TV and Me: Home Movies

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

In the early to mid 1970s I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at first freelance writing, then as the book review editor and finally managing editor of the arts section (half the weekly paper) for the Boston Phoenix, before I returned to freelancing, this time for national magazines.  For much of that time I was writing about new books, new records and concerts, new movies, new plays and only occasionally about television. (Although Mort Sahl read aloud from my piece on the Dick Cavett show, on the Dick Cavett show.)  So I wasn’t watching much.

 Most of my TV viewing in those years was late at night on a black and white set with a broken channel changer, and apart from news, PBS and Cavett I mainly watched movies.  There was a long tradition of movies on television, especially in the late hours.

 Movies were the easiest programs for television to broadcast when it began, but Hollywood resisted feeding this threatening upstart.  Movies appeared anyway in the early 1950s, mostly made in the 30s from hand-to-mouth studios like Republic and Monogram, plus British imports.  By 1955 or so, the major studios—now getting into television production themselves—released movies made as late as 1948.  Eventually there might be only a few years between theatrical release and a TV spot.

 As mentioned earlier in this series, movie cartoons, comedy shorts (included silent ones), faded western movies and serials like Flash Gordon were staples of Saturday morning TV for kids even in the early 50s. But in some ways, movies weren’t ideal. TV screens were small, picture resolution wasn’t good and reception was often iffy—this is one reason that most early TV shows were brightly lit and shot in medium and close-up.

 These viewing problems also prompted the TV editors of movies to discard darker scenes and wide shots first, as they looked for footage to snip and replace with commercials. But they weren’t consistent—I recall the Saturday morning boredom of trying to watch galloping cowboys chasing each other in the dark.  Murky viewing wasn’t caused only by television deficiencies—scratchy prints, inept editing and poor projection weren’t uncommon.

 Things had improved somewhat by the mid to late 1950s, when more than a thousand movies were available to appear at all times of the day and night, mostly presented by local stations but also from networks. One survey suggested that in 1955 alone, a quarter of television programming was comprised of old movies.

Carole Lombard in "To Be or Not To Be" (1942)
released to TV in 1955

 So I saw many old movies for the first time on television, including many I’ve never seen in any other way.  That I saw any movies at all before the age of 7 or so is due entirely to television. I couldn’t necessarily follow a complicated plot or dialogue at an early age, but I generally found something to like.

 Until I was 10 or so, I only saw a few movies on the big screen: Disney films at the theatre near my grandparents in Youngwood, and my father took me to see a few at the Manos or the Strand in Greensburg (I recall a Martin and Lewis comedy, and Killers From Space), before my classmates and I were bussed to Pittsburgh to see the latest Biblical epic (The Ten Commandments, etc.) at the big Cinerama theatre.  Eventually I walked every week with neighbor friends to Saturday matinees at the Manos, a faded movie palace just on the near side of Main Street in Greensburg.

 But thanks to television I could see dozens of old movies from the time I was 4, as long as they were broadcast before my bedtime. When they were made didn’t enter into my consciousness—for a kid, everything is either now, soon or in the indiscriminate past—but once again, I had an accidental, sideways education in movie history at an early age, partly because of the studio ban on newer films.

 The movies shown on television included major features with star actors, but most of them—especially at first—were serials (or compilations of serial episodes) and what were known as B movies.

 To tempt people back to theatres as the Depression seemed to ease in 1934, some exhibitors began showing two movies for the price of one.  In late 1935 the two largest theatre chains announced this would be the policy in all their venues across America.  The double feature was born, a movie institution that lasted for more than 30 years.  At first, however, the bonus movie was slightly different: almost always shorter, and shot on a smaller budget with lesser stars (some on the way up, and some on the way out.)  To contrast them with the big budget, big-star “A” films, they were known in the industry as “B” movies, to be shown before the main feature. 

"Bulldog Drummond's Bride" 1939

The B movies were among the first to populate television.  They were cheaper to acquire, and being shorter, they accommodated commercials more easily. Most were genre films—westerns (predominantly) and crime stories, plus war movies, romantic comedies, melodramas and musicals.  The often-strange Bulldog Drummond crime series was an early entry, and the Charlie Chan series. Perhaps even the Torchy Blaine movies (a 1930s woman reporter who became the prototype for Lois Lane.)  On a somewhat higher level, the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made its first appearances in 1954.  I remember seeing Rathbone as my first Holmes. 

 Drummond and other B movies had noticeably quick rhythms, and that must have appealed to me.  (As Superman in the series, George Reeves made the quick movements of serial and B movie heroes, though in those films they were probably augmented by speeding up the camera to enhance the effect—and shorten the movie’s length.)  I adopted quick movement in my play after TV, and I loved running.  There was lots of running in B movies.

 At Dumont, the network that at first scheduled the most movies, both B movies and a few A features were often grouped by genres under banners like Frontier Theatre (westerns) and Adventure Theatre (Tarzan, etc.)  Since the only Pittsburgh station in the early 1950s was Dumont’s cash cow, I could see a lot of these movies. While my attention to the westerns wavered, the Tarzan movies, with action in the relatively contained jungle, were fascinating. There seemed to be a lot of World War II movies on TV, though Hollywood was still making them for theatres in the 50s, along with Korean war films, which we sometimes saw at Saturday matinees later in my childhood. 

 I’m naming some movies and actors I recall for two reasons: they comprise part of my cultural life history, and they became part of the cultural literacy of my generation-- in both cases mostly because of television.

  I saw some film stars of the 1940s on television programs, and perhaps recognized others (like James Cagney, Peter Lorre, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson) from their cartoon parodies or variety show impressionists before I saw their movies. But eventually I would see many of those movies on television, if nowhere else.  I probably caught glimpses of their gangster films as a child. 

There are others however I knew directly from their movies, like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (at least one of the films they did together, Bringing Up Baby, was televised in the mid-50s, and I seem to recall seeing Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace.)

 I knew Jimmy Stewart from Harvey and It’s A Wonderful Life, which television made into a Christmas movie.  I knew Spencer Tracy, perhaps from one of his films with Hepburn but more likely from his role as Father Flanagan in Boys Town, a portrayal extolled by the Sisters at school.  And I certainly got an indelible impression of Henry Fonda when I saw The Grapes of Wrath on TV, an unforgettable movie.

Glenn Miller (top left), sax/vocals Tex Beneke
(bottom right) with singer Marion Hutton and
the Modernaires

  I recognized Fred Astaire, so I must have caught a dance or two from the Astaire and Rogers RKO films or his other musicals that were broadcast.  I was likely to have watched parts of the movies featuring Glenn Miller (Orchestra Wives or Sun Valley Serenade) if I happened on one, since I knew my mother had a particular fondness for Glenn Miller’s music, which I knew from records.  I’d seen Shirley Temple movies at an early age, but as with all these films, my attention was inconsistent, especially when I couldn’t follow the story.  By third and fourth grade my attention span improved, along with the ability to follow a more talky plot.

 Among the many movies I likely saw on TV, there were classic films of American and English directors I wouldn’t recognize the names of until later.  Until I left for college, this was virtually the only way I could see them. 

"Mrs Miniver"

I saw my first Hitchcock films on TV.  An early entry to TV was the 1940 Hollywood production of Foreign Correspondent. I seem to recall one of his early British films, The Lady Vanishes, as well as other British films of the 30s and World War II era. I saw British actors in American films or coproductions--I distinctly recall seeing Mrs. Miniver on TV, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (who I recognized in Forbidden Planet on the silver screen.)  Perhaps I even saw Greer Garson play Elizabeth Bennet against Lawrence Olivier’s Darcy in the 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice. 

 I certainly saw Oliver on TV in Wuthering Heights and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, probably in high school.  And though it wasn’t until college, I saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and other 50s and 60s British films for the first time on television, when I knew to look for them. 

Sims in "A Christmas Carol"

At Christmastime as a child I remember seeing the Alistair Sims version of A Christmas Carol.  I remember my excitement at seeing an old Laurel and Hardy holiday movie in which human sized wooden soldiers come to life (Babes in Toyland, 1934.)

 
Apart from the genre groupings, the more important pictures (or at least the A features) with the biggest stars were seen on prime time or weekend afternoons under marquees like The Million Dollar Movie. I also recall the Sunday afternoon movie on KDKA, introduced by legendary Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie and entertainment columnist, Harold V. Cohen, who also provided background during commercial breaks.  (Later that function fell to probably Pittsburgh’s most famous radio voice of that era, Rege Cordic.) I don’t recall the movies or what Mr. Cohen said, but I did get the idea that movies could be taken seriously, and that real people made them. 

 So it’s entirely possible that I saw a Charlie Chaplin feature there (Cohen was a Chaplin buff), or even Orson Welles films like The Magnificent Ambersons.  (However, it was at the Orson Welles theatre that I saw Citizen Kane, and remember that as the first time.  Or the first several times.) 

So there were plenty for me to see, though the bulk of movies were shown late at night.  For years, they were just about the only programming past the eleven p.m. news.  They often went by the title—or were referred to colloquially as—the Late Show.  And then the Late Late Show.  At one point back in the Dumont days our Pittsburgh station showed movies all night on Swing Shift Theatre.

 In 1963 the third Pittsburgh station (Channel 11, NBC) premiered the local Chiller Theatre with “Chilly Billy” Cardille (the prototype for SCTV’s parody Monster Chiller Horror Theatre by Joe Flaherty, a Pittsburgh native), but shows featuring horror movies had been around for awhile by then. Though I first saw the Frankenstein and Dracula movies on TV, I wasn’t as fascinated with horror movies as many of my schoolmates (they were especially fashionable in 1957-58, or my sixth grade.)

 

But I loved science fiction.  Since I’ve now seen most of the 1950s s/f classics on the big screen, I’m not entirely sure which ones I first saw on television, or at a Saturday matinee, or at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (I wrote about their first sci-fi festivals in the Boston Phoenix under the title “It Came From the Orson Welles.” My friends at the Welles turned the phrase into a t-shirt. This became an annual festival that outlived the Welles itself.)

 I’m guessing The Day The Earth Stood Still is one I did see on TV first.  But I’m sure about several classics made in the UK, especially since I’ve seen them only on small screens: The Day The Earth Caught Fire and Five Million Years to Earth remain two of the best of that era. 

 I also saw the original King Kong and Mighty Joe Young first on TV, enough times to notice, when I saw King Kong on the silver screen, that the first part of it (the preparation for the journey) was routinely cut on TV to fit the time slot and make room for more commercials.

 I saw Olivier’s Richard III on TV, but when I saw it again at a screening at the Westmoreland County Museum of Art, I was dazzled by the prologue that I didn’t remember. Possibly it, too, was cut, so on TV the movie began with Olivier’s “Now is the winter of our discontent…” speech. 

 Such cutting was a major flaw.  Apart from commercials disturbing the mood and narrative drive, missing or truncated scenes hurt the film and at times rendered it incomprehensible.  Seeing these old films whole could be a revelation.   

By the early 1960s, Hollywood studios loosened up on showing their 1950s movies, and their big hits from previous years. By this time some movies were being broadcast in color. The first showings of The Wizard of Oz (beginning in 1956) were big deals. However, most people still had black and white sets so the switch from sepia to Technicolor within that film didn’t have quite the same impact until most homes got color sets beginning in the mid 1960s.

 The networks responded to this new availability of more recent movies—especially color films-- with prime time movie slots: NBC had Saturday Night at the Movies, then adding the Monday Night Movie in 1963. By 1966 there was the ABC Wednesday Night Movie and the CBS Friday Night Movie, and so on.

 Movies became so popular that networks began to make their own, the so-called “made for television” movies, which constituted a genre of their own. With some conspicuous exceptions (like The Day After), I don’t count many of them as movies.  In any case, real movies and TV movies became a major part of prime time into the 70s and 80s. 

 I do have a few indelible memories of movies I first saw on TV at some point: The 1956 Edmund O’Brien version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four which I saw in high school; the Ernest Borgnine movie version of Marty, which was one of those primetime network movies.  I recall that we happened to be at my grandmother’s when I saw it. 

Others include Go, Man, Go, the Harlem Globetrotters movie with a very young Sidney Poitier, and Poitier again with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll (as well as Louis Armstrong) in Paris Blues, directed by Martin Ritt.  Newman and Poitier played expatriate jazz musicians.  When the Newman and Woodward characters wanted to return to the states, the Poitier character didn’t: he felt free of American racism in Paris.  An eye-opener.

 I was probably in high school when I saw the 1959 Gregory Peck film about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beloved Infidel, and in college when I was taken with the 1962 Jason Robards film of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.  I recall being especially moved by seeing the 1959 film about the aftermath of a nuclear war, On the Beach on television, though it’s possible I saw it first at a theatre. It also starred Gregory Peck, with Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

 I saw both the Glenn Miller Story (Jimmy Stewart, 1954) and the Benny Goodman Story (Steve Allen, 1956) on TV in the 60s, and later taped them from TV to see several times since.  Among the many other biographical films I saw on TV, the most powerful was probably The Life of Emile Zola (1937) starring Paul Muni, with its revelatory scenes exposing prejudice in the Dreyfus affair.

 By the 1970s I was in fact interested in old movies, learning about directors and cinematographers and so on. So at the Orson Welles and other repertory theatres in Cambridge I saw again (and this time, whole) movies I’d dimly encountered on TV. I also had learned enough about film history to know which movies I wanted to see when they appeared in the TV listings.

 So while I might watch whatever was on the late show after an exhausting day and evening at the Phoenix and some work-related outing afterwards, I also scheduled viewings of particular movies I hadn’t yet seen.  Watching movies on TV could be frustrating, broken up by blocks of commercials and often cut down to make time for even more ads. But you could also watch them from bed.

 Once when I was back freelancing, I decided to see how many movies I could watch in one day.  At that time, the Orson Welles Cinema had three screens, and on Saturdays they had a special film or two in the morning, then their regular rotation the rest of the day (usually a double feature per screen), and at least one midnight movie. For various reasons I could see movies for free there at the time, and so I spent one Saturday seeing eight films (though I might have snuck out to see one at another of the three other theatres within walking distance.)  After the midnight shows I went home and watched two more movies on television for a total of ten.  After which I was sick in bed for at least a week. 

There is nothing like seeing a great movie on the big screen of a movie theatre, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to see many that way, either first run or later. In Cambridge especially, I had the additional experience of seeing directors and actors in person, along with their movies.  In Boston I saw an advance screening of what is now regarded as a masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence, featuring an intense and heartrending performance by Gena Rowlands, and when the lights came up, there was Gena Rowlands standing in front of the screen, together with the director (and her husband) John Cassavettes. It was an amazing, almost ecstatic moment: the fulfillment of two fantasies--seeing someone step down from the screen into real life, and (a bit more prosaically) being able to talk to someone you've been watching immediately after the film is over (and I did get a chance, with a few others, to chat with them afterwards, in addition to asking questions in the public Q & A, with Gena Rowlands turning that full wattage sympathetic gaze directly on me.) 

 But seeing movies at home is also part of my history, and the small screen brought them to me early and often.  Though seeing films in the cinema is the ideal (I think of "Sullivan's Travels" in this regard),video also has its advantages, principally an intimacy with the screen and its images. Seeing these movies in childhood to adolescence, even if I didn’t follow the plot or notice the nuances, added a depth of feeling and experience when I saw them as an adult.

"The Grapes of Wrath" 1940

 It may be tempting to assume that in the first quarter of the 21^st century, the variety and availability of movies is so much greater, what with streaming to a home theatre or a computer screen or a phone, in addition to the residual technologies of cable, satellite and DVD/Blu-ray, with ever increasing resolution and augmented sound.  But I’m not so sure.

  There was a kind of sweet spot in the 1980s, with several premium cable channels showing year-old releases, while channels like Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Channel showed a catalog of old movies, as well as Bravo for a few foreign films.  Meanwhile abundant video stores provided individual choice (and catalogs of foreign language films.) One could buy movies on cassettes or tape them off the TV, and play a particular movie whenever you wanted.  All of this while repertory theatres showing classic foreign and American films still existed in cities and college towns. Those films form the basic cultural and visual vocabulary of movies. 

"Sullivan's Travels" 1941

But now those rep theatres like the Orson Welles are largely gone, as are the video stores.  Those are really big losses, in terms of the movie experience but also curation and availability.

 Meanwhile AMC and Bravo show fewer movies in favor of phony reality shows, and there are fewer choices on the fewer old generalized premium channels. Streaming is a hot mess, as the new and old titans duke it out, and whether you can see a certain movie depends on which services you’re paying for, and whether they are showing that movie that month. 

It's Alive! "Frankenstein" 1931

Even then you may wind up paying an additional fee to see a particular movie, and not just brand new ones.  And that’s if you can find it. It seems to be much harder to see classic films and foreign films just about anywhere than at any time since the 60s. 

 There are a few streaming services currently which show medium-old movies (roughly from the 60s onward) without an additional cover charge, but with commercials.  But how free is it, if you must pay a hefty monthly fee to get Internet streaming, then pay out for Amazon Fire or some such device? In addition to your viewing and listening hardware.  But back when there were four to eight channels on a television set, there were movies galore. And they were all free. 

Witness

I want to tell what the forests

 were like 

 I will have to speak

 in a forgotten language

--W.S. Merwin