Elwy Yost (1925-2011)

Remembering the enthusiastic movie host, who for 25 years gave film fans the best date on Saturday Nights.

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To Ontario film fans of my age and up, Elwy Yost is an institution. From 1974 to 1999, Mr. Yost was the affable host of TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies, which presented a double bill of films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, paired for similar themes, genres, or simply because they shared the same star or director. (Elwy even gave CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada a run for its money in the ratings.) After each movie he would present his own interviews with a veritable “Who’s who” of Movieland, taken from his archive that grew with each new annual pilgrimage to Hollywood.

This weekly program took one increasingly deeper into the magic of the movies, with a substance far exceeding most of the celebrity-obsessed pap that passes itself off as entertainment journalism these days. It wasn’t enough that generations young and old would know such luminaries as Bette Davis or Henry Fonda. One came away learning about Preston Sturges, Franklin Pangborn, Nunnally Johnson, Powell & Pressburger, to name only a few. Over the years, one would also go behind the scenes to learn about how they made the bullet holes for The Wild Bunch, or the stop motion animation effects of 1960’s The Lost World. 

Saturday Night at the Movies however would still not be as high-caliber a program were it not for its host. Elwy Yost possessed an “everyman” quality: with his moustache, glasses and pipe (in the older shows), he could be our neighbour or a relative. With his warm demeanour, gift for storytelling (reminding us how much learning is fun), and his trademark enthusiasm, he became a surrogate friend to countless people. Despite how learned he was, Elwy still nonetheless appeared as a film fan more than a scholar, and his joy was always felt in his introductions and interviews. Through him, one realized that all cinema mattered: whether he showed Ingmar Bergman or a Dorothy Lamour sarong picture, one learned how each feature that ran through TVO’s projectors was in some way part of cinema history.

Before Saturday Night at the Movies, Elwy McCurran Yost was already a veteran in broadcasting and education. Born in Weston, Ontario, on July 10, 1925, he was a child of the depression, whose love for the movies started at an early age when his father would give the boy money to attend the matinee. And since the man could only afford to send one person to the cinema, Elwy would in turn regale his father with stories about what Tom Mix did that particular week. Mostly, Yost’s further association with the movie world would wait, as he graduated from the University of Toronto, had a stint in the Toronto Star’s circulation department (and met his future wife Lila in the cafeteria), worked in the Avro Aircraft project until the Arrow was cancelled, and even taught English at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate in Etobicoke, before acting as a panelist on CBC’s game show Flashback in the 1960s. He had also hosted a CBC movie program, Passport to Adventure for two years. It presaged his format on TVO’s Magic Shadows, in presenting a film broken into half-hour segments on weekday afternoons. In the early 1970s, Elwy Yost was hired by TVO to put together a show wrapped around the three Ingmar Bergman films they had acquired rights for, and thus Saturday Night at the Movies was born. (In his younger years, Elwy had another liaison with cinema, as an extra in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge.)

My first encounter with Elwy Yost was during my public school years, upon discovering his sister show, Magic Shadows, which ran from 1974 to 1987. Every weeknight, he would serialize a feature film in half-hour instalments. In case the film would not be long enough to fit all five nights, the duration of the week would be filled with ongoing chapters from a classic matinee movie serial.  Thus, The Adventures of Captain Marvel could take several months to see, as one would wait for it to air in the available time slots. Over the years I had seen The Yellow Balloon, Son of Kong, Belle Starr, The Further Perils of Laurel and Hardy, My Darling Clementine, The Cat People, A Night in Casablanca, as well as the great serial The Crimson Ghost in this fragmented presentation. Such programming is lost in today’s “on-demand” environment, as in those pre-VCR days, Magic Shadows necessitated one to be home every night at 7:30 PM to catch all the parts of the movie. Like Saturday Night at the Movies, Magic Shadows also made for fun viewing because of its host and the guests. This show was aimed at younger viewers, who no doubt migrated to his famous Saturday night show when they became older. (A third series, Talking Film, also had a short run in the 1980s, in which he would introduce clips taken from his mighty interview archive.)

The set for Magic Shadows consisted of a homey-looking back room, which could have been in your house or mine. (All that was missing was a fireplace and a dog sleeping in front of it.) The pipe-smoking host would welcome the viewer, and after his typically enthusiastic and knowledgeable introduction, the camera would slowly zoom in as Elwy turned on the film projector next to him, move further into the light emanating from the lens, rack focus, and we were in the land of movies. Perhaps because the program appealed more to youngsters, the guests on this show were more there for fun than historical posterity- which is why he was visited by someone dressed as Captain America. One of my earliest memories of the show was when he presented Charlie Chaplin’s The Adventurer while a bunch of kids sat around his easy chair. (I believe they also referred to him as “Uncle Elwy”.) During the Halloween broadcast of The Cat People, trick-or-treaters appeared at his door! When he showed a Laurel and Hardy movie, a member of the “Sons of the Desert” fan club stopped by. Magic Shadows bewitched many a young viewer during its reign, leaving an impression with its trippy opening animation title sequence, evocative of Yellow Submarine, and memorable theme song. (A fond personal memory was in finding a university classmate ten years later with whom I could sing it.)

As I grew older, and stayed up later (or, more to the point, when I became old enough to no longer need a babysitter who wanted to watch Love Boat instead), I eventually discovered Saturday Night at the Movies. As my interest in cinema increased during my teens, Elwy Yost was my surrogate teacher. I was among countless viewers who would look forward to learning something new about film history every week. Well before the Internet, smaller towns and cities didn’t have a well-stocked library or store on books of the cinema. We hungrily relied on Elwy Yost for information and entertainment. Well, there was at least one significant book at our library… from Mr. Yost himself.

Although he had also published a few novels, Elwy Yost only wrote one book about cinema. Magic Moments from the Movies, which I borrowed from the library incessantly, was a nostalgic work in which he would describe his favourite moments of cinema- through his prose one could vicariously relive the movie, and for that matter, his diction in print matched that onscreen- this lovely little tome was a “portable Elwy Yost” that one could enjoy between the Saturday night viewings. In between the lines of his reminisces, one also learned about the times in which his chosen films of affection were made, and the craftspeople who made them.

In 1989, Mr. Yost had scaled down his workload, and attempted to semi-retire to Vancouver, in his wife’s home province, only presenting one film every Saturday night. The time slot for the second film would have an instalment of Jay Scott’s Film International. However, he was soon back to introducing a double bill of cinema for several more years, before finally taking his last bow in 1999, and spending his remaining years in British Columbia. Elwy’s final episode of Saturday Night at the Movies was an emotional affair in which he and his trusty producer Risa Shuman shared memories and clips from his 25-year legacy, and then presented the 1994 film, Speed, which was written by his son, Graham. 

Saturday Night at the Movies continued the following season with Shelagh Rogers, whom I believe was handpicked by Elwy Yost, and did a superb job filling his shoes, until her complications with CBC forced her to leave the show. The program continues, and even after a revolving door of hosts (and several years without one) it sadly has become the antithesis of everything Elwy had built it up to be. Regrettably, the program has become cold, impersonal and pedantic. The warmth and enthusiasm has been replaced by title cards and soundbytes.

His retirement at the age of 74 was certainly well-deserved, as he left behind an incredible legacy that no doubt influenced and inspired countless viewers. As a friend had stated, people probably learned more from him than they did in film school. (My hand is up.) Despite that he was out of the public eye for nearly 12 years, his passing this summer at the age of 86 I think deeply affected many. He was a star, and he was a scholar, but his endearing quality also made him a close friend. Thus, as the news of his death broke, online forums and op-ed columns were flooded with personal reminisces from his viewers, about how he or his program had touched their lives.

Like all the giants in broadcasting (most of whom are sadly now gone), Elwy Yost never talked down to his audience, and never shot for the lowest common denominator. But he was more than a familiar face that people allowed in their homes; he was a role model who shaped audiences young and old. Elwy Yost indeed left a long shadow in television after his retirement. The intervening years have only further increased the need for someone of his stature to keep alive the history of the cinema. I feel sorry for younger film fans who came of age after Elwy Yost left the broadcast band: they truly missed a golden age.

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Updated from its original publication in Vol. #1, Issue #24. One further update; in 2013, Saturday Night at the Movies ended its run in, I’m sorry to say, a really lacklustre fashion that barely recognized the legacy of the man who made this show an institution for 25 years.