Movie 4 (also known as Movie Four) is a television program that aired at various times, but predominantly weekday afternoons, on various television stations on channel 4, including WNBC-TV in New York City from 1956 to 1974. WNBC's program aired top-rank first-run movies and other future classics from Hollywood, as well as foreign films. As with other movie shows of 90-minute length, films that ran longer were often divided into two parts.
Though it achieved a degree of success, for most of its run the WNBC show usually ran in the shadow of rival WCBS-TV's The Early Show on weekdays and The Late Show on weekends. Despite its being a major player among the local movie shows for nearly 18 years, the program today is largely forgotten in relation to WABC-TV's better-known The 4:30 Movie.
The Movie 4 title was also used at varying times until the 1970s by NBC's two other owned-and-operated stations on channel 4, WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. and (to a considerably lesser degree) KNBC in Los Angeles. The network's Chicago outlet, WMAQ-TV, used the title Movie 5 for its movie shows from the late 1950s up to the 1980s; and during NBC's ownership of Philadelphia station WRCV-TV (now KYW-TV), their movie umbrella was known as Movie 3.
Early history
What became Movie 4 debuted on what was then WRCA-TV on June 4, 1956. In its first eight months on the air, the program was known as Evening Theatre, and was hosted by staff announcer Johnny Andrews. Prior to its debut, WRCA-TV had been the least committed to airing old movies among the New York television stations. The show was started in large part as the station's attempt to compete with WCBS-TV's aforementioned movie shows and WOR-TV's Million Dollar Movie, as well as capitalizing on the recent release of major pre- and post-1948 films from the top Hollywood studios for television. Only a month into the show's run, and to show that the station was in the game for keeps, WRCA-TV appointed whom they called a "film director" to oversee the purchase of first-run feature films, and to advise NBC's O&O's and affiliates. The program's title switched to Movie 4 on or about February 3, 1957.
Peak years
The heyday for Movie 4 was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, many films that became classics had their New York television premieres. Among these films were The Bells of St. Mary's, High Noon, The Quiet Man, The Men, and East of Eden. For the most part, top-line features were usually reserved for the Saturday and Sunday night airings, while more standard fare was run on weekdays and weekend afternoons.
Prestigious foreign films—mainly from England but also from other countries—also had their first showings on Movie 4 over the years. For example, in the autumn of 1960, New York viewers saw the 1955 Peter Sellers–Alec Guinness version of The Ladykillers for the first time on television, as well as Fernandel's The Sheep Has Five Legs, the 1954 Rossano Brazzi film Flesh and Desire, the 1957 French release Les Louves (Demoniac), the 1955 Spanish movie The Miracle of Marcelino, and the 1950 Italian film Prima comunione (Father's Dilemma).
In the program's last years, several films became recurring staples of Movie 4s schedule, including North by Northwest, Home from the Hill, Soldier in the Rain, Captain Newman, M.D., Father Goose, The Time Machine, The Babe Ruth Story, and the respective pilots for Columbo (both Prescription: Murder and Ransom for a Dead Man) and Ironside. Some of Elvis Presley's films also saw play on Movie 4, among them Flaming Star, Kissin' Cousins and It Happened at the World's Fair. The show was also among the first times New Yorkers saw the Doctor Who character, via the theatrical releases Dr. Who and the Daleks and Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. with Peter Cushing as the title character. The station also had its share of Japanese monster movies, including Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster and Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, but such titles were minuscule compared with the number of such films that ran on rival WABC-TV's The 4:30 Movie.
Other films shown on Movie 4 were Visit to a Small Planet, Crawlspace (1972), Lover Come Back (1961), Ten Little Indians (1965), and I'd Rather Be Rich, and such MGM musicals as Annie Get Your Gun, The Band Wagon, Singin' in the Rain, High Society, Kiss Me Kate, and Les Girls.