Oct 25, 2019 3 min read

Hey, Comcast, where’s my Bette Davis?

What did you do with my singing Judy Garland and my dancing Fred Astaire and my handsome Gary Cooper? Why have you taken away all those manly men on horseback?

Last weekend, as I always do, I turned on channel 890 to see what old movie was playing on TCM, and instead of some nifty black and white film noir, there was this hateful message:

To watch this program you’ll need to subscribe.

Wait … what???

Turner Classic Movies had always been part of my basic cable package, a reliable bit of relief from the usual noise and nothingness I get when I start flipping through the channels. When I first discovered TCM, the old movies were background chatter when I went about my chores at home, but then I began to pay attention; I found that even when the old, black and white movies were not that great, the people who starred in them were.

There’s chiseled Gary Cooper, of course, and handsomely decent Gregory Peck; Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas have menacing chins; oh, and Marlon Brando in that taxi cab scene. Humphrey Bogart has a way of growing on you.

Greer Garson is so noble and resembles Meryl Streep; Elizabeth Taylor looked best in black and white. Ingrid Bergman was so beautiful in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” it almost hurt to look at her. While watching, I thought about cutting my hair short.

These were the people who filled my rainy weekends and kept me company. True, not all the old movies were worth watching all the way through. Productions were primitive, with misogynistic scripts and characters too often based on offensive racial stereotypes. (In recent months, TCM hosts had appropriately begun to acknowledge these wrongs in their introductions.)

But most afternoons I could turn to the channel and enjoy bits of a silly musical, or see a dusty old western. Or marvel at Esther Williams in those ridiculous swimming movies. And now that’s gone.

This month, Comcast moved TCM into a higher, more expensive subscription tier filled mostly with premium sports. It reeks of a money grab, and I’m not buying.

One rainy day, I went looking for something else to watch, and landed on one of those made-for-TV Christmas movies – the ones where the heroine is a big-city gal who returns to her small, cozy hometown to manage the sale of the bakery that had been run by her beloved grandmother, who raised her when her parents died. She hires a tool belt-wearing handyman and finds herself falling for him. But, oh, no! It’s slipped her mind that she has a skinny, suit-wearing fiancé back in the big city and he’s on his way to fetch her! Before it’s all said and done, there will be a tree lighting in the town square, where rich fiancé will concede romantic defeat to the handyman and the heroine will decide to swap her Armani suits for frilly aprons and become the town’s cupcake vendor.

And let me tell you, cute as he is, that handyman is no William Holden. And that rich fiancé is no Cary Grant. I miss my old movies.

Just now, I clicked on channel 890 to see what I’m missing. The on-screen information indicates they’re playing a movie from 1942 called “Mexican Spitfire at Sea,” starring ZaSu Pitts. I’m sure it is a terrible film, but more watchable than anything else that’s on. If only I could tune in to see.