article from The Commercial Appeal Playbook, July 31, 1992
by Jimmie Covington

21st memphis Film Festival to salute vintage TV, movies

     Actor James Drury portrayed one of Elvis Presley's older brothers in Elvis's first movie in 1956. A year later, when singing idol Pat Boone made his first film, Drury was in the cast - playing Boone's older brother.
     And when Frankie Thomas Jr. was a young actor, network television was "live from New York" on Saturday night and every other night of the week.
     Drury gained his biggest fame as star of The Virginian, third-longest-running western on network television. Thomas went "where no one has gone before" as the star of live television's Tom Corbett, Space Cadet long before Capt. James T. Kirk and Luke Skywalker were specks on the celestial horizon.
     Drury and Thomas are among nine actors and former actors scheduled to headline the Memphis Film Festival, which kicks off its annual four-day celebration of vintage movies and TV shows Wednesday morning at the Memphis Airport Hotel (formerly Hilton Inn) at 2240 Democrat.
     The festival, marking its 21st year, is a fond look backward at Hollywood films from the 1930s into the 1970s and from television's golden era. It also focuses on the people who made the films both in front of and behind the cameras.
      From 1,500 to 2,000 people from the local area and across the nation are expected to attend the festival before it winds up with a Saturday night banquet.
      People come from New York, California and most of the states in between to view the old films once again, listen to daily panel discussions by the actors, get autographs, and buy or trade films, cassette tapes, movie posters lobby cards and other memorabilia.
      The festival will have five viewing rooms - four featuring 16-millimeter films, including the kinescopes of old TV programs, and a video room. In all, 170 movies and television programs and five complete movie serials will be shown. The screenings will start at midmorning and run until late in the evening."
      Besides Drury and Thomas, the star guest list this year includes:
          Jan Merlin, actor, writer and Thomas's co-star on Tom Corbett.
          Ed Kemmer, star of another pioneering TV space series, Space Patrol.
          Lucille Lund, who appeared in the horror classic The Black Cat with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
          Jane Adams, western and serial heroine of the 1940s and 1950s.
          Keith Larsen, who starred in the 1950s television show Northwest Passage, which co-starred Buddy Ebsen. The show currently is running on Saturday mornings on the TNT cable network. Larsen also starred in other series and movies.
          John Pickard, charactor actor who starred in the syndicated television series Boots and Saddles and has a long list screen credits.
          Lash LaRue, an annual festival favorite and a true survivor among the Hollywood cowboys of yesteryear. LaRue is one of only six living actors among the 60 or so who starred in B western series during the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. And he alone is still living among the five guest stars at the first Memphis festival in 1972. Others at that festival, which dealt almost exclusively with westerns, were Don 'Red' Barry, Max Terhune, Russell Hayden and Sunset Carson.
     

       
         James Drury                       Frankie Thomas (center)
                                                   & Jan Merlin (left)

      This will be the first trip for both Drury and Thomas, they said in telephone interviews.
      Drury, 58, recalled that he and several other actors under contract to 20th Century Fox studio in the mid-1950s heard that their next film, Love Me Tender, would star Elvis Presley. Concentrating on their film work, they had not kept up with what was happening on the nation's music scene.
      "We said, 'Elvis who? Who is it?' We had never heard of him," Drury said from his home in the Houston, Texas, area. He was already extremely popular in music but we didn't know that.
      "Of course, after Love Me Tender, everything just exploded for the guy. When he came on the set, he was extremely easy to work with. We all were just so impressed with what a nice human being he was."
      Drury's first screen appearance was a two-word line in the near-classic Blackboard Jungle (1955). He spoke one sentence as a choreographer in Love Me or Leave Me (1956), starring James Cagney and Doris Day.
      With Love Me Tender and other films, including Bernardine (1957), Pat Boone's initial film, the parts got bigger.
      The Virginian, a 90-minute TV western that was the apex of Drury's career, aired from 1962 to 1971, including the final year under the revised title The Men from Shiloh. It ranks behind only Gunsmoke (20 years) and Bonanza (14 years) in first-run staying power, and is now a weekend staple in reruns on cable's Family Channel.
      Drury spent much of the 1970s working on the stage in regional and dinner theater productions, returning to film only briefly for the 13-episode Firehouse in 1974.
      He's currently a principal in several business enterprises and for several years has been national spokesman for associations and companies.
      About two years ago Drury decided to seek to return to films and has retained a new agent to help him pursue "challenging contemporary things that are difficult for me.... I think it is just a matter of time before I find a way to do some more substantial films."
       In the years after Tom Corbett went off the air in the mid-1950s, Thomas has become one of the nation's leading teachers of bridge. He also has written books about bridge and a series of Sherlock Holmes novels.
       He declined to give his age, but he was playing teenagers in the late 1930s, starring in the serial Tim Tyler's Luck and as Bonita Granville's sidekick in a series of Nancy Drew movies. He also had a role in Boys' Town (1938) with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney.
       Thomas, whose parents were performers, also acted on Broadway in the 1930s and had radio experience. His work in films and radio gave him good training for the live telecasts of Tom Corbett, which ran three days a week plus a Saturday show that was a condensed version of the weekly stories.
       The show, which also had radio, newspaper comics, comic book and regular book versions, was more popular in its heyday than Star Trek in its initial television run. Tom Corbett and Space Patrol, plus perhaps a couple of other shows, formed a link between Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers of an earlier era and Star Trek and Star Wars of recent times.
       Disc jockey Alex Ward will present his "Pig 'n' Whistle" rock and roll show at the Saturday night banquet. Banquet tickets are $25 per person.