September 1993: “Nineteen-Sixty-Two was the year I found out there was more to movies than rooting for the good guys and cowering in your seat. I saw Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and The Manchurian Candidate, probably the first American movie that could have carried Fassbinder’s title Fear Eats the Soul. But 1962 was also the year of a filmic incident I’ve recalled at least as often as I’ve thought of any of those classics: the night I saw The Pirates of Blood River. It was the last day of school. The theater was jammed with students, most of them graduating and most of them drunk. The air was thick with the tension oozing out of a thousand bodies. Up on screen, evil pirates, noble Huguenots, and a lot of piranha fish gave chase to a progressively incomprehensible story-line. The movie…