February 26, 1963: WCBS goes to all-night movies

Newsday, February 4, 1963.

Tonight’s landmark in the history of theatrical motion pictures on television is one of my favorites. WCBS, the once-mighty CBS flagship, became the first New York City television station with (nearly) 24-hour broadcasts, showing movies from 11:30 pm till dawn (more or less) beginning 55 years ago.

Extended hours were nothing new for some west coast stations, which began offering film series with names like “Swing Shift Theater” as early as the 1950s. Even the CBS-owned station in Philadelphia somehow beat WCBS to the punch with multiple entries of “The Late Late Show” on the same night.

WCBS had offered the longest broadcast day of any New York City station since the 1951 introduction of “The Late Late Show,” which originally aired only on Friday and Saturday nights, despite the fact that the city had a substantial population of shift workers who got off work in the middle of the night (including yours truly, who got off work around 2 am at both The New York Post and the Bergen Record at various points in the 1970s).

Warners’ 1944 answer to “The More the Merrier” was the first film on the extended “Late Late Show” on April 26, 1963. Its 102 minute run time in theaters would translate to approximately 2 hours on TV after commercials were added.

Thanks to libraries full of relatively short films sourced largely from Poverty Row studios, Channel 2 managed to sign off by 2 a.m. on most “Late Late Show” nights in the early years. A notable exception occurred on New Year’s Eve 1952, when midnight coverage of the ball drop in Times Square was followed at 12:05 a.m. by the all-star epic “Forever and a Day,” which was repeated at 2 a.m. Presumably, the station was on the air until  around 4.

Running times got much longer after WCBS began showing hundreds of newly-acquired films from MGM in December 1956 and Warner Bros. the following month. You might have guessed that Channel 2 would call it a night after the April 5, 1957 debut of the massively long MGM musical “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936) on “The Late Show.” But no, it was followed at 2:30 a.m. by “Key Witness.” (Columbia, 1946). Then there was five minutes of “The Late Late News” at 3:45 and another five of  “Give Us This Day,” with signoff finally arriving just before 4 again.

The 1963 expansion of “The Late Late Show” was timed to coincide with the 12th anniversary of “The Late Show.” according to an announcement that was covered in the Long Island newspaper Newsday. At the time, New York City was in the midst of a 111-day newspaper strike and lockout that shut down all seven mainstream papers, so this historic event didn’t receive as much coverage as it much have otherwise. (Except on Channel 2, which had began running daily reminders of the upcoming schedule on its evening news. I vividly recall noticing with astonishment that that the Fox musical “Hello, Frisco, Hello” was airing very either very late one night or very early one morning.)

Because of the strike, The New York Times didn’t get around to covering the expanded “The Late Late Show” until April 7.

At the time, Channel 2 had something called called “College of the Air” airing at 6 a.m. on weekdays, so on most nights the final “Late Late Show” would end somewhere in the vicinity 5:30, still followed by news, “Give Us This Day” and signoff. Vintage TV listings I’ve studied don’t precisely document this, but veteran viewers have written that sometimes as few as five minutes elapsed before Channel 2 signed on again, followed by “Give Us This Day” and news. “College of the Air” did not air on Saturday and Sunday and “Sunrise Semester” (which aired at 6:30 weekdays) did not start until 7:30 a.m. on weekends, so “The Late Late Show” often ran past 7 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings, at least from 1963 to around the end of the decade.

Newsday listing for the evening of Friday March 1, 1963, when WCBS showed five films from 11:30 pm until around 7 a.m on Saturday morning. If the listing is accurate, there were about 5 minutes of commercials during both “Honeymoon” and “Code,” which was light for an era when there were generally around 10 minutes of ads per hour of film, eventually much more in late night.

 

WCBS had a substantial number of short pre-’48 B features (60 minutes, give or take) from Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal under license at this point, so in the very earliest years of its all-night broadcasting, they often offered “The Late Late Show,” “The Late Late Show II” and “The Late Late Show III” on weeknights. (“College of the Air” was quickly given the heave-ho, allowing the broadcast day to begin with “Sunrise Semester” at 6:30). Depending on the lengths of films, on some Friday and Saturday nights, there was even “The Late Late Show IV,” as it was identified in the New York Times listings. I’ve seen some of the latter starting as late as 6:05 a.m. on a Sunday morning, which would normally qualify as a Sunday listing. The Times carried as part of the Saturday night schedule.

A WCBS spokesperson admitted to the New York Times they deliberately didn’t give an end time for the last “Late Late Show” because it might discourage some viewers. This 1946 sequel ran 89 minutes in theaters, so if it started at 5:10 it would end pretty close to 7 am after commercials were factored in and there were no cuts.

 

During this period, WCBS often showed as many as four movies on Saturday afternoons when there weren’t sports preemptions — hour-long features at 2, 3 and 4 o’clock, followed by “Life of Riley” or “Love That Bob” at 5 and a 75-minute Saturday edition of “The Early Show” (it ran 90 on weekdays). So there were as many as eight movies on those days with a total running time (including commercials) of approximately 11 1/2 hours (or nearly half the broadcast day).

Of course, this couldn’t last in the long run. The increasing average length of films that WCBS showed in late-night, with ever-larger number of commercials, reduced the number of films that could be shown. There were also CBS network incursions into late night, beginning with some late-night NFL games on Saturday nights in the late ’60s. CBS pitted “The Merv Griffin” versus “The Tonight Show” in 1969, which pushed “The Late Show” to a 1:10 a.m. start. That was followed in 1972 by the ever-expanding “CBS Late Movie” (which included off-network reruns of shows like “M*A*S*H,” “Kojak” and “Columbo”) and was renamed “CBS Late Night,” the unfortunate “Pat Sajak Show” (1989-1990) and “Crime Time After Prime Time.”

For some of us, the ultimate indignity came when CBS repurposed the “Late Show” name for David Letterman’s talk show in 1993, which was followed by another CBS talk show called (oh, the horror) “The Late Late Show.” By that point, the uber-cheap “CBS News Overnight” had reduced CBS’ once-vaunted library to a few minor Warner titles like “Hotel” and made-for-TV films that were played off on Friday nights. The station’s Saturday nights were already given over to the likes of “American Gladiator,” the weekend edition of “Entertainment Tonight” and infomercials.

I could have bought this poster for $100 in the early 1970s. God knows what it’s worth now.

But there was this great and glorious period when I would often get up in the middle of the night to watch movies on WCBS. I spent half a century ruing the morning during high school that I slept through the alarm on the night they aired “The County Doctor” (1936), a Fox epic starring the Dionne Quintuplets. It remained stubbornly unavailable for decades, finally arriving on DVD a few years ago (after I suggested it to the Fox Cinema Archives). When I was a teenager, it was reassuring to know there was a place I could watch “Steel Against the Sky” (WB, 1941), even if it was at 4:45 a.m. in the morning and interrupted by commercials. It doesn’t exactly live up to that title, either, but it does show up from time to time on TCM.

 

 

Vera Hruba Ralston and other wonders of “Republic Rediscovered” at MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art’s wonderful “Republic Rediscovered” series of restorations co-curated by Martin Scorsese has been an opportunity to acquaint myself not only with films I’ve never seen but performers I’ve only been vaguely aware of.

Vera Hruba Ralston, the queen of the Republic lot, is probably best known as one of John Wayne’s many leading ladies, but on Saturday I caught her in a couple of bonkers ’40s vehicles that were cooked up for her. A Czech ice skater, Vera Hruba was signed as Republic’s answer to Sonia Henie, but then she married studio honcho Herbert Yates and was rechristened with a new last time reportedly taken from a cereal box and turned into a dramatic star.

Former Warner star George Brent gets top billing in “Angel on the Amazon” (1948, repeated Feb. 7), but the byzantine story is built around Ralston, a mysterious woman he meets in the jungle when she rescues him — and the other occupants of the plane he crashed in the jungle during a storm — from headhunters.

The smitten Brent and his chic doctor friend (a quite bemused Constance Bennett) encounter Ralston again in Rio de Janiero (courtesy of stock footage lifted from “Flying Down to Rio,” which also turns up in Republic’s “Brazil,” available on Blu-Ray). Despite the aging Brent’s best romantic efforts, Ralston remains skittish, especially after she glimpses a man from her past (Fortunio Buonanova), who fills Brent in with a tragic flashback after she flees the country.

The film’s third act takes place in Pasadena, where Brian Aherne (in old-age makeup), who Brent believes is Ralston’s father, narrates an even more ridiculous flashback featuring Ralston in a dual role. Not that anyone who had glimpse at the film’s ads or posters wouldn’t know she was “cursed with eternal life.”

Even Garbo would have a hard time pulling off this risible premise, and Ralston was no Garbo, even though Hungarian emigre director John Auer, a Republic workhorse, keeps her dialogue — delivered in a sometimes inscrutable accent — to an absolute minimum and just lets the audience drink in her beauty.

Poverty Row stylist Auer also helmed the equally entertaining, if utterly preposterous, “The Flame” (1947, Feb. 7) which casts Ralston (some of whose copious dialogue appears to be dubbed) as a French nurse who assists her American boyfriend (John Carroll, a former Clark Gable standby at MGM who generally rode the ranges for Republic) in a torturous scheme to inherit his half-brother’s millions.

Ralston works as a nurse to the half-brother (erstwhile Universal leading man Robert Paige), who is dying of an unspecified disease and seduces him into what’s supposed to be a very short marriage. But then of course she falls in love with her new organ-playing husband. Further complications are provided by a blackmailer (Broderick Crawford, who’s a hoot) mooning over his nightclub singer girlfriend (Constance Dowling) who takes a shine to Carroll.

The cast also includes Blanche Yurka as Paige’s aunt, who is justifiaby suspicious of Ralston’s motives, and Henry Travers as his doctor uncle, on hand to try to sell the improbably happy ending to audiences. “The Flame” also benefits from some nifty second-unit footage shot in New York City, where Carroll’s character lives on Central Park South.

MoMA offers two more glimpses of Ralston at the beginning and the end of her career. Repeating on Feb. 7 is Republic house director Joe Kane’s “Accused of Murder” (1956), released three years before the studio’s demise. Ralston plays the title character, a nightclub chanteuse that police detective David Brian tries to clear of killing her admirer, shady lawyer Sidney Blackmer. Filmed in an especially lurid version of Republic’s Trucolor and their widescreen process Naturama, the excellent cast includes a scene-stealing Dolores Gray as a key witness, Warren Stevens as a vicious mob hitman, a clean-shaven Lee Van Cleef as Brian’s junior partner and Elisha Cook Jr. as a weaselly informer. George Sherman’s “Storm Over Lisbon” (1944), described by MoMA as Republic’s budget version of “Casablanca” features Ralston in her dramatic acting debut opposite Richard Arlen and Erich von Stroheim. It’s showing on Feb. 9 and 14th.

I was even less familiar with the work of William Elliott, as he was known during a Republic interregnum between a pair of stints for Monogram/Allied Artists where he billed as “Wild Bill.” (He used “William” again for a handful of AA police thrillers at the end of his career). During the ’30s, as Gordon Elliott, he appeared in dozens of often unbilled bit parts mostly at Warner Bros.,  briefly dancing with another man as a winking Al Jolson quipped “Boys Will Be boys” in “Wonder Bar” (1934).

Elliott was past 40 when he made western expert R.G. Springsteen’s delightful “Hellfire” (1949), acting with a lack of artifice reminiscent of Gary Cooper as a soft-spoken but tough gambler who decides to build a church as a tribute to the preacher who dies taking a bullet meant to Elliott.

His faith is tested when he crosses paths with sexy outlaw Doll Brown (noir icon Marie Windsor, who’s excellent), whose real name is Mary Carson and is searching for her younger sister.  Doll has a price on her head for her husband’s murder and she is being hunted for the bounty by the husband’s brothers (Jim Davis, a year after “Winter Meeting” with Bette Davis, is the leader).

What makes the plot unusual is that she is also being sought by marshal Forrest Tucker, who is married to Doll/Mary’s sister and is also Elliott’s best friend. Only Elliot realizes that they are in-laws, but helps Doll when she assumes yet another identity, as saloon singer Julia Gaye, to fool Tucker. Things get really complicated when Tucker falls for his sister-in-law, who encourages his attentions to make Elliott jealous. Well, I said it was complicated. But it works.

“Hellfire” was photographed in Trucolor process, which looks fantastic in this restoration.  Windsor is ravishing whether she’s wearing leather or lace, and is more than up to the dramatic demands of the climax, when her late husband’s brothers storm the jail where she’s being held. Elliott handles action and dialogue scenes with such seemingly effortless aplomb that you wonder how he would have fared as a star at the majors studios. “Hellfire” is being repeated on Feb. 6 and Feb. 13 and offers elements of interest even for non-western diehards.

I also very much liked my first viewings of a couple of Republic’s family films: Allan Dwan’s religion-suffused “Driftwood” (1947, repeated Feb. 8), with an extraordinary performance by Natalie Wood as a six-year-old orphan experiencing civilization, including a spotted fever epidemic, for the first time; and  Kane’s “Trigger Jr.” (1950, repeated on Feb. 10), an irresistible Roy Rogers vehicle in gleaming Trucolor that packs a solid plot, three songs and several circus acts into just 68 minutes.

Also highly recommended is the only high-profile film in the series, another family film which I’d somehow never gotten around to seeing. Lewis Milestone’s sublime “The Red Pony” (1949, repeating Feb. 12),  is an example of Republic’s post-war ambitions to lure the carriage trade as the majors loosened their grip on theaters in the wake of a court order. It has Robert Mitchum, Myrna Loy, genuine three-strip Technicolor, a script by John Steinbeck, music by Aaron Copland and one of the most frightening climaxes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The first screening of “Trigger Jr.” was accompanied by an hour’s worth of clips from beautifully restored Republic features and serials, some quite obscure indeed (like “Rosie the Riveter”). It was introduced by Andrea Kalas, archive director at Paramount Pictures, present owner of the Republic library, whose team is to be highly commended for the labors on hundreds of them. The splendid series continues through Feb. 15, then resumes again in August.

Revival circuit: ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (1932) and ‘That Brennan Girl’ (1946) at MoMA

I caught a couple of great new restorations at the Museum of Modern Art on Friday night. “Sherlock Holmes” (1932) was the delightful final screening of “To Save and Project,” MoMA’s annual festival of international film restorations. “That Brennan Girl” was the opening salvo in “Republic Rediscovered,” a series of 30 new restorations resulting from a fruitful collaboration between Paramount Pictures, owner of the Republic Pictures library, and Martin Scorsese’s “Film Foundation.”

I saw at least part of William K. Howard’s “Sherlock Holmes” around 45 years ago on WFSB’s “Cinema Club 3,” but didn’t remember much because the series (including some early Fox talkies that were newly arrived to TV) was broadcast at 11:30 on Sunday nights and I had to be at my desk at the Hartford Times by 7 am on Monday.

Ernest Torrence pretty much steals “Sherlock Holmes” (1932) from Clive Brook.

“Sherlock Holmes” is a whole lot of fun and, and — like Howard’s superb “Transatlantic” (1931) that kicked off this year’s “Save and Project” series — has a visual vitality and narrative sweep that makes it far easier to savor than many stage-bound early talkies.

The wit of Clive Brook’s Sherlock — he had actually played the role twice in two even earlier talkies, including a cameo in “Paramount on Parade” — is drier than Basil Rathbone’s definitive detective, but still much more lively than John Barrymore’s 1922 silent rendition. (Especially when Brook dons a particularly amusing disguise to confront Moriarity).

Both those films are credited as based on William Gillette’s stage play of the same name (as is Rathbone’s 1939 THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES) though they vary quite considerably in their particulars from the 1916 film version starring Gillette himself.

Brook’s edition benefits tremendously from the terrific Moriarity of Ernest Torrence, a towering Scottish-born villain in silents who would make just two more films before his death at the age of 54 the following year. In the striking opening sequence, Moriarity is sentenced to hang for murder, prompting Holmes to retire and set a wedding date with his fiancee (Miriam Jordan).

Because this film brings its Victorian Era hero into the 1930s, when Moriarity inevitably escapes he recruits a band of international criminals (including American gangster Stanley Fields) to wage an amusing Chicago-style mob war in London as part of his plot to eliminate Holmes and his arch-rival at Scotland Yard (Alan Mowbray, playing it mostly straight).

Other deviations that the estate of the prominently credited, recently-deceased Alexander Conan Doyle apparently permitted screenwriter Betram Millhauser (who later worked on five films in Universal’s Holmes series) to make included providing Sherlock a mildly annoying young Canadian ward named Billy and largely sidelining Dr. Watson (played splendidly if briefly by Reginald Owen, who would graduate to Holmes in 1933’s Poverty Row version of “A Study in Scarlet”).

Brook’s pistol-packing Sherlock may not be strictly according to Doyle, but this 69-minute adventure, which has been out of circulation for years, builds to a rousing (if wildly improbable) climax. MoMA has no repeats scheduled, but many of their restorations have turned up at the TCM Classic Film Festival (which has not yet announced its full schedule for this year). Fox is listed as collaborating with MoMA on this restoration, so perhaps they still retain (or will be wiling to negotiate) the rights necessary to put this classic out on video in this gorgeous new video transfer taken from a pristine 35mm nitrate print.

MoMA’s busy Dave Kehr, who curated “Save and Project,” also wrangled the Republic series and introduced Andrea Kalas, head of Paramount’s archives, who presented “That Brennan Girl.” It certainly lived up to MoMA’s promises about this “unaccountably overlooked” film, the final work of the underrated director Alfred Santell (whose masterful but sadly orphaned “Winterset” [RKO, 1936] could also use restoration).

For the first two-thirds at least, this story by former star reporter Adela Rogers St. John (a regular guest on “The Merv Griffin Show” as an old lady in the ’70s) goes against the Hollywood grain, daring the audience to sympathize with the character played by Paramount ingenue Mona Freeman —  a young San Francisco woman who picks up lots of bad habits from her hard-bitten divorcee mom (British actress June Duprez, the beautiful female lead of Korda’s “Thief of Bagdad,” who was only eight years older than Freeman).

A fleeting wartime romance leaves Freeman a widowed mother who can’t quite give up her love of nightlife, especially after the older man (James Dunn in one of his final screen appearances, though this Oscar winner continued to work regularly on TV up until his death in 1967) who befriends her is sent off to prison.

Before a more conventionally redemptive climax that may have been dictated by the studio, “That Brennan Girl” tackles its frequently sordid milieu with more honesty than you’d see in most Hollywood films of this era. Extensive location shooting adds to the verisimilitude, and the evocative score is by George Antheil (best known these days as the collaborator with Hedy Lamarr on the frequency-hopping technology that cellphones use). It’s very much worthy of reevaluation, and if you’re in the New York City area, MoMA will be offering repeats on Feb. 9 and Feb. 15, both at 5 p.m.

Republic reissued “That Brennan Girl” in 1951 in a re-edited version called “Tough Girl” and it ran frequently on TV (it’s unclear in which version or versions) between 1955 and around 1970. (“Suds up to here” was Howard Thompson’s entire capsule review in the New York Times, which seems wildly unfair). “That Brennan Girl” has circulated on the public-domain market since the ’70s, but hopefully Olive Films will offer it among its ongoing series of Republic restorations on DVD and Blu-ray.

The first part of the tantalizing, 30-film “Republic Rediscovered” (I’m unfamiliar with many of the tiles, though I have run across listings for many of them in my ongoing movies on TV project) runs through Feb. 15 and continues from Aug. 9 to 23.

Scorsese himself will be introducing John Auer’s “The City That Never Sleeps” tomorrow (Feb. 3) at 7 p.m. The full schedule is here. [http://press.moma.org/wp-content/files_mf/republicrediscovered_screeningschedule82.pdf]. And if that’s not sufficiently tempting, get a load of this mouth-watering trailer:

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the label of cinephile, but this sure looks like the cinephile event of the year to me.