Classic movies

Going to the movies used to be a small outing. You checked the paper, chose a showing, and sat in a dark room with strangers. A downtown theater might still have had a balcony, a heavy curtain, and a newsreel before the feature.

The double feature was a real afternoon. A cartoon, a short, and then the picture you had come to see. Ushers with flashlights were part of the furniture. For the biggest films, a roadshow engagement meant reserved seats, a higher ticket, a printed program, and often an intermission, closer to a play than to a casual show. People dressed for some of those nights. They did not pause the story and come back on Thursday.

Hollywood was also changing its tools. Silent pictures gave way to sound. Black and white shared the marquee with color. Wide screens arrived in the 1950s in part because television was keeping people home, and the theater needed a reason to put on better clothes. From the early 1930s until 1968, the Production Code shaped what a studio picture could show. The rating system that followed, beginning with marks such as G, M, R, and X, was a different bargain with the audience.

This quiz stays with films from the 1930s through the 1960s: musicals, suspense, wartime stories, fantasy, and comedies that people still quote. You do not need a list of every award. The right kind of memory is the shape of a picture you saw more than once. The notes stay with public history: a year, a star, a place, and one plain fact about how the film was made or received.

Some of these pictures were events when they opened. Others found their real audience later, when local stations played them until a household could recite the shape of the story. Either kind of memory is welcome here. When you want the songs people hummed on the way out, try popular music. When you want the living-room version of Hollywood, classic television is next door.