I have been thinking about a couple of recent deaths, two men who enriched the lives of those who love movies. I caught this bug from my mother who grew up in the golden age when a few cents bought you a cartoon, newsreel and double-feature with actors including such favorites of hers as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Robert Taylor. No accounting for taste.

She took me as a child to matinees of 1950s films like “The Creature from the Black
Lagoon,” and “The War of the Worlds.” When I got creeped out, she would tell me to cover my eyes. And when I realized she was still having fun and munching popcorn, I’d lose my fear and embrace the art of the chills.

Thanks to her I saw “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” at seven, but also “The Bridge on the River Kwai” when I was ten. They both stayed with me forever. I wanted to be both Captain Nemo and Ned Land, but I began to suspect war and peace, life and death, winners and losers were more complicated than they first appeared. As I got older we often wound up watching black and white oldies on TV’s late show when both of us should have been in bed. By then I was as hopelessly hooked as she was.

I first came upon Richard Schickel, who died in February at 84, when he was the movie critic for Time-Life. After that gig he morphed into a maker of movie or TV documentaries about movies as well as the author of books and biographies about the makers. I recall with particular pleasure his eight-part series “The Men who Made the Movies” — revealing interviews with directors whose insights might otherwise not have been recorded. They included Raoul Walsh, George Cukor, William Wellman, and Howard Hawks.

Other documentaries studied the careers of Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy, Elia Kazan, Clint Eastwood, The Making of Star Wars and so on. His book on the king of the magic kingdom, The Disney Version, is a shrewd assessment of that pioneering entertainment mogul.

He also collaborated with Lena Horne on her autobiography and assessed not just such unsurprising icons as Brando and Bogie, but also Goya and Willa Cather. A man of part, obviously. He even wrote a wry and wised-up book about divorce, “Singled Out.” He was always good company — lucid, likable, literate, infatuated with film but clear-eyed enough to separate wheat from chaff. He advanced my film education.

Jonathan Demme made wonderful idiosyncratic movies including a few masterpieces. His work was rarely less than watchable and often very cleverly constructed. And his work often has a through-the-looking-glass aspect to it. That is, the projects that appealed to him seemed to subvert the genre to which they belonged and turn audience expectations on their head. He was a very American director in his appreciation of the eccentricity lurking behind every convention.

So we have an FBI agent in “Married to the Mob” who is a fool for love, a sympathetic and protective serial killer in “The Silence of the Lambs,” a black man who is prejudiced and a gay man who is a more loving family man than the straight people who discriminate against him in “Philadelphia.”

Demme may have been the last important director to have learned his trade making B movies with names like “Caged Heat” for Roger Corman. On them he met the great cinematographer Tak Fujimoto who shot most of Demme’s subsequent films. He came into his own in the 1980s with a number of wry, off-kilter films including the wonderfully loopy “Melvin and Howard” with Jason Robards Jr. as the deranged Howard Hughes riding a motorcycle in the desert.

Demme disowned the uneven “Swing Shift” because its star Goldie Hawn pulled rank on the young director and in his eyes botched the production. She should have had more faith. Demme came to be regarded as an actor’s director. Many of his stars did their best and freest work for him.

Paul Le Mat was never better than as Melvin. Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta and Melanie Griffith were given a boost by their performances in “Something Wild.” An even more stellar ensemble was Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modine, Mercedes Ruehl and a surprisingly menacing and comic Dean Stockwell in “Married to the Mob,” film that anticipates the darker but equally dysfunctional mob in “The Sopranos.”

After those films Demme might have been typecast as a director of quirky comedies, but no. He next turned his talent to capturing other kinds of offbeat performances in “Stop Making Sense,” the wonderful concert film of The Talking Heads and “Swimming to Cambodia,” a one-man show by Spaulding Gray.

These were followed by his best known films in the early 1990s that allowed him to subvert films what might have been conventional horror/thriller, melodrama or social commentary in “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Philadelphia” and “Beloved.” Again, Demme elicited what my be their most subtle, memorable performances from actors as varied as Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Tom Hanks, Antonio Banderas, and Denzel Washington.

He made a pair of misbegotten remakes that did not live up to the originals in “Charade” and “The Manchurian Candidate,” but the early magic was again evident in “Rachel Getting Married” where a wedding was turned into a three-ring circus of family dysfunctional with superior performance from Anne Hathaway, Rosemary Dewitt and Debra Winger. He also made several more music films, not surprising in a director with such a lyrical way with a camera.

Apparently a new film was in the planning stages, but we won’t be lucky enough to see it since esophageal cancer killed Demme at 73. Luckily we have a shelf of his cheerful, beautiful, soulful and oblique films to console us for our loss. The men who make the movies may be as mortal as the rat of us, but the movies are forever young.