Casual

...From the moment a hand in giant closeup sets the timer on a bomb, which fills your entire field of view, you can't look away...

...Seeing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil in a theater makes you wonder how anyone can watch it any other way...

...You're far from the comfort of your living room, where you can always press the pause button and go get something from the fridge...

...Now a second couple appear...

...Then for some reason, around my junior year of high school, I started taking them up on their offers and began to get acquainted with the cinematic canon...

...Scale is just as important in the famous crop duster sequence in North by Northwest...

...A traffic cop stops the car briefly at a corner, where groups of laughing soldiers and women flirt, and a couple of men push a cart of sombreros across the street...

...When I first saw the long, near-silent sequence of Cary Grant waiting interminably by the side of a road in the middle of nowhere, then watching a stranger approach, then staring at him as he stares back from across the road, my jaw dropped...

...They're played by Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston, and even though they're mere details in this panorama—in which the real star is the directing—they're instantly recognizable...

...I preferred tapes of mindless action movies, full of pithy quips like "Hasta la vista, baby" and "Get off my plane...

...It takes you on a roving tour of a Mexican border town, through a scene bursting with activity and texture...

...A laughing couple walks into an alley off an arcade, just as the unknown man who set the bomb puts it in the trunk of a car...

...It dropped again when I saw the Mount Rushmore scene...

...From time to time, they invited me to go along...

...Seeing a movie is about going out to a theater and watching pictures so big you can't escape them, and so absorbing you can't get them out of your mind...

...How could this possibly be effective on television, where the actors would appear so small they could be anyone standing against a painted set...

...Every menacing image is all the more so for being large...

...Back then, I wasn't too interested in anything old or subtle...

...A man rides up, and on the big screen the Duke would be so perfectly defined you could count the wrinkles on his face...

...No more...

...The couple reappear, get into the car, and drive away...

...The big screen isn't just life-sized, it's larger than life, and seeing what great directors can do with it is worth getting out of the house for, even in the dead of a New England winter...

...You'd miss most of this on television...

...It's spectacular enough on TV, but you can just imagine what the opening scene would look like in a theater...

...In the theater, you can't move an inch...

...I saw films like Touch of Evil and The Third Man and How Green Was My Valley and North by Northwest...

...They showed the usual cinematic dead white males...

...That extraordinary first shot is four minutes long...

...DAVID DONADIO...

...No sooner would Aunt Martha open the door onto a vista of quintessential cowboy coun-try—in a shot that many subsequent directors have stolen and the rest should—than a whole new appreciation of wandering and desolation and family loyalty would well inside you...

...Almost always, I had some sort of excuse for staying home, where I would end up doing absolutely nothing...

...The camera follows them, and they walk past the car the first couple are driving and across the border into the United States...

...In an era when it's possible to read license plates from space, you ought to be able to make out the faces of the actors a great director puts on the screen...

...Looking back, I can think of a dozen invitations I kick myself for turning down, in my days of antisocial adolescent sloth...

...The camera ascends far above the street and tracks the car, alternately leading and following it through the town...

...One movie I'd give anything to see on a big screen is The Searchers, John Ford's story of a man's seven-year search for his niece on the Texas plains soon after the Civil War...

...These I would watch for hours on end, lying alone with a blanket on the living room floor...

...In both, Hitchcock's characters are dwarfed by the landscape, yet in spite of what has to be an infinite focus, their expressions are distinct...

...A few of these I'd seen long before on TV, and I'd liked them fine, but it was watching them in all their glory on a big screen that won my heart...