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saw a movie once, that was that. The odds were slim that you would ever see it again. There were no Museums of Modern Art or film retrospectives. Today, thanks to videocassettes and DVDs, one can see a film as often as one likes. But since we knew back then that we would have only the one encounter, we learned how to concentrate totally.
    In a sense, learning a film at a single screening must have been something like a return to that oral tradition where one acquired a Homeric song through aural memory. In any case, at seven I confronted not the rage of Achilles but the obsession of a man three thousand years dead. I was never to forget my first sight of the mummy in its case as, nearby, an archaeologist reads a spell from an ancient papyrus. Slowly, the linen-wrapped hand moves. The archaeologist turns; sees what we cannot see; starts to laugh, and cannot stop laughing. He has gone mad.
    Fifty-eight years later, I watched the movie for the first time since its release and I became, suddenly, seven years old again, mouth ajar, as I inhabited, simultaneously, both ancient Egypt and pre-imperial Washington, D.C. Then, as the film ended, my seven-year-old world dissolved, to be glimpsed no more except for the odd background shot of a city street, say, in a 1932 movie, where now-dead people are very much alive, unconscious of the screening camera as they go about their business, in the margins of a film where they are forever, briefly, alive.
    What appeals in
The Mummy
, other than the charnel horror? Obviously, any confirmation that life continues after death has an appeal to almost everyone except enlightened Buddhists. No one wants to be extinct. Hence, the perennial popularity of ghost stories or movies about visits to heaven that prove to be premature since heaven can always wait even if hell be here.
    For a time, after
The Mummy
, I wanted to become an archaeologist, though not like the one played by Bramwell Fletcher, whose maniacal laughter still haunts me. (Years later, Fletcher acted in the first play that I wrote for live television.) I preferred the other archaeologist in the film, as performed by David Manners, who also appeared in
Roman Scandals
(1933), another film that opened for me that door to the past where I have spent so much of my lifelong present.
    From earliest days, the movies have been screening history, and if one saw enough movies, one learned quite a lot of simpleminded history. Steven Runciman and I met on an equal basis not because of my book
Julian
, which he had written about, but because I knew
his
field, thanks to a profound study not of his histories but of Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Crusades
(1935), in which Berengaria, as played by Loretta Young, turns to her Lionheart husband and pleads, “Richard, you
gotta
save Christianity.” A sentiment that I applauded at the time but came later to rethink.
    Thanks to
A Tale of Two Cities
,
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, and
Marie Antoinette
, my generation of prepubescents understood at the deepest level the roots—the flowers, too—of the French Revolution. Unlike Dickens’s readers, we
knew
what the principals looked and sounded like. We had been there with them.
    In retrospect, it is curious how much history
was
screened in those days. Today, Europe still does stately tributes to the Renaissance, usually for television; otherwise, today’s films are stories of him and her and now, not to mention daydreams of unlimited shopping with credit cards. Fortunately, with time even the most contemporary movie undergoes metamorphosis,
becomes
history as we get to see real life as it was when the film was made, true history glimpsed through the window of a then-new, now-vintage car.
    My first and most vivid moviegoing phase was from 1932 to 1939—from seven to fourteen. Films watched before puberty are still the most vivid.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
The Mummy
,
Roman Scandals
,
The Last Days of Pompeii
. Ancient Egypt, classical Rome, Shakespeare when he was