I love old movies.....Good old movies, that is.....Good old movies and even not so old 'good' movies, I love'em all......And I watch'em over and over again....I bet I've seen the Maltese Falcon 300 times and that's a conservative estimate....:)...I know what you're going to say, "Paul from Alabama, don't you ever get bored watching the same movie over and over again, the ending is always the same"?....Well all I can say is, I'm never bored with a 'good' movie and the feeling the movie gave me the first time I saw it, the way it moved me emotionally, well if it gives me that same feeling the 300th time I see it, well I might watch it 301 times.....:)...I know some folks can't, I got a good friend who never ever watches a movie twice, he just finds them not interesting and frankly boring and that's fine, we're just different when it comes to watching movies....

Now what is an old movie?...Well for me over the years what's an 'old movie' has changed as I got older and I'm sure for other folks too around my age, I'm 59 now.....Years ago when I first fell in love with old movies, an old movie was anything with my favorite actor, Humphrey Bogart....'The Maltese Falcon', 'Key Largo', 'To Have and To Have Not', 'The African Queen', 'Casablanca', 'The Big Sleep' and the 'The Petrified Forest'.....I mean these are wonderful, great old movies, with great acting and great stories....I would see them on TV or at movie theaters that would have old movie screenings.....Of course then came VCR tapes and now DVD’s, even movies on demand on the TV now or shown on our computers......

Bettie Davis?.....'All About Eve'.....Every movie she was in she was mesmerizing but none as much as her part in 'All About Eve'....

W.C. Fields?....Lord I love him....'The Bank Dick' is one of the funniest things I've ever watched in my life.....The Marx Brothers?.....Absolutely insane......Some of the old screwball comedies with William Powell, like 'My Man Godfrey'....Cary Grant?.....He's made some of the funniest movies ever, 'Arsenic and Old Lace', 'The Philadelphia Story', 'His Girl Friday', 'My Favorite Wife' and of course 'Bringing Up Baby'......

Alfred Hitchcock?......"North By Northwest', 'Vertigo', 'Rear Window', 'Dial M For Murder', 'Notorious'...and 'Psycho' ...I lived in Atlanta when 'Psycho' came out in 1960, I was 11 years old then....We lived in the suburbs of Atlanta and the only way you could get downtown to see a movie when you were 11 years old by yourself was the buses or trolleys as we called them back then....A friend of mine, I even remember his name still, Henry Cline, well me and Henry slipped off from his mother's house early one evening and took the bus downtown to the old Paramount Theater in Atlanta, one of those beautiful old theaters that's gone now, big screen, ornate furnishings, looked more like a palace than a movie theater.....We saw 'Psycho', how or why they let two kids like us in is a mystery to me but back then we thought ourselves lucky until......Until that shower scene, those of you who saw 'Psycho' know what I mean, I never took a shower for weeks afterwards and I always locked the door if I was even in the bath, just in case Norman Bates tried to sneak in with that big old kitchen knife in his hands.....:)

Now one of my favorite movies of all time is Steven Spielberg's 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', released in 1977.....OK, ready for this?....I saw it one day at a matinee in 1977, I went back and saw it that night again, and then went back and saw it again twice the next day!!....OK, I said I liked it......:) But now it's an 'old movie' about as old now as the 'Maltese Falcon' with Humphrey Bogart was the first time I saw it.....So you see today's movies will be the old movies of tomorrow, we just have to live long enough.......:)

Every time I ever saw Paul Newman in a movie, whether it was 'Cool Hand Luke', 'Harper', 'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof', 'Long Hot Summer', 'Hud' or 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', I walked outta that theater knowing I was a little bit like Paul Newman or at least thought I was or wanted to be, which when you're young is the same thing...even when you're old too sometimes......:)

Cowboy movies, gangster movies, movies about love, sci-fi movies, horror movies, mystery movies, detective movies, period piece movies, epics....Whatever we can conjure up in our minds, somebody has made it into a movie......I know, some movies are better than others, and some movies, well they shouldn't have been made in the first place, but some......Some are amazing..........

How many times have I seen 'To Kill A Mockingbird"?.....More times than I got coneflowers and those of you who know me, know I'm a fool for coneflowers and I got over a hundred of them planted all over in drifts throughout my garden, yes I've easily seen that movie a 100 times and more I'm sure....,..And that movie, why it magically makes me 7 or 8 or 9 years old again every time I watch it......When I was a kid, about those ages I used to go visit my granny for the summer in Piedmont, Alabama and I was the new kid in town visiting for the summer, just like Dill, the little boy who had all the adventures with Scout and Jem that summer portrayed in the movie and the book..Little Dill who always exaggerated a little bit trying his best to fit in or impress his new friends, I used to do a bit of that myself.......

The scary house, the mysterious, scary boy, some mean old drunken man, eccentric old ladies in the neighborhood, we had'em all in Piedmont just like the ones Harper Lee wrote about in 'To Kill A Mockingbird'.....It was just like Harper Lee was writing about the Piedmont of my youth and it was portrayed just like it in the movie.....I think I've never felt more alive than when I watch that movie again and again, its not nostalgia, it’s more than that, it’s magical if its anything.....I can only speak for my own youth, but being a kid in a small southern town where everyone knows everyone and everyone more or less looks out for each other, well I'm prejudiced I know but I feel sorry for kids today that'll never know what that was like.....

You see old movies are sometimes more than just old movies......I can a watch'em again and again.....and I do.

Paul from Alabama