Classic Television - Prime Time

NBC Saturday Night at the Movies

Original Run

September 1961 - October 1978

Original Network

NBC

NBC Saturday Night at the Movies, is the first continuing weekly prime time network television series to show relatively recent feature films from major studios in color. The series premiered in September 1961

Previously, movies on television were usually low-cost B films or older films that the major studios or producers no longer found suitable for theatrical presentation. Movie audiences had grown to expect films to be shown in widescreen and in color, so older black-and-white Academy ratio films had lost much of their value to the theatres. By the late-1950s, with the exception of some of Walt Disney's films and The Wizard of Oz (1939), these older films had become standard fare for independent stations and the non-prime time schedules of the network affiliates.

Up until the early 1970s, the time span between a film's theatrical release and its appearance on commercial network television was much longer. Whereas today it can take as brief a period as three years before a theatrical film shows up on commercial television, between 1954 and 1972 a theatrical motion picture (even a relatively recent one) usually had to wait as many as twelve years (as in the case of the 1959 Ben-Hur) before it turned up on the home screen.

A short-lived black-and-white ABC-TV series entitled Famous Film Festival had premiered in 1956, but had shown British films made in the 1940s. They were shown in a ninety-minute time slot, which meant that the films had to either be severely edited or shown in two parts. NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first network movie anthology series to run two hours (and occasionally longer), so that the films could be shown in one evening.

For its 1961 television season, NBC obtained the rights to broadcast 31 post-1950 movie titles from 20th Century Fox, although only 30 were actually telecast that season. One film, The Seven Year Itch, was held off by the network until the start of the 1963 season. On September 23, 1961, Saturday Night at the Movies premiered with the 1953 Marilyn Monroe - Lauren Bacall - Betty Grable film How to Marry a Millionaire, presented "In Living Color". Some of the other movies shown were The Day the Earth Stood Still (March 3, 1962) and No Highway in the Sky (March 24, 1962). Many of these films, having been made in Cinemascope, a Fox specialty from 1953 to 1967, had to be severely panned-and-scanned for full screen television viewing (which was the only kind of television aspect ratio in existence then). That initial deal with Fox ended up lasting two seasons, with a total of 61 films. And when the studio found greener pastures over at rival ABC, the network found studios such as MGM and Paramount eager to provide content. Because commercial breaks were shorter until the late 1960s, films running less than two hours sometimes ended before the close of the program. The remaining time was filled up with theatrical trailers of upcoming films scheduled to be shown on the series in the future. By about 1968, this was no longer necessary, as commercial breaks had become longer.

The three major commercial networks did not show worn-out 16 mm prints of films as was then the usual practice on local TV stations. The films which aired on the network movie anthology series (as well as annually-telecast specials such as The Wizard of Oz) were 35mm prints invariably in excellent condition. With the advent of cable television, VHS, and DVD, the idea of always showing films - even very old ones - in pristine, remastered condition on television has become the norm, but aside from films shown on the three major networks, this was simply not done prior to the 1980s. Up until then, many times, local stations had to settle for inexpensive 16 mm prints of such relatively recent films as Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) or Prince Valiant (1954), rather than good "theater-quality" prints as seen on the networks. Unlike the major networks, nearly all local stations used 16 mm film chains