Pictures with pa Never mind playing catch — there was plenty of bonding to do with dad at the cinema Take 5
By: Dean Pritchard Posted: 2:40 PM CDT Friday, Jun. 19, 2026

The Odeon. The Park. The Hyland. The Boyne.

Decades before the birth of the multiplex and home video hastened their doom, they were among Manitoba’s standalone citadels of cinema.

And for a time (1973-1974), it seemed, they were my second home.

I was seven years old and my mom and dad had recently separated.

Weekends with Al, we didn’t play a lot of catch. We went to the movies — a lot of them. Godawful dreck, future classics and everything in between. And I do mean everything. Hands up, who remembers Son of Dracula with vaunted thespians Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Al didn’t teach me how to hammer a nail, change the oil in a car, or tie a knot that wouldn’t slip.

But those shared afternoons in the dark shaped who I am in ways I was slow to fully appreciate.

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Sleeper (1973)
Young Frankenstein (1974)

This one’s a twofer.

Before he became a cultural pariah and forced his audience to wrestle with the Bad Man/Good Art dilemma, Woody Allen made some damn funny movies, none more so, in my seven-year-old estimation, than Sleeper.

Allen, whose nebbish persona had not yet curdled with age and scandal, plays Miles Monroe, a New York City health-food store owner who dies after a minor operation, is cryogenically frozen and awakes 200 years later to an American police state (imagine that!).

Allen’s transition from avowed coward to reluctant revolutionary is riddled with slapstick gags aplenty — perfect! — and satirical ‘70s jabs that would take me several more years to appreciate (what the heck is an Orgasmatron?).

Sleeper later sent me down a comedy rabbit hole that eventually led to the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and the early films of Bob Hope (Allen’s early film persona as a cowardly would-be Casanova owed a huge debt to Old Ski Nose).

Like Sleeper, Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’ loving spoof of classic Universal Studios Frankie flicks, helped kick-start my film education and cemented a conviction that everything looks better in black and white.

I still watch Young Frankenstein every couple of years, double-billing it with Brooks’s primary source material, Bride of Frankenstein.

Some men of a certain age become insufferable quoting Monty Python. For me, it’s Young Frankenstein (“It’s pronounced Fronken-steen,”; “Werewolf! There wolf, there castle”; “Wait. Where are you going? I was going to make espresso”)

Stop me, please.

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White Lightning (1973)

Was there any movie star cooler than Burt Reynolds in the 1970s? Don’t start with me, the answer is no.

In White Lightning, Reynolds plays Gator McKlusky, a moonshining good ol’ boy released from a prison work farm so he can help bust the corrupt sheriff who killed his brother.

This is Burt before he sported a ‘stache that had its own publicist, before his legendary bad choices led him to mid-career stinkers like Stroker Ace and Cop and a Half.

Clean-shaven Burt was sweaty and dangerous, and nothing was going to stop him from avenging his brother’s death, no matter how many Plymouths had to be destroyed in the process.

Forget Smokey and the Bandit, it was White Lightning that made me a lifelong Burt Reynolds fan.

Sad admission: as a young teen I tried to cultivate my own version of Burt’s iconic laugh, hoping some of his cool would rub off. Didn’t work then, doesn’t work now. Ha-ha-haaaaa (cue gum smack).

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Papillon (1973)

OK, I know I just said no one was cooler than Burt Reynolds in the ‘70s, but Steve McQueen was pretty darned close.

Papillon is the purportedly true story of Henri Charriere (McQueen) who in the 1930s spent years imprisoned in the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony before escaping on a raft of coconuts.

Dad and I saw Papillon at the Boyne Theatre in Carman during a weekend visit with my grandmother, who still lived outside town on the family farm.

Owing, I suspect, to a lack of local entertainment options at the time, Papillon has the distinction of being the most wildly inappropriate movie I ever saw with Al: a dour, violent tale of man’s inhumanity to man, including long stints in solitary confinement eating bugs.

I was spellbound.

A couple of years later, bored with an unsatisfying diet of Hardy Boy mysteries, I found a copy of Papillon on my mother’s bookshelf.

It was the first adult book I read and I devoured it. I still remember my wide-eyed shock when I learned where prisoners hid their money.

Writers are readers first. After Papillon, I never stopped reading.

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Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Fifty years later we all know the story: Upon its release, Phantom of the Paradise, a modern-day mashup of Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray, played to crickets everywhere but Paris and Winnipeg, where it drew long lineups of fans who came back again and again, something that would not be repeated until Star Wars brought the Force to moviegoers two years later.

That was still to come when dad and I hunkered down with our popcorn bucket at the Odeon Theatre.

From its opening Rod Serling voiceover to its phantasmagoric ending, the movie occupied a then-weird tonal space that would become much more common in the years to come.

Was it a horror movie or a comedy? I know it scared the heck out of me when Beef got a plunger to the face in the shower.

So why was everyone laughing? And what were all those pretty women doing rolling around in Swan’s (Paul Williams) bed?

Speaking of Paul Williams, what about that soundtrack? A pastiche assembly of Beach Boys, glitter rock and shock rock knockoffs, it set off a still roiling internal debate about nostalgia, “good taste” and the emptiness of cool.

The Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack was one of the first albums I ever owned (a birthday gift from dad) and I wore the grooves out of it.

That Williams also wrote for the Carpenters and the Muppets later complicated my love, but I eventually got over it. The heart wants what the heart wants.

It was another 20 years before I saw Phantom again on home video.

I still knew the words to every song and still winced in pain and sympathy when Winslow Leach gets his head grill-cheesed in the record press.

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The Last Waltz (1978)

Last Waltz indeed: this was one of the last movies I remember seeing with dad before he moved away.

I don’t know that I had ever heard of the Band before we took our seats at what was then Cinema Polo Park, but I was immediately hooked.

This wasn’t so much music that was composed, but something powerful and thrilling that sprang fully formed from the soil eons ago.

Dad bought the soundtrack album, which I quickly recorded on cassette and played night after night on a portable tape deck I stashed under my bed, the sounds rising up through the mattress, forever modifying my musical DNA.

Music has remained a shared passion. Dad introduced me to Tom Waits when I was a teenager; in more recent years I turned him on to Warren Zevon and Nick Cave.

In 2016 we made a bucket list pilgrimage to Memphis for five days of blues, soul and barbecue ribs.

I’m still working on making him a Fred Eaglesmith fan. Give me time.

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It might sound like this is more about me than my dad, but it’s not, not really. All of us are shaped, in ways big and small, by time spent with the people we love, if we are lucky enough to have them.

We are the sum of our influences. My story is his story and his story is mine.

Al moved to Toronto over 45 years ago and our days together since then probably don’t amount to more than six months.

But I still see myself in him, and not just in the mirror.

Like a lot of people, there are things about myself I would change if I had a do-over, but for the most part I like the person I have become.

And I love you, dad.

Happy Father’s Day.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca