Sunday, January 6, 2013

The Old Black & Whites

Still catching those old movies on Turner Movie Classics from time to time. Saw one movie from the Torchy Blane series....apparently, the sassy reporter character was the inspiration for one Lois Lane later on. "Fly Away, Baby" was barely 75 minutes and even for a movie from those days, it was done on a shoe-aglet budget. But what was interesting about this one was the last third of the movie was about this worldwide race between two very rich fellows of which one leg was by zeppelin. Considering that this flick was released in 1937, I guess the production must've happened before the Hindenburg disaster. Also, one of the stops was Frankfurt, Germany and one scene showed one zepp with the Nazi emblem on the tail. Otherwise, the movie was a pretty fluffy amuser with the characters just hamming it up with no care about an Oscar...basically what anyone would imagine a 1930s comedy-adventure movie would sound like.

Then, just today I found out from Wikipedia that a lot of the original radio broadcasts and perhaps even the original TV broadcasts of "Dragnet"in the 1950s were out in the public domain, so people can download them to their hearts' content. I didn't bother doing so but I did watch the very first episode of the first season of the Jack Webb police classic, complete with the legendary theme song, right from YouTube.

He's Joe Friday...he's a cop....partner's Ben Romero...he's a sergeant....as Joe is....Chief of Detectives is Thad Brown (played by Raymond Burr!)....and this is the pilot!

The pilot is indeed interesting....just for the fact that the episode takes place within only two rooms, and the guys get their hands very dirty.