I was a very lonely little boy. My parents, who were old enough to be my grandparents, treated me as though I were a pet, rather than a small human being, and a bothersome pet at that. It never occurred to them that inside that little body there was a human being, with thoughts, feelings and a personality that were distinctly his own. They didn't know how, or even want to know how, to nurture themselves or each other, let alone me.

If there had been such a concept then, and if they had been capable of understanding it, they would thought I was a child beamed down from another planet. Or, at the very least, I had replaced their real child, who must have been kidnapped by Gypsies. I read books. I cried easily and often. I was a nerd, a sissy, a wimp. Why had they been inflicted with this...this mutant?

To the kids I grew up with I was an anomaly too. I didn't play sports and didn't care about all those endless, mindless statistics. When they went to the movies, they wanted to see cowboys; I wanted to see love stories.

There was no TV in those days, but there were radio and, of course, reading. These two escapes from a loveless world and an overly intrusive mother had two things in common: Because they took place inside my head, rather than in the external world, they were very intense, very personal, very intimate experiences. (TV, on the other hand, was so graphic and left so little for your imagination and your emotions to do that it could never duplicate the intimacy and intensity of either radio or reading.)

Best of all, there were the movies. Bigger than life, even in the days before extended screens and stereophonic sound, they created a world that I could lose myself in. TV was always over there somewhere, but even small-screen movies wrapped you up in the worlds they created.

They were the perfect escape for a little boy who, like George Gissing, must have felt that he had been born in exile. A little boy who, somewhere deep inside him, waited impatiently for his Gypsy parents to return and claim him at long last.

The first movie I can remember seeing (I think) is Gone with the Wind. The year was 1940, I was five and the price of a ticket was ten cents. Since GWTW had been released in 1939, I'm assuming (partly on the basis of my parents' cheapness) that the following year the Selznick epic was in general release at what was then known as "popular prices."

The next picture I can remember seeing (I think) was John Ford's How Green Was My Valley. I think I saw it in 1940 or 1941, but I've seen it so often since (as well as read Richard Llewellyn's novel) that I no longer remember what I actually remember from the early Forties, if anything. I know I identified with the young hero, Huw Morgan, played by Roddy McDowall, who I fancied I resembled.

I do know that in 1942 (or was it 1943?) I saw Lucky Jordan, with Alan Ladd. In those days performances were continuous, so you could see the same picture again and again without being kicked out or having to pay for another ticket. I saw Lucky Jordan so many times one Saturday afternoon that my mother, alarmed because I hadn't shown up for dinner, came to the theater to drag me home. All I can recall of the movie is that the baddies tied Alan Ladd up in a chair. I also flipped out over Helen Walker. I was seven or eight at the time.

After that I can't remember the movies in any particular order. I saw Lassie Come Home (1943), with my look-alike, Roddy McDowall, and I still blubber at the end, when the young boy comes out of his schoolhouse to unexpectedly find his bedraggled collie waiting for him. Just writing about it makes me weepy.

I adored Nyoka the Jungle Girl and could hardly wait for the next Saturday matinee to find out how she got out of the fix she had gotten herself into the last time I saw her. Since these serials were made during World War II, they were fervently patriotic, but can I really be right about that Japanese submarine hiding out in the bottom of a volcano? (God, being on our side, of course, destroyed the sub with a spectacular eruption.)

No matter what her movies were called--Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) or Cobra Woman (1944)--Maria Montez always made the same movie, with the same co-star, hunky Jon Hall (who also, somehow, got to play opposite Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark, 1944) and the same costumes. Of course, I wanted each of her movies to be different, but at the same time I always expected them to be exactly like all the others.

Betty Grable also made the same Gay Nineties musical again and again. (Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, "gay" had a different meaning then.) Call it Coney Island (1943), Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943) or Wabash Avenue (1950), the only thing that seemed to change in a Grable musical was her leading man. A memorable scene in Sweet Rosie O'Grady sees Robert Young pulling the gaudy flowers off raucous barroom singer Grable's dress and tying her hands behind her so she can't wave them around, in order to force her to warble like a lady.

I adored swashbucklers, particularly with Tyrone Power, like The Black Swan (1942), my favorite, and The Mark of Zorro (1940), as well as The Spanish Main (1945), with that most unlikely of heroes, Paul Henreid; Sinbad the Sailor (1947), with the whimsical Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; and Captain Kidd (1945), with the despicable Charles Laughton. Many of these thrillers also starred fiery Maureen O'Hara, and if Ty, Doug and Paul could love her, so could I. (Somehow, although he was in many of these same movies, as the villain, I didn't feel the same compulsion to love Walter Sleazak.)

I was just a little too young for the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the Thirties, but I can remember him being chased by Nazis in (I think) Desperate Journey (1942) and foiling them by throwing the back seat of his convertible limousine into the path of their pursuing motorcycles. "An old bootlegger's trick," Errol tossed off brightly. I hadn't the slightest idea what a bootlegger was, but it all seemed very suave and sophisticated to me.

Although I also loved out-and-out horror movies like the creepy The Mummy's Hand (1940), nothing could equal the terror of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), whose hideous portrait of its hero's moral corruption had me literally looking over my shoulder in dread for weeks afterwards. (Though the movie was in black-and-white, the repulsive portrait came on screen at the end of the movie is a burst of Technicolor.)

If I'd hated and feared Charles Laughton as Captain Kidd, I pitied him as The Canterville Ghost (1944) (also based on an Oscar Wilde story), doomed to wander eternally as punishment for his cowardice. I was every bit as cowardly as he, and so his being literally sealed behind a brick wall made me squirm with empathic terror.

Unlike my contemporaries, who roared with derisive laughter at Lou Costello, I always identified with this fellow nerd, although, of course, I had to keep my sympathy to myself.

In The Fallen Sparrow (1943) I heard for the first time about what seemed to be a very romantic war that had taken place in Spain, and this probably fueled my addiction years later to Ernest Hemingway.

For some Proustian reason I have an inexplicably sharp memory of Mary Martin and Victor Moore listening to a radio soap opera in True to Life (1943) and realizing that it is their own family they're listening to, thanks to writer Dick Powell's unscrupulous eavesdropping. (This was decades before the Loud family self-destructed on public TV.) And the howls of outrage when, just a few minutes into Sullivan's Travels (1941), the words "The End" flashed onto the screen. Then we realized, to our relief, that what we were seeing the end of was not Preston Sturges's satire of Hollywood and do-gooders, but "director" Joel McCrea's movie-within-a-movie.

While James Agee was sneering, I was cheering as Ginger Rogers, addressing her infant son as "Chris boy" in Tender Comrade (1943), prophesied the better world he would enjoy because his father (Robert Ryan) had died on the field of battle. After the war the House Un-American Activities Committee found the movie and its director, Edward Dmytryk, Communist-inspired, and Ginger did a flip-flop.

If Ginger went over the top in Tender Comrade, she was not the only Hollywood star to do so during World War II. All of us, even kids like me, who enthusiastically participated in scrap and paper drives, rallied behind our servicemen and our President to beat the nefarious Japs and Nazis.

Are these movies really worth discussing? The point is moot. They are the movies of my childhood and they shine in my heart as only your first movies (or your first anything) ever can.

Alan Ladd, Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., yes, even Paul Henreid gave my life a sense of adventure it would never have had otherwise.

Betty Grable was like my big sister, and if she seems silly and vapid nowadays, I still love her all the same. Maria Montez, with her heavy Dominican accent and ridiculously tawdry gauzy and bangled costumes, was like the strange old-maid aunt you never wanted to be seen with outside your home, but always remember fondly. Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood, Maureen O'Hara, John Loder and Patric Knowles, and Walter Pidgeon, in John Ford's film about the Welsh coal-mining family were the caring father and mother, sister and brothers and mentor I never had, but always longed for.

At sixty, movies don't have that kind of personal magic for me anymore.

How green was my valley, then.