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Is There a Future for Films of the Past? (Part One)

© John Vincent Brennan

In July, Turner Classic Movies featured W.C. Fields as The Star of the Month, showing several hours of Fields’ films each Monday night. They did a masterful job, showing every major Fields talkie with two minor exceptions. At the end of the month, having sat through each film (sometimes twice, as I taped every film and watched a few of them a second time) I was both elated and somewhat concerned.

Elated because of the wonderful job the cable station did. TCM got a hold of excellent prints of each film and showed them all uncut, a miracle in these politically corrected times. And, naturally, it is hard not to be happy after spending a good part of the month in the company of one of the greatest and most original comedians of all time.

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t catch something I’ve never seen before on Turner Classics or its rival, American Movie Classics, and in fact, as I write this, I am looking forward to seeing the 1925 prehistoric epic THE LOST WORLD. A silent movie in prime time? That’s right. Only on cable, folks.

However, there is a price to be paid, I fear, for having all these films shown almost exclusively on two cable stations, and that price is a dwindling fan base as the years go on. When I was growing up in Queens, New York, there were only seven channels to choose from – the big three of CBS, NBC and ABC, plus three local stations and one PBS station. Each one of these channels offered an incredible smorgasbord of entertainment, good, bad and indifferent, and all of them featured black and white movies from the past as part of their daily programming. There was Chiller Theater on Channel 11 and the Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9, which often featured the same movie for five days in a row. Channel 5 showed The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Mae West on Saturday mornings and sometimes late at night during the holidays. Channel 11 often showed CASABLANCA, while Channel 9 showed CITIZEN KANE. Flipping through the channels, manually of course, since these were the days before remote controls, one could always stumble upon a black and white movie someplace.

A whole generation of kids received an incredible education on the history of the movies through local television. Perhaps we couldn’t tell you that Groucho Marx’s real first name was Julius, or that George Raft was originally offered the role of Rick in CASABLANCA, but we knew that Groucho was funny and Bogie was cool. I am sure that I am not just speaking for myself when I say I learned to love old movies thanks to local television.

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