Some favourite films, in no order of preference . . .
American Graffiti
An Affair to Remember (and its grandchild, Sleepless in Seattle)
Apollo 13
Bang the Drum Slowly
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Broadcast of 1938
The Caine Mutiny
Cars
Casablanca
City Lights
The Cocoanuts
A Day at the Races
Duck Soup
Eight Days a Week
The Enchanted Cottage
Fantasia
Field of Dreams
From Here to Eternity
From the Terrace
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
The Great Dictator
A Hard Day's Night
Heavenly Days
Hidden Figures
I'll Be Seeing You (Ginger Rogers strictly acting, and very well)
Keeping the Faith
The Kid
Last Train from Gun Hill (Anthony Quinn and Kirk Douglas in that rarity---a Western with brains)
Lost in Yonkers
Monsieur Verdoux
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
National Lampoon's Animal House
The Natural
A Night at the Opera
The Odd Couple
The Pink Panther
Ray
The Right Stuff
Schindler's List
Sorry, Wrong Number
That Thing You Do
The Truman Show
Twelve O'Clock High
2001: A Space Odyssey
Where Were You When the Lights Went Out
Woodstock
. . . among others.
Some favourite television series, in no order of preference . . .
The Addams Family (Yes, it was and is funnier than The Munsters. And every damn Addams
Family film made decades later.)
All in the Family
The Bob Newhart Show
The Burns & Allen Show
The Danny Thomas Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Ed Sullivan Show (name one other variety series on which a classical music performance involving piano trios was
liable to be followed by a dog act and brought the Beatles live to the U.S. for the first time)
Frasier (the first spin-off in television history that was better than the show that birthed it)
The GE College Bowl (this quiz was required viewing at dinnertime in my house on Sunday nights, even if its
original host could be described occasionally as Allen Leaden . . .)
Hill Street Blues
The Honeymooners
House
The Jack Benny Program
The Jackie Gleason Show (the full variety hour was just as good, especially before it was turned into
an hour's worth of remaking The Honeymooners as lame mini-musicals; long live Reginald Van
Gleason III, the Poor Soul, Rudy the Repairman, and Joe the Bartender)
Jeopardy! (the original, hosted by Art Fleming, and the only quiz show my paternal grandfather swore by)
Love, American Style
Life with Elizabeth (Betty White's first series, making her a kind of pioneer since she was the first woman to create
and oversee a series with this charming half-hour of ten-minute comic vignettes hooked)
The Lucy Show (Yes, it's funnier than I Love Lucy. Wanna fight?)
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
M*A*S*H
Moonlighting
NBC Saturday Night (the first season, before Chevy Chase's ego caused him to leave after that first season,
and when the show really was funny)
Newhart
Northern Exposure
Our Miss Brooks
Peyton Place (should be given a lifetime achievement award for doing what some think could never be done---
being a soap opera with brains)
The Phil Silvers Show (a.k.a. Sgt. Bilko, and I still think Steve Martin and company should be prosecuted for
assault with a dead weapon for what they did to it in that God-awful film)
Private Practice (the second spin-off in television history that was better than the show that birthed it!)
Route 66
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (which deserves to be restored in full and made available complete on DVD)
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
Taxi
Topper
The Twilight Zone
You Bet Your Life (Or, I Went to a Groucho Marx Concert and a Quiz Show Broke Out)
. . . among others . . .
And, since I'm an old-time radio nut, some of my favourite old-time radio series, in no order of preference . . .
Amos 'n' Andy (the original 1928-32 serial comedy; the later sitcom version would have made a dog's
breakfast)
Academy Award Theater
AFRS Mail Call
The Big Show (radio's last-gasp big variety show, hosted by Tallulah Bankhead and with Fred Allen as her most
frequent guest---excellent comedy, excellent music, excellent acting skits, and lived up to the wisecrack of New
York Times critic Jack Gould being "enough to make you wish you could have seen it")
Bob & Ray Present the CBS Radio Network (Which often included their classic old-time radio soap parody, One
Fella's Family)
Broadway is My Beat (the best crime drama of all time, radio or television)
The Burns & Allen Show
Cathy & Elliott Lewis On Stage
The CBS Radio Workshop
CBS World News Today (more of it survived than you think, and it was and remains excellent World War II
spot reporting)
Dragnet (the second-best radio crime drama of them all and still beats the TV version hollow)
Duffy's Tavern
Easy Aces
Escape
Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel (but---except for one surviving full episode---you have to buy the book
Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel: The Marx Brothers' Lost Radio Show, a collection of the show's
scripts, to get the idea)
Fibber McGee & Molly
The Fred Allen Show (in all its iterations from The Linit Bath Revue and Town Hall Tonight to
Hour of Smiles and Texaco Star Theater before reverting to The Fred Allen Show in 1945)
The Goldbergs
Gunsmoke (the radio original makes the TV version look like Gravy Train)
The Halls of Ivy
The Henry Morgan Show (this was edgy stuff even for the 1940s)
Information, Please
The Jack Benny Program
The Les Paul Show
Lights Out
Lum & Abner (like Amos 'n' Andy, the original serial comedy was tons better than its eventual sitcom
conversion)
Lux Radio Theater
The March of Time
Our Miss Brooks
The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show
Quiet, Please (if The Twilight Zone could be thought to have a grandfather this short-lived but effective
psychological fantasy was it)
Richard Diamond, Private Detective (not even half as stiff---and way funnier in the bargain---than the eventual
TV version remembered best for introducing the world to Mary Tyler Moore's legs)
The Six Shooter (Lasted one season but it was the most wry Western on radio---and with James Stewart in the lead role)
Stoopnagle & Budd (only three have survived, but they were the antecedent to Bob & Ray)
Suspense
Vic & Sade (arguably the best purely conversational comedy of them all, in which you could know intimately enough
dozens of other local characters strictly through the talk of the two protagonists and their teenage son---who was
played by Bill Idelson, eventually Sally Rogers's mama's-boy boyfriend Herman Glimscher on The Dick Van Dyke
Show before becoming a respected television director and writer)
The Whistler (pioneered the idea of telling the crime at the beginning and keeping you listening by taking you
through the mind and thoughts of the alleged suspect---who didn't always turn out to be the actual criminal . . . the best
parody of the show had to have been Jack Benny's sketch, "The Fiddler")
Words at War (a terrific NBC dramatic anthology which made radio shows out of assorted books published during
World War II)
You Are There
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (the 1955-56 five-part-a-week version with Bob Bailey in the title role, turning the show
from stupid to smart almost overnight and for too short a period of time)