Tom Hanks’ first encounter with a classic San Francisco movie came as aboy growing up in the East Bay.

“The first time I saw ‘The Maltese Falcon’ was on a rainy Saturday afternoon on a houseboat in Alameda,” Hanks said of the 1941 Humphrey Bogart classic directed by John Huston. “I saw it cut up. I saw it edited on the Channel 5 Saturday movie. … Half of it, I didn’t even know what’s going on. But I can remember the specifics of a cold, rainy day and finally seeing some aspects of ‘The Maltese Falcon.’ ”

Hanks appeared on Turner Classic Movies on Saturday, May 20, to introduce another Bogart film, “Casablanca,” and the Bette Davis vehicle “Jezebel,” two classics from Hollywood’s golden era, while promoting his new novel, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.” But during his air time, he spent a solid portion talking with TCM host Ben Mankiewicz about his childhood movie memories.

“Movies are this one-on-one relationship,” Hanks said. “Movies are made for one person and one person only, and that’s the person who is viewing them. We all have our own memories that are connected to a specific film that if we think about it, we can remember where we were, what theater we saw it in, or maybe what weekend it was when we happened to see them on TV.”

Hanks, 66, said some of his earliest movie memories were seeing the 1964 Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night” at the Island Auto Movie, a drive-in theater in Alameda; “Duel at Diablo,” a 1966 western starringSidney Poitierand James Garner, at the Alameda Theatre; and a rerelease of the 1954 Disney classic “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” at theGolden Gate Theatrein San Francisco, back when the venue was a movie palace that boasted a Cinerama screen.

But what was young Tom Hanks’ favorite movie?

In 1992, Hanks and science-fiction authorRay Bradburypresented a lifetime achievement Oscar to legendary special effects innovator Ray Harryhausen. As Mankiewicz notes, Hanks said at the ceremony, “Some people say ‘Casablanca’ or ‘Citizen Kane.’ I say ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ is the greatest film ever made.”

Hanks said he saw the 1963 fantasy film on TV, “like on the CBS Sunday Night Movie.”

“Excuse me — that sword fight with those skeletons? I call it ‘optical poptitude,’ ” Hanks recalled. “If you’re 8 years old and you’re seeing that … by the way, on a black-and-white TV, cut up for commercials with 325 lines of scansion on it, it’s not the crispest picture in the world. But you could not convince me that ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ or ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ broken up over two nights on the ABC Sunday night and Monday night movie were not the perfect way to see those motion pictures. I would fight you tooth and nail.”

Hanks said that while he loved movies as a kid, he didn’t become an obsessed cinema buff until he was a student at Chabot College in Hayward and he began attending repertory screenings around the Bay Area.

“I saw all of the James Dean movies in one night,” Hanks said. “Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Jules and Jim’ on the same bill; that’s when I started getting into it.”

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@BRFilmsAllen