Million Dollar Movie - The Phenix City Story

Every weeknight, at 7 and 10, WWOR-TV Channel 9 in New York would show the Million Dollar Movie. They used the Million Dollar Movie theme show music about thirty years earlier in Gone With The Wind.

In the 1960s, a million dollars was a lot of money. In fact, there was a show called The Millionaire and the rich man, John Beresford Tipton, had his assistant, Michael Anthony, give a one million dollar tax-paid check to people. The show was about how it changed their lives. But I digress.

Many of the movies were Abbot & Costello comedies.



Many other shows were dramas.

One show starred Ernest Borgnine as a New York Policeman - Lt. Joseph Petrosino - pursuing The Black Hand. At one point he's pushed in front of an oncoming subway car. Later, the bad guys stick a pin in a corpse to be sure it's dead. Pay or Die, 1960. It was such a scary movie. They put this guy in his pizza oven! The bad guys put black ink on a girl's underwear while she was still in it. Pretty tough stuff in an era of The Untouchables on TV.

Another show was about how bad guys took over a town in the south. That's The Phenix City Story (1955) and I believe it starred John McIntire who later turned up in the film Cloak & Dagger - starring Dabney Coleman as Jack Flack

As I write this, I get the feeling I wrote it before. What do you think?

The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino (1912)

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