Six movies with southern roots headed to a television
near you

Fade in:
An Atlanta television executive reads an e-mail from a curious viewer who wants to know whatever happened to some of his favorite movies from years past. The executive becomes curious himself, as his company should own the rights to the flicks, but he’s never heard of them. And the mystery begins. Though the premise would likely have been rejected by even “Murder, She Wrote,” scribes, that’s exactly how Turner Classic Movies Senior Programming Manager Dennis Millay began his quest to reclaim six long forgotten RKO Pictures movies from the 1930s and 1940s.

The pictures, which are all feature-length and were distributed in wide-release, have been quietly locked away in film vaults around the world since the 1950s. The titles are “Double Harness” (1933), “One Man’s Journey” (1933), “Rafter Romance” (1933), “Stingaree” (1934), “Living on Love” (1937), and include four movies produced prior to the once powerful Hays Code, which mandated strict social and religious standards over motion picture content. Though still tame by today’s standards, taboo subjects like the word“virgin” and topics like pre-marital sex — which would be virtually unheard of in movies made during the Hays era — are found in the four earlier pictures.

Moviegoers will recognize some very famous names from the cast lists; Ginger Rogers, William Powell, Irene Dunne, and Lionel Barrymore, and Ethel Barrymore play characters. By Millay’s research, the last time one of the movies was broadcast was in 1959 by a local television station in New York. “It was like a little treasure hunt,” Millay told The Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah. “When I found them, I was so excited I was bugging everyone to tell them about it.” The Byzantine process Millay went through to uncover prints of the movies and the rights for Turner Classic to air them compels the story. He received a message from savvy viewer who was curious why the titles were never shown on TCM, whose founder, Ted Turner, acquired the RKO library of movies in 1986.

The six movies, which were produced by legendary movie impresario Merian C. Cooper, who brought the 1933 version of “King Kong” to the screen, had been sold to Cooper out of the RKO library as part of a separation package Cooper negotiated when he quit work at the studio in the 50s.

With the dawn of television before him, savvy Cooper had an eye for showing the movies over broadcast airwaves, but eventually lost the rights to the pictures after a series of business deals went sour. Former Cooper business associate and one-time RKO accountant Ernest Scanlon wound up with the rights to the movies, which probated to his unwitting family when he died.

Millay unearthed the rights to movies, which he purchased from the Scanlon family, but finding actual copies of the pictures was more difficult. Millay located copies of most of the pictures at the Brigham Young University film library in Provo, Utah. One movie, “A Man to Remember,” had to be tracked to a film society library in the Netherlands. Once the titles and prints were secured, Millay began the painstaking process of restoring the movies for broadcast.

First, the movies will enjoy a more auspicious reintroduction to film audiences via New York’s Film Forum week in February. The six movies are set to begin airing on TCM in April.