Afternoon Film Festival

Afternoon Film Festival
1956 Trade Advertisement for ABC's Afternoon Film Festival.
Genre	Film Anthology
Presented by	Allyn Edwards (1956); Donald Woods (1956-57)
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
Production
Location(s)	ABC (American Broadcasting Company) studios (New York City)
Running time	2 hours (1956); 90 minutes (1956-57)
Release
Original network	American Broadcasting Company
Original release	January 16, 1956 – August 2, 1957

Afternoon Film Festival was a series of British theatrical feature-films aired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) television network from January 1956 to the summer of 1957 each weekday from 3:00 to 5:00 pm (EST). This anthology was the first (and probably the only) instance of a major over-the-air (non-cable) American television network broadcasting a package of theatrical movies as part of its Monday-through-Friday daytime television programming. Consisting mostly of films from the 1940s and early 1950s, Afternoon Film Festival was actually an offshoot from ABC's prime-time movie series Famous Film Festival, which began in the fall of 1955 on Sunday evenings and featured a package of 35 British titles leased from J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors in England at a cost of $45,700 each.

ABC signed Allyn Edwards—and later, the veteran actor Donald Woods—to host each Afternoon feature, and on Monday, January 16, 1956, the anthology premiered with Alfred Hitchcock's espionage thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938). The next afternoon, the internationally successful war drama The Cruel Sea (1953) was telecast. In the case of these two classics, as with the rest of the series, this would be the first time these films were ever aired on American television.

Unfortunately, the series suffered from several handicaps that were never overcome. One of ABC's competitors, for example, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), was featuring its Matinee Theater in the same daily time slot as Festival. This was a timely and interesting series of live one-hour television dramas, often highlighting controversial domestic themes, geared to divert housewives from their daily chores.Matinee Theater had one other advantage—NBC was broadcasting it in color (a relative novelty at the time), whereas ABC's series of old films were all aired in black-and-white, including those that had originally been shot and exhibited theatrically in color. (In fact, NBC's 1956 presentation of Olivier's Richard III notwithstanding, color films were not broadcast in color on network TV until the 1961-62 season.)