Saturday Night at the Movies

Saturday Night at the Movies was a weekly television series on TVOntario, the public educational television network in Ontario, Canada. The series presented classic movies, followed by interviews and feature segments with directors, actors and other people involved in making the films presented. The show was initially formatted in this way due to requirements that all programming shown on TVO (including dramatic programming) needed to contain educational elements, which was usually accomplished by including interviews and analysis of the programming. Nevertheless, even after these requirements were dropped, the format was maintained; all told, the series presented almost 1,500 films and over 1,000 interviews.

First aired on March 30, 1974, the program was originally hosted by Elwy Yost. The first film shown was Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly. During Yost's 25-year tenure as host, he showed a wide variety of foreign films, but tended to concentrate on Hollywood-produced films from the 1930s through the 1950s, slowly expanding into also showing films from the 1960s and 1970s as the series progressed.

In the late 1990s, the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris appointed Isabel Bassett as chair of TVOntario, with a mandate to refocus the network's broadcast schedule more clearly on education. Although there was some concern that the network would lose Saturday Night at the Movies, its highest-rated program, Bassett instead negotiated an agreement with York University to include the series in its film studies curriculum.

Yost retired as host of the series in 1999. The last film he presented was, atypically, a recent Hollywood blockbuster: Speed was personally chosen by Yost to conclude his run as host, as it was written by his son, screenwriter Graham Yost.

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