A documentary tribute to freedom is the subject of this Special.
A portrait of the Jew as an American and as representative of our minority cultures. Includes interviews and various performances. Susan Strasberg does a scene from the play "Diary of Anne Frank."

Host: Jeff Chandler                                                   

October 26th, 1952-April 26th, 1953 NBC

A documentary series of 26 half-hour films on naval warfare during WW11. Leonard Graves was the narrator while Richard Rodgers composed a special musical score. In later years the program was rerun in syndication. 

NOTE: OPENING ONLY

                                      

October 20th, 1957-September, 1969

Walter Cronkite hosted this Sunday-evening documentary series, that presented filmed reports on a wide variety of historical and scientific subjects. In January of 1967, the show's title was changed to The Twenty-First Century.

General Montgomery Clark reminisces about WW 11. with Edward R. Murrow.  

Host: Walter Cronkite.                      

Walter Cronkite narrates.  

A retrospective of Paris, a spawning ground for a revolution in the arts, sparked by a host of American expatriates from the world of literature, painting and the theater. Among those players include authors Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Colette, E.E.Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane and Stephen Vincent Benet. Performers include Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Marilyn Miller, Beatrice Lillie, Judith Anderson, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford; artists Pablo Picasso, Jo Davidson and Alexander Calder. Janet Flanner, who as "Genet" is the New Yorker's Paris correspondent, and artist-photographer Man Ray contribute their reminiscences. 
           

A one hour special report. Jewish survivors of Nazi atrocities and concentration camp horrors relate their past experiences.

Quentin Reynolds is the host and narrator.  

"Nothing will remain of the Jewish question but a cemetery," predicted a Nazi official when Hitler's program to eliminate the Jews bean in earnest in 1938. Many hundreds of cemeteries were filled before Allied victory halted the Nazi machine in 1945. " REMEMBER US" tells the story of the millions of European Jews who died in prison camps and ghettos during this period, and of those who survived.

Past footage from Documentary films and the accounts of survivors are used to piece together a scenario of life and death as Typhus and starvation stalked the prisoners in the concentration camps, including Dachau, Breendonk, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald, and the ghettos of Europe. Survivors describe the resistance which met the Nazi decision to destroy the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, lengthy trips by cattle-car to extermination camps, capricious selection of gas chamber victims and the endless variety of tortures devised to bring about Hitler's "final solution to the Jewish question."  

Broadcast on TV on July 18, 1960 the "Remember Us" documentary which includes fragments from Alain Resnais' classic 32 minute documentary "Night and Fog" (1956), opens with Dr. Gisela Perl, a survivor of the Holocaust...a Romanian Jewish Gynecologist deported to Auschwitz in 1944 where she attended hundreds of women as an inmate gynecologist without the bare necessities to perform her work, delegated by Josef Mengele. She relates her ordeal and the ordeal of others. Dr. Pearl is best known for her published book in 1948,  "I Was A Doctor in Auschwitz."  Other interviews are spoken by Sonia Weissman (the donor's wife and a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto), Janus T (a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), and Mr. Friedman (a survivor of Treblinka). The film goes on to use various well-known pieces of footage that exists in the USHMM film and video collection, such as German newsreel footage, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials as well as other war crimes trials, Mogilev gas van footage, etc. The film also incorporates well-known still photographs. There are images (and montages) of equipment used for medical experimentation, for example, a gynecological examination chair. At the conclusion of the film, narrator Quentin Reynolds warns that the Holocaust must be remembered least it be repeated. He then goes on to use the example of apartheid in South Africa as a [contemporary] parallel.

This extraordinary documentary which aired only one time and repeated in the early morning hours, has been forgotten by the general public for 60 years. It is not available anywhere with the exception of an archived  16mm print donated as a gift by Leo Weissman to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999.

A Variety Review described the film this way.

"In  the annals of TV there probably hasn't been a more gruesome documentary than 'Remember Us,' an hour-length 
depiction of the Nazi horror which ravaged 9 ,000,000 lives and left an open sore on humanity's conscience. No better telling has caught the diabolic character of the  Nazi regime than  'Remember Us,' a title which echoes and re-echoes when matched against the past and present. It is not easy to view and listen; a terrible reminder for an unsettled world."

NOTE: It is interesting that 34 years later  Steven Spielberg would initiate a six year world wide filming coordination,  producing "Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Project," begun in 1994 with the objective to film/video tape and preserve first-person survivor testimonies and encourage their use in education.

In 1985, Phil Gries, founder and owner of Archival Television Audio, Inc. filmed a series of interviews with filmmaker Cluade Lanzmann which were televised each night for four consecutive nights after an installment of Lanzmann's nine and a half hour epic documentary SHOAH, broadcast  on PBS in its entirety. Nine years later, in December of 1994, Gries worked on the documentary "Bringing The Holocaust Home," for the BBC. For many days Gries filmed inside the new United States Holocaust Museum, in Washington DC, which was closed to the public during filming sequences within the museum. This landmark institution opened its doors for the first time to the public the previous year (March 22, 1993). Half - a- year later Phil Gries was hired to film 15 interviews (July-September, 1995)...65 hours of footage with holocaust survivors for the Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah project at the inception of Spielberg's visionary undertaking. Most of the sit down interviews, conducted by social workers, averaged two hours long. Some of  them lasted  four hours long. It was ALWAYS an emotional experience for subject and all others involved in the filming.

Today, twenty five years later,112,000 thousand hours (52,000 separate interviews) of  interviews have been conducted around the world and are preserved in The Visual History Archive. The material is digitized, and fully searchable via indexed keywords, and hyperlinked to the minute at the USC  SHOAH FOUNDATION in Southern California. 

REMEMBER US (1960), in many respects one of the first of such documentary retrospectives of the horrors of the Holocaust, remains a most hard hitting and compelling reminder and retelling of the horrors of Adolf Hitler's "solution to the Jewish question."

                                                                                                                            

Fred Allen narrates a chronicle of America and Americans from the end of World War I to Oct. 29, 1929. Robert Russell Bennett's musical score is made up of popular songs of the period. First telecast Dec. 6, 1956, this documentary was written and produced by Henry Salomon.             

January 23, - July 16, 1960.

A prime time our-long documentary series hosted by Chet Huntley and Frank McGee.

A repeat showing of the special Easter time program first presented on NBC on April 16, 1960; filmed in the Holy Land without actors, it traces the route Jesus took through Jerusalem as he bore the cross to his crucifixion on Calvary. Frank McGee introduces the program. Last years presentation was a part of the World Wide 60 series.  Music conducted by Jacques Belasco.  

Narrated by Alexander Scourby.
Norman Rose contributes the biblical voice.  

                       

America's participation in World War I is chronicled.  Alexander Scourby narrates.  Produced by Henry Salomon.  Written by Salomon and Richard Hanser.  Music by Robert Russell Bennett.  Premiere broadcast was Oct. 16, 1956.    

A Reviewer's Comment:

   I am a professional musician, so I am probably a little more aware of the background music than many other viewers, but I need to mention that one can shut the picture or one's eyes and just concentrate on the score and Alexander Scourby's voice to have a rather enjoyable hour, for the music is non-stop for the entire hour. 

Program number 11 of 18 programs. 
Myrna Loy introduces this unique series. The long romance between music and the silent movies, the musical extravaganzas of the thirties, the great days of the Roxy Theater, and the artistic contributions of "background music" to films are among the recollections which Miss Dorothy Lamour introduces. Her guests are Jeanette MacDonald, Gene Kelly, Francis X. Bushman, Allan Jones, producer Arthur Freed, songwriters Dorothy Field and Ray Henderson, award winning composer Franz Waxman, pianist Jack Shaindlin and former organist of the Roxy Theater, Dr.(of music) C.A.J. Parmentier. Most of the interviews were originally recorded in 1959 by producers Joan and Robert Franklin.    

    NOTE: Robert  C. Franklin (1920-1980), inspired by a 1958 newspaper story he read about Columbia University's POPULAR ARTS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT, approached Dr. Louis Starr, then director of the oral-history collection, with a proposal to interview and tape record, on to 1/4" reel to reel audio tapes, movie people as they passed through New York. The objective would be to document, through personal recollections, the era of the silent era in films, the impact of sound, the triumphs and inequities of the major studios, and life in the glittering film capital...a firsthand account revelation of how silent movies were actually made.  

Robert  and his wife, Joan Franklin went on to record 200 reels of audio tape, recording celebrities mostly in New York City hotel rooms in 1958 and 1959. Transcripts of interviews were made available at the time to students and researchers. 

In 1961 excerpts/highlights from these audio tapes were edited into a 16 part  radio series titled, MEMOIRS OF THE MOVIES. Myrna Loy provided a standard opening. A different celebrity host/hostess was employed to introduce each episode. All of the 90 celebrities interviewed have since passed away with the exception of Joanne Woodward. Two additional episodes were later produced, "Style of the 70's," and "Rush To Reality," both hosted by Ben Gazzara and added, subsequently, to  re-issues of the series which were syndicated in the 1960's and 1970's airing  in New York (WINS), Boston (WBZ), Philadelphia (KYW), Baltimore (WJZ), Fort Wayne (WOWO), Chicago (WIND), San Francisco (KPIX), and Los Angeles (KFWB).  

The original 200 unedited reels of 1/4" audio tape interviews recorded by Joan and Robert Franklin are no longer known to exist. However, audio cassette transfers from these original tapes were donated by Joan Franklin many decades ago to Columbia University's Oral History Research Office where they exist  today.
Confirmed during a 2009 phone conversation with Mary Marshal Clark, archivist at Columbia at that time, who stated that the first on file communication from Robert  Franklin to Columbia University related to his  proposal to do an oral history audio recorded project is dated, July 31, 1958.
                               

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.  

A man charges his wife with habitual drunkenness.                                              

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.

On today's show, a wife accuses her unemployed husband of being lazy and shiftless. In another case, a wife accuses her husband of bringing home unexpected guests.                                               

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.

Today's case; a wife accuses her husband of drinking and violence.

                                                 

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.

In today's case, a husband accuses his wife of habitual drinking.                                                

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.

In this case, a wife charges her husband with flirting with other women.                                                 

October 20th, 1957-September, 1969

Walter Cronkite hosted this Sunday-evening documentary series, that presented filmed reports on a wide variety of historical and scientific subjects. In January of 1967, the show's title was changed to The Twenty-First Century.

Episode: Get The Graf Spee, reconstruction of events that led to the scuttling of the famed Nazi battleship (The German Sea Raider) in Montevideo harbor on December 17, 1939. German sea raider.
                                                                           

An examination of the human factors to be considered in space travel. Included are films of weightlessness tests, gravity studies and a look at the mental rigors of space travel as two airmen undergo 17 days ia a mock-up capsule. Also, a discussion of nutrition with Beatrice Finkelstein; optical challenges with Otto Schueller, and radiation perils with Dr. Herman J. Schaeffer.                                                                                                                                                             

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.

The wife accuses husband of gambling and selfishness, wife accuses husband of drunkenness.                                                 

1962-1964 Syndicated.

Mike Wallace narrates biographical retrospectives of notable people. This syndicated filmed 65 half-hour program series was one of the first to be produced by David Wolper. 

"Lindbergh" narrated by Mike Wallace. Highlights of Charles Lindberg's career. Commercials included. 

                                 

1958 (Syndicated)

A half-hour documentary series produced in Los Angeles. It was an "actuality" show. Couples would discuss marital problems with Los Angeles marriage counselor Dr. Paul Popenoe as he would listen in closed quarters to pretrial complaints offered by real-life divorce bound couples.

A wife accuses her husband of extreme jealousy and watching TV.                                                

September 27, 1960-June 4, 1963
A series of reports, many by John Secondari and Robert Drew and his team (Richard Leacock, D.A.Pennebaker, Al Maysles), most notable YANKI NO, THE CHILDREN WERE WATCHING and ADVENTURES ON THE NEW FRONTIER,  in association with Time, Inc.
The series began in the fall of 1960 and ran in sporadic regular runs from 1961 through the middle of 1963.  


A documentary on current events satire.  Also, a look at President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.

Hosts: Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl.