TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "The General Electric Theater" from CBS (Dec. 18, 1955)

Posted to YouTube by user 'HORDE'
Length - 29:17

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

Everyone knows that Ronald Reagan, America's 40th president, had been an actor. But that doesn't mean its not still a little jarring to see him actually act, as in this episode of "The General Electric Theater". "GE Theater", which Reagan was also host of for its entire run from 1953 to 1962, was an anthology drama in which a different story with different actors appeared each week. The early years of TV had many such shows, although "GE Theater" was one of the few remaining by the end of its run in the early-1960s.

This 1955 episode of "GE Theater" is entitled "Let It Rain", and in addition to Reagan it features a very young Cloris Leachman. Reagan plays a journalist who has stopped off in the southern small-town where Leachman's character lives. The journalist ends up trying to debunk a local legend about a Civil War-era sword that was lodged in a tree trunk, while also carrying on a love affair with Leachman. (It's especially jarring to see Reagan in these romantic scenes.)

The episode is typical of early-TV anthology series: only a handful of characters, just a few locations (all of them sets on a soundstage), and stories that tended towards the personal and intimate--all of which worked well with the smaller budgets and smaller screen of early television.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Suspense" from CBS (Oct. 11, 1949)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Suspense1949'
Length - 29:29

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

As we approach Halloween tomorrow night, here is an episode of the early, black-and-white dramatic anthology program "Suspense" from October of 1949--starring the legendary horror movie star Bela Lugosi in an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado".

Half-hour dramatic anthology programs were a dime a dozen from the late-1940s through the mid-1950s. (Here's a sampling: "Armstrong Circle Theatre", "Crime Syndicated", "Fireside Theatre", "Gruen Playhouse", "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars", "The Silver Theatre".) "Suspense", with its emphasis on suspense stories, was a little different than most.

The Poe story is here updated to a World War II and immediate postwar setting (a period that was basically contemporary in 1949). Two army officers (one played by a young Ray Walston) take the deposition of a man (Romney Brent) who tells the story of how he sealed up a romantic rival (Lugosi) in the vault with the title cask. Lugosi offers a somewhat restrained performance while still providing the flair audiences by this time (nearly twenty years after "Dracula") had come to expect. (Honestly, most of it is in the accent, probably.)

Edgar Allen Poe has been a standby for spooky stories for well over 150 years, and this adaptation of one of his greatest stories does a pretty good job of providing one on the day before Halloween.