My Favorite Things

Guest post by Margaret Roblyer

My Favorite Things: The Movies

I’m a writer, so you’d think I’d claim the written word as my favorite medium. While I can name favorite books, poems, and short stories, I have to admit that their characters and imagery don’t make the frequent guest appearances on the stage of my everyday life that video does. Movie actors and great dialogue are most often cast in these leading roles.

I met my favorite film in 1961. My mother had given up her dream of making it on her own as a legal secretary in Jacksonville, Florida, and dragged me, aghast and protesting, from my beloved tropical paradise back to the technicolor-starved, rural village of Cresaptown, Maryland, where we had come from. Having spent the last five years in the former, I had few friends or acquaintances in the latter. A thoroughly miserable girl of 14 with nothing else to do besides seethe and cast lethal looks in my mother’s direction, I spent much of my time draped mournfully across a living room chair in front of our small, black-and-white TV, watching whatever appeared on its two channels. On one those splendid summer days before the school year began, when the sun shone like a spotlight outside and with the low whirr of lawn mowers
in the background, I shunned the outdoors, turned instead to the luminous screen, and saw the 1947 movie Stairway to Heaven.

Daytime programming in those days was sparse, which I imagine is why each station
featured at least one old movie a day. When I finished a movie on one channel, I’d switch to the other to see what was on. I fell in love with Charles Laughton and Alex Guinness, envied the slender forms and soigné, languorous slinks of Myrna Loy and Marlene Dietrich, and to my mother’s chagrin, began emulating the quick comebacks and snide remarks I heard in my favorite films. Without realizing it, I was not only collecting an anthology of movie memories but beginning a lifelong habit of applying their themes to my life and adopting their lines into my language.

Stairway to Heaven was the first post-war movie collaboration between American and British filmmakers; in England it had another title, A Matter of Life and Death. In its opening scenes, I heard British airman and burgeoning poet Peter Carter (David Niven) on the radio in a burning airplane, preparing to die as he quoted Andrew Marvel’s marvelous works. When I heard him exclaim, “I’d rather have written that than flown through Hitler’s legs!” I thought to myself, “Yeah, this is the way people should talk.”

I saw him and American servicewoman June (Kim Hunter) standing hand in hand before a celestial court, pleading that they deserved to live out their lives together even though the airman’s number was up, and I said to myself, “Love looks like this.” Long-dead American patriot Raymond Massey, serving as heavenly judge advocate, made his xenophobic case that this “minor British poet” didn’t deserve more time on earth with this girl of “good Boston stock.”

At the end, the heavenly judge quoted Sir Walter Scott’s poetry and decided in the couple’s favor, and I closed my eyes and understood how justice is larger than law and love more powerful than either. Then I opened them and said, “This is the way life should work.”

I have mused much about this time over the years. While you should not think my entire life philosophy comes from movies, clearly some scriptwriters have been influenced by the best philosophers and the greatest books. So now I think that maybe the moment the right stuff rises up from these great works and lands on the pages of scripts is what makes movies really become magic. And maybe that’s why it’s okay that, with a nod to Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, movies are among my favorite things.

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M. D. (Peggy) Roblyer is a retired Professor of Educational Technology and textbook author who helped usher in the world of educational technology in the 1970s, becoming prominent for shaping this new discipline in the online era. In a career that spanned nearly 40 years, she authored a dozen textbooks, including Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching, which became the best-selling text in the field when published in 1996 and remains so today in its ninth edition. Since retiring in 2015, Peggy has focused on her love of language by joining the River City Writer’s Club, serving as founding editor for the Longleaf community newsletter and past webmaster for the Chattanooga Writers Guild.

​She is currently querying publishers for her memoir, Strong Glass: A Memoir of Escaping the Dark Mirror of Family History, and enjoys writing essays like those appearing on her website blog: http://www.mdroblyer.com.