Television: My Film School – Part 1

With all due respect to my post-secondary professors, much of my film history education was self-taught. From my late teens through to my late twenties, the majority of my “education” was done from television. Oh sure, I rented from the video store, and saw new releases in the theatre, but even then a cinephile never “wanted” for long, because there were always movies to watch on the tube where I grew up. Purists could carp about films on television being edited for content or time constraints, but that was less a problem with public television, or for late-night viewings when I most came alive. They could also moan that movies were (gasp!) presented without the proper aspect ratio. But you know what? We took it however we found it. A lot of back catalogues still weren’t well represented on home video. The internet wasn’t a “thing” yet (certainly not for streaming video). I’m glad I’m just old enough to remember when each TV station had its own specialty, especially on weekends or late at night. Even in my college years with six channels on rabbit ears, there was something to see. Now, I’ve got 500 Bell Fibe channels, and guess what? Nothing’s on!

This is the first of a highly personal, subjective series of posts, remembering the various series or television libraries that taught me about film. (I always have to snort at these cinephiles who claim to know it all. I’ve been studying film history for nearly 40 years, and in many ways, I feel like I’m still scratching the surface.) The memories in this series of posts will come from roughly 1983-84 (when I first became interested in cinema) to 1999. Ready? Here we go!

Elwy Yost (1974-1999) TVOntario: Of course. Where do you start with this guy? There are thousands of Southern Ontario cinephiles who owe something to the quarter-century that Elwy Yost hosted Saturday Night at the Movies on TVOntario. He offered the best movie date in town, with two films every week, often paired for similar themes, stars or directors, interspersed with interviews of stars, technicians, writers and critics, culled from the mighty archive that he kept building with his annual pilgrimages to Hollywood. He also hosted Magic Shadows (1974-87), in which a film was broken into half-hour time slots on weeknights. And if the film ran short, the remaining slots in the week would show a serial chapter. Kids who grew up on Magic Shadows would often emigrate to Saturday Night at the Movies. And there was also Rough Cuts, and Talking Film: each episode would compile interviews regarding a central theme. You didn’t come away just learning about A listers like Bette Davis or John Ford. You’d also learn about screenwriters, bit players and technicians. This was all graced with Elwy’s trademark enthusiasm.

Six-Gun Heroes (1983-84) WQLN: My gateway to cinema was westerns. I would stay up to watch westerns during my summer holiday from high school, and then I’d familiarize myself with the players and start seeing them in other movies. Anyway, former cowboy star Sunset Carson was hired to host three seasons of Six-Gun Heroes, an hour-long syndicated PBS program which featured 1930s-40s B-westerns, with his wraparound introductions. Some purists would bitch that the movies were edited to fit an hour, including Carson’s bits, but whatever. I was already enamoured of Sergio Leone by the time I discovered Six-Gun Heroes, which seemed like a different universe. But here is where I learned of singing cowboys like Gene Autry, and other efforts with Allan “Rocky” Lane and Buster Crabbe. Although this program was syndicated for three seasons on various PBS affiliates, WQLN (Erie PA’s Channel 54) only showed the first. The theme song was Bill Anderson’s single, “Ride Off to the Sunset”, which stays with you for days… years, even.

Matinee at the Bijou (1981-84) WNED: This one’s a bit of a cheat. I would occasionally watch Matinee at the Bijou, however, I only have a clear memory of one episode: The Million Dollar Kid, featuring the East Side Kids. This was in the summer of 1984 – just when I was getting interested in old movies, and it figures, just when the series ran its course. Movie nostalgia was still on high when PBS syndicated this 90-minute program, which attempted to bring back the ambience of a Saturday afternoon matinee. And once again cinema purists would bitch that such an experience was distilled to 90 minutes, as “going to the movies” usually took up several hours. But it was more about the “essence”. Younger viewers could get a sense of what it was like: cartoons, serial chapters, trailers or short subjects would be included with one movie, usually an hour-long “B” picture, which back in the day would’ve been “the second feature”. I believe everything they showed was public domain, which still offered a good overview of the kind of material that used to be presented on Saturday afternoons.

Q Classics (1984-?) WQLN: On Saturday nights (usually) beginning at 8:30 PM, WQLN (Erie PA’s PBS affiliate) would show a double feature of films. (In the beginning of its run, it would follow Six-Gun Heroes!) In their heyday, they would repeat the same two films on the Sunday afternoon the following weekend . This was handy in those pre-VCR days: if you missed the movie or wanted to see it again, you’d simply wait eight days for when they re-broadcast it. In those days, WQLN showed a lot of titles from the Fox catalog. It was hilarious to see movies begin with the Cinemascope logo, followed by pan-and-scan or cropped visuals. But again, we took it however we saw it. Highlights included The Bravados (1958), Inferno (1953), River of No Return (1954), Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), Gang War (1958), Laura (1944), Bigger Than Life (1956), Red River (1948), The Philadelphia Story (1940). Q Classics would continue well into the 2000s, and well after I moved out of their broadcast area, It would eventually be hosted, and even feature commercials from businesses in London, Ontario (!) because the program was very popular among Canadian viewers on the other side of Lake Erie. (In the early 90s, public television would begin running commercials from their sponsors: whatever paid the bills.)

CBC Saturday Mornings (1983-87) CBC: Watching CBC on Saturday mornings seemed to be a “thing” for me: first in reruns of Star Trek, Sgt. Preston and RCMP, and then when they began showing movies. They included some bona fide classics like When Worlds Collide or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, but more often they scheduled “second features” from their RKO catalog. Sometimes they would show two films in that two-hour block! These versions often lacked the inimitable RKO logo opening, with the radio tower and its “bip bip dee bip” sound. They were instead the rebranded TV prints with the title card of C&C Television Corp. Movietime USA, pared down to fill a one-hour time slot (with commercials). Even some opening credits were truncated! Again, some cinema purists would charge that we weren’t seeing the complete films that originally ran sixty to seventy minutes, but remember, this was before TCM, and these titles were unavailable to home video, so we saw these things however we could. As such, I am grateful for the “crash course” on a different kind of cinema, offered on these Saturday mornings. During the week, I would learn about the “A listers”. Saturday mornings would be lessons on films with such peculiar names as Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Nancy Drexel, or Olin Howlin! I had noticed that many of these CBC movies were directed by somebody named Lew Landers, although I was still figuring out what exactly a director did. Many of these titles did not appear in the Leonard Maltin or Steven Scheuer reference books that were always within reach, thus giving them a mysterious allure. Then as now, I didn’t value one kind of cinema over another. It all mattered!

Whew! That’s all for now. Next post will include some late night memories.