Image © 20th Century Fox
“Are the characters as gaudy and thin as cereal boxes? Is the dialog banal and shrill? Is the moralizing heavy-handed and relentless? Is the hokum a bit thick even in the context of a showmanship special? Well, yes. But who cares?”
— Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times
Hokum isn’t a word you know at ten,
especially when you get to go to
your first PG movie, thank you, parents,
for the guidance. That said, still
today I can see the one burned face
in the galley before someone tosses
a coat over it. This was the early ’70s,
years before gore became de rigueur.
And then there was Shelly Winters
swimming, something about holding
one’s breath for two-and-a-half minutes.
So I would practice in the bath, just
in case the time came the ship I sailed
met a tsunami and capsized. Better
to know how not to breathe under
water, to be the one who could find
air, a long swim to a safer shore.
I was too young to realize so many
stars came to spectacular ends
in this film—Winters, Roddy McDowell,
Stella Stevens, and even Gene Hackman.
So much important history I was blind to
in the hopes of cinematic rescue,
that any disaster, even my parents’
marriage, however upside down,
could be, it seemed, somehow survived.
George Yatchisin is the author of Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). He is also co-editor of the anthology Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press 2015), and his poetry appears in anthologies including Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman's Library 2019).