old—I would have thought we were more like thirteen or fourteen. It says something about the different sort of world we lived in that we were allowed to take those little trips on our own.
I see there is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this. Most of it’s on YouTube and it’s also on Netflix, as is the original. Do I really want to see it again, or shall I just leave my nostalgic memory alone?
I’ve sometimes thought of it over the years, since the late ’70s or so, when I became old enough to look back at my adolescence. The title began to seem almost prophetic of the madness that would break out a bit later in the ’60s. There’s something behind this, something we don’t understand.
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