"LIFE'S main business was with our outer reality, with those great events and dominant personalities that shaped our history. Movies--the ones we remember--speak to, and from, an inner reality. They come at us alone in a crowd, whispering to us about what we long to feel or to be."

So begins the three-hour TV production Life Goes to the Movies, based on the bestselling picture book, which will be presented at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 31, on NBC. TIME Contributor and Cinema Critic Richard Schickel has appropriately been cast as writer and coproducer of the show; he was LIFE'S cinema critic and resident film historian. Unlike some film anthologies, L.G.T.T.M. does not spend all its time gazing in a rearview mirror. "From the beginning," says Schickel, "we set out to accomplish much more than an exercise in nostalgia. Our aim was the same as LIFE'S--to reflect actuality as well as art, to show both the inner and the outer realities." That reflection is caught in every segment of the show: newsreels are continually interspersed with cuts from memorable films. Often, as when World War II melodramas are blended with the real thing, the sequences are both striking and moving. Sometimes the results are sheer hilarity. "Throughout the '30s," the narration says, "America's biggest factories were its dream factories." Factual glimpses of that decade are juxtaposed with scene after scene of little Shirley Temple, ever an orphan, lisping and dancing her way into the audience's heart. The moody films of the '40s follow a series of loners down a series of mean streets--an echo of postwar confusion and anxiety. A comic and ultimately sorrowful section is devoted to Marilyn Monroe, following her from screen tests to her last incomplete film, tracing her biography in rare shots with Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio. There is also a haunting, overproduced birthday party for John F. Kennedy, where the tardy star is introduced as "the late Marilyn Monroe." Marilyn was the waif Shirley Temple pretended to be--except that her desperation, as L.G.T.T.M. shows, was all too real. That kind of realism is also shown in candid scenes of the "Hollywood Ten"--the first men to be blacklisted for leftist sympathies. A happier, realistic segment shows the early Academy Awards, presided over by a brash young newcomer named Bob Hope. Perhaps the show's most comic sequences are the ones that started out to be serious--a parade of insect mutants from post-A-bomb sci-fi epics, Elizabeth Taylor served up like a high-priced entree in Cleopatra, a series of youthquake teen films (Teen Age Cave Man is a typical example) to lure the young back into the moviehouses.

Nor are contemporary stars ignored: Jack Nicholson's unforgettable confrontation with the waitress in Five Easy Pieces is longer than the burning-of-Atlanta clip from Gone With the Wind.

The narrators cover almost as much history as the films they elucidate. Shirley MacLaine opens the show and shares the narration with Henry Fonda--a 40-year man in Hollywood--and Liza Minnelli. Schickel's script concludes with a memorable valediction: "LIFE --the magazine--[suspended] publishing in 1972. Life--as we live it --goes on. So do the movies."

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