Let me think 😀 – I’d like to go way back to the 1960s and experience my first group of movies. Mary Poppins was the first one, with Batman soon after. Back then we had black and white TV, so it was great seeing all the Batman characters in colour.
I remember seeing James Bond’s Doctor No and From Russia with Love together in one show in the late 1960s. Back then, cinemas would often show movies from a few years earlier. I particularly remember a woman who had spikes that shot out of her shoes, which she used to kick people with and kill them. She was in the movie – not in the cinema 😀.
I saw the Bible movie too around 1967. I tried to watch it recently but it was quite tedious. I did like the various movies on the life of Jesus. In my early years, I remember The Robe, King of Kings, and Ben Hur. Some don’t think that you should portray Jesus. The argument against that is that the whole point of the incarnation was that the Son of God would become human. We need to think of Him as being human in addition to being God. And to do that, we’re going to have a mental picture of him anyway. But these movies were a key factor in my interest in Jesus.
I remember being quite excited about The Ten Commandments in 1972. It was a 1950s movie, but we were studying Egyptian history in school, perhaps prompted by a Tutankhamen exhibition in the British Museum. And when it came to the Pavilion cinema in Cork, I jumped at the chance to see it.
My most vivid memory is the crossing of the Red Sea.
Funnily enough, Crossing the Red Sea was the title of a punk album by The Adverts in 1978, which says something about the cultural impact that the incident had. Liberal and modernist Christians tend to deny that the sea opened up. Perhaps they want to make the Bible seem more credible. But I prefer to take the Bible at face value. If I’m wrong, hopefully I’ll get the correct answer in heaven, but in the meantime, I default to believing that it did open up. Miracles are rare, even in the Bible, but why wouldn’t God occasionally do them? – particularly at a time when a wave of fresh revelation is coming from him, which finds its way into the Bible. Much of the Old Testament was written at that time and the New Testament is associated with the miracles of Jesus and the apostles. I tend to be skeptical about miracles after the New Testament, but you do get little miracles – or things that we think of as miracles.
And in my childhood years, I used to enjoy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, and all the Disney movies. Most of the big movies that I remember were old ones that went back to the 1950s, 1940s, and 1930s. Strange to think that Snow White goes all the way back to 1937.
My favourite 1970s movie was Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. And we regularly went to the James Bond movies. I tended to avoid trendy movies, so I missed out on Jaws, Star Wars, and Saturday Night Fever. I did see Jaws recently, and it was much better than I imagined. And I first saw Star Wars in 1982. In later years, particularly when the kids were growing up, we were big into Star Wars – both movies and games.
In the 1980s, I remember being very impressed with The Elephant Man. I went to it out of curiosity, but I was amazed at how compassionate I became about him. I remembering buying the soundtrack and visiting some of the sites associated with him in London. The movie was a big influence on me.
And then, in 1982, I saw Chariots of Fire. That had a huge impact on me too. It was a great movie with an excellent soundtrack. I spent the next year listening to it on my Walkman tape recorder 😀, bought it on CD in later years, and I listen to it on my phone these days.
It also featured the true story of a Scottish evangelical Christian who refused to run in the Paris Olympic Games on a Sunday. He later became a missionary and died in China. Very few evangelical Christians nowadays are strict about Sundays. The New Testament emphasizes many of the Old Testament commandments, but it was only the Scribes and the Pharisees who made strict rules about it. They regularly took Jesus to task for not keeping their rules. Still, it’s good to have a special day each week when you can meet with others for worship and give a bit more time to spiritual matters. But God didn’t create the Sabbath to be a stick to beat people with. It was our day off, an opportunity to enjoy God and each other.
Chariots of Fire also gave me an interest in Cambridge. Somehow I got confused and thought that the Christian guy, Eric Liddell, had gone to Cambridge, but that was the Jewish guy, Harold Abrahams. I remember us showing the movie in our Christian Union in what is now the University of Limerick a couple of years later. And I’ve watched the movie many times since. My first time seeing it was in the Palace Cinema in Cork, which is just across the road from Cork Baptist Church. And I saw a movie about the later life of Eric Liddell in Mallow Street Christian Fellowship here in Limerick in recent years. I can’t remember what it was called, but YouTube has many videos about him.
I did regularly got to the Cinema after than, but my most vivid memories since are associated with my kids growing up – Babe, the various Toy Story and Pixar movies, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and so on. And now it’s ages since I’ve been to the cinema. But of course, even as a child, most of the movies were watched at home.
Hibernia Gospel 