By Leonard Maltin
October 12, 2015 at 2:58PM
Porter Hall, Betty Hutton, and Eddie Bracken in Preston Sturges sidesplitting 'The Miracle of Morgan's Creek' (1944)
Even as film buffs bemoan the downsizing of the DVD market, major studios are making more of their vintage titles available in other ways. Paramount has just launched a YouTube channel on which, amazingly, they are streaming a diverse assortment of pictures from the 1950s and '60s-for free-from Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models to Elvis Presley in King Creole. A variety of film clip packages cover movies of the '70s, '80s, and beyond. The studio's inventory includes titles from Republic Pictures, like John Wayne in The Fighting Kentuckian and the Batjac library, including Budd Boetticher's terrific Western 7 Men From Now, with Randolph Scott. When you sample one of these films you discover even more that are available, like Here Comes the Groom and Riding High with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope in Casanova's Big Night, and Jean Arthur in The Devil and Miss Jones.
Paramount no longer owns its pre-1948 titles, having sold them to MCA (now Universal) in the late 1950s, although there is one happy exception: they held back Preston Sturges' Miracle at Morgan's Creek because Jerry Lewis was remaking it as Rock-a-bye Baby. That's why the classic Sturges comedy is now streamable free of charge. (Paramount was also the last major studio to make its films available for syndicated television use; by the time they dove in the pool there was little interest in such early '50s black & white movies as Dear Brat and Darling, How Could You!. Sure enough, they are part of this YouTube channel today.)
Meanwhile, 20th Century Fox has announced a year-long program of releasing one hundred vintage titles in the digital format, including ten films that have never been released on home video before: Raoul Walsh's The Red Dance (1928), The Cock-Eyed World (1929), the rowdy, politically incorrect The Bowery (1933) with Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper and George Raft, Hello Sister (1933), which was begun by Erich von Stroheim, and the very funny Sailor's Luck (1933); John Ford's Men Without Women (1930), Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor in the little-seen State Fair (1933), Shirley Temple in Mr. Belvedere Goes to Washington (1949), the Marilyn Monroe documentary Marilyn (1963) and opera star Laurence Tibbett in Metropolitan (1935), the first official release from 20th Century Fox.
You can check out the first batch of films at www.itunes.com/foxfilm, which features a handful of John Ford titles: Doctor Bull with Will Rogers, Drums Along the Mohawk, My Darling Clementine, The Prisoner of Shark Island, Young Mr. Lincoln, The World Moves On, Tobacco Road, and The Seas Beneath as well as an eclectic selection of more recent selections including Alien Nation and Romancing the Stone. The rental price is a modest $3.99.