In the early 1990s, when I was still in high school, the VCR was my family’s only home entertainment. We didn’t have cable at that time. Somewhere around 1990, I recorded my first movie on television, which was the original King Kong. After that, I was always buying blank videocassettes and recording– mostly in LP mode– whatever I could because I liked to collect and log what I had. One of the primary stations I tuned into was Channel 7 Chicago. At that time, there was the ABC 7 Late Movie– not to be confused with the more modern-era “7 Movie.” And unless I’m misremembering this, there was an even later movie that I rarely was awake for. These showings went from Friday into early Saturday morning. The station always played the old RKO movies, and these opened with the “Movietime” C&C Television Corporation logo.
C&C Television Corporation was the television unit of a beverage company called Cantrell & Cochrane Limited. In December 1955, they acquired the television rights to the majority of the RKO Radio Pictures film library, which had previously been owned by General Tire and Rubber Company. In the 1970s, the television rights went to United Artists, and then later, they were absorbed by Warner Bros. Pictures (through Turner Entertainment). Despite the change of ownership over the years, the C&C logo still appeared on the television prints of RKO titles. These were the versions seen in the early morning weekend hours when Channel 7 still played movies worth staying up for.
Being the RKO library– one of the “Big Five” Hollywood studios– the highlight was always a late screening of my favorite movie, King Kong, starting at 11:30 PM. On one occasion, it was colorized, but it was still Kong! Sometimes you’d get its sequel, Son of Kong. Though it paled in comparison to the original, it never lost its nostalgic appeal, and to this day I’ve kept a 16mm print of it that I own. Aside from the father and son gorillas, the other big classic that hit the small screen from time to time was Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. It was years later when a film teacher pointed out there was a little bit of Kong in Kane. He was referring to some background jungle effects that appear in the Welles masterpiece.
The late movie is where I discovered the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in early ’30s movies like Hook, Line & Sinker, Half-Shot at Sunrise, and Cracked Nuts.Their best films, however– Diplomaniacs and Kentucky Kernels— remained relatively elusive, and I only found them years later through old-school collectors and movie convention video pirates. Wheeler & Woolsey were vaudevillians and certainly not to everyone’s taste. Another team that turned up on the dial– and my guess one that would play a little better to modern audiences– was Jimmy Gleason and Edna May Oliver. Co-starring in a series of B mysteries, Gleason played the fast-talking city cop Oscar Piper and Oliver the matronly schoolteacher, Hildegard Withers, who was almost always displeased about something. Together they appeared in The Penguin Pool Murder, Murder on the Blackboard and Murder on a Honeymoon.
RKO was the house of noir, and there were so many film noir classics shown from the 1940s and early 1950s– many of which featured Robert Mitchum: Crossfire, Out of the Past, The Big Steal, Where Danger Lives, Angel Face. and so on. There was Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet and Robert Ryan in the boxing classic The Set-Up. Noir was a visual style that could be found in the horror genre RKO was also known for, especially in movies like producer Val Lewton’s Cat People. Lewton’s films were always showcased on Channel 7, particularly I Walked with a Zombie.
In addition, there were the incomparable Fred & Ginger musicals as well as mysteries (The Falcon and The Saint series), screwball comedies, pre-Code dramas, adventures, and Westerns. There were the big stars, of course, like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, for example, or Irene Dunne in her earlier years, but generally, the names you’d find on late night television would be the lesser-known players like Richard Dix, John Beal, Tim Holt, or Virginia Bruce. To get a sense of the scope of the studio’s catalog, just page through a copy of Richard Jewell’s The RKO Story (1982)– one of those treasured studio books many film buffs have on the shelf.
Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947).
When you’re recording every old movie on TV, you think you’ll have all the time in the world to watch them. At the time, I thought of how many I would play for my dad, who appreciated movies like these. But by the early 2000s, VHS had become outdated. The VCR got stored away. The tapes were boxed up. When I finally moved out of my condo, I had 50 gallon Rubbermaid tubs filled with videos that had been languishing in a storage closet for years. It was actually frustrating to know I had hundreds of tapes, especially when these towers of Scotch, Sony, Maxell and Polaroid were falling all over me as I was emptying the bins.
I had to dispose of most, gift others to a friend whose family still used a VCR. Everything except the rarest or most essential had to go. If it was now on dvd– as most of them were– gone! I had saved so much because there was always the idea that maybe one day I might hook up the VCR again or transfer some to a digital format. I’m sure it would be of interest now to see the ones that had the commercials recorded: the dour, bankruptcy attorney Peter Francis Geraci or the Celozzi and Ettleson Chevrolet car commercials. And the Channel 7 Eyewitness News team promos featuring John Drury and Mary Ann Childers. There were a hundred others that defined late night local television. After some of the more repetitive ones, it was always a relief to get back to the freeze frame of that night’s movie title.
All these recorded memories are undoubtedly fading and degrading, even if they weren’t recorded in the lower quality EP mode. But the saddest part of this movie collecting is the realization that most of these movies I never did play for my dad, who passed away in 2023. Other things, of course, were shown to him in later years and in other formats, but those old, late movies– as they were shown and edited back then– have been buried by time.
~MCH
Wheeler & Woolsey were a late night staple.