In an effort to divert attention from the fact that they're raising our rates again, Comcast, our cable company (which we often refer to as the "Confederation of Weasels" around our house), decided to placate us by adding a few extra channels. We only get one of the new ones since we don't have the expanded package--the Hallmark Channel (formerly known as Odyssey).

Now, although I loathe Comcast and everything they stand for, I was pretty juiced about getting Hallmark because they were the only cable channel (that I know of, anyway) showcasing the old Gunsmoke reruns (the half-hour series from 1955-61, retitled Marshal Dillon) and I was anxious to watch them. (TV Land showed a few ages ago on Saturday afternoons so I've seen one or two of them, but they would always show the same ones over and over again.) I go to the Hallmark Channel website to find out when the next Marshal Dillon will be shown, and apparently they scheduled the last rerun yesterday (January 3). Next Saturday they'll be showcasing endless repeats of Hogan's Heroes and The Beverly Hillbillies.

As I avail myself of a second helping of sour grapes, I placate myself by saying "Well, they're not as good at the radio show broadcasts anyway." It doesn't help much. I can still hear the cosmic forces having a really good chortle at my expense.
7:36:29 PM    comment []  trackback []  

”Ringing Murray Hill Four-Oh-Oh-Nine-Eight…”

Day 3 of “Twenty Days Well-Calculated to Keep You in Suspense.”

Sorry, Wrong Number

Last night I revisited what is probably the most famous of all of Suspense’s productions with the February 24, 1944 broadcast of “Sorry, Wrong Number.” Lucille Fletcher's heart-pounding play tells the story of Mrs. Elbert Stevenson, an invalid who mistakenly overhears a telephone conversation between two men plotting to murder a bedridden woman. She frantically tries to get both the telephone operator and the police to do something to prevent it from happening (at 11:15pm), but the scant details with which she provides them they dismiss her as an elderly crank. Agnes Moorehead gives a tour-de-force performance of absolute hysteria in the part; a role that most deservedly earned her the title “The First Lady of Suspense.”

When the play was first broadcast on May 25, 1943, the actor playing the role of the “killer” committed a gaffe and missed a crucial cue, leaving the play’s outcome up in the air to many in the listening audience. Nearly three months later, the show’s producer rectified the mistake with an encore performance on August 21, 1943. “Sorry, Wrong Number” would eventually be presented a total of eight times, with Agnes Moorehead stepping up to the mike for each and every one of them. She used the same script for each performance because she superstitiously believed it to be a good-luck charm; eventually the script became torn, tattered and heavily marked from overuse but since Agnes had most of the dialogue memorized by that time it didn’t seem to matter.

Orson Welles remarked that “Sorry, Wrong Number” was “the greatest single radio script ever written”—a sentiment that I can’t quite share; I also strongly disagree with OTR author John Dunning’s assertion that the production is “rather boring.” I first heard Fletcher’s play over KMOX in St. Louis (back when AM radios could really pick up distant stations, since we lived in West Virginia) in the late 70s and a year later, was delighted to find that the script had been included in our textbook for my high school English class. Listening to it late at night—with the lights out, of course—it still gives me goose pimples. Moorehead was simply terrific in this broadcast, and supporting players Cathy Lewis, John McIntire and Hans Conried were equally top-notch.

“Sorry, Wrong Number” was later brought to the silver screen in a fleshed-out feature film by Paramount in 1948. If you look at it as a completely different take on the radio play, it’s not too bad—although I think they made a major mistake in passing up Moorehead for Barbara Stanwyck for the Mrs. Stevenson role. I find it a little hard to buy that the ball-busting dame from films like Double Indemnity and The File on Thelma Jordon could ever be a helpless, bedridden invalid. (Stanwyck must have done something right, however, she earned an Oscar nod for her performance in the film.)

Lucille Fletcher was a fertile contributor to Suspense; penning classics like “The Hitch-Hiker,” “The Diary of Saphronia Winters” (also with Moorehead), and “Fugue in C-Minor.” But “Sorry, Wrong Number” remains her most famous work; so influential, in fact, that it provided material for some of the funniest shows in Radio’s Golden Age—for example, a October 17, 1948 Jack Benny Program (with Barbara Stanwyck as guest) in which Jack intercepts a conversation via crossed wires and hears his sponsor planning to cancel his contract. A Burns and Allen broadcast from March 13. 1947 sends up the same material, while adding a parody of The Adventures of the Thin Man to boot.

The Dark Tower

Orson Welles stars in this May 4, 1944 broadcast as the great stage actor Damon Wellington, whose newest play is being threatened with the loss of his leading lady—his sister Jessica (Jeanette Nolan)—through the oily machinations of her Svengali-like husband, Stanley Vance (Hans Conried). Damon uses his acting talents to “remove” Stanley for the sake of both his sister and the play. Director-producer William Spier adapted Alexander Woolcott and George S. Kaufman’s stage play of the same name for this Suspense; a feature film version of The Dark Tower also premiered that same year.

I had never heard “The Dark Tower” until last night and while I enjoyed it, I’m not certain I would have included it in this “Best of” Collection. (I think two of Welles’ earlier Suspense efforts, “The Marvelous Barastro” and “Lazarus Walks” are much superior productions.) That tiny quibble aside, it’s definitely worth listening to for Welles and Welles alone; his delicious burlesque of his idol, John Barrymore, is a truly inspired performance. Consummate radio pros Conried, Nolan, John McIntire (Nolan’s husband), and Verna Felton all provide Welles good support.

Orson also gets the opportunity to poke a little tongue-in-cheek fun at his own image with this amusing line: “There’s a little thing I like in the second act, too…Jessica asks me why I don’t stop drinking and I say ‘What? Would you have me subsist entirely on food and reach the gargantuan proportions of an Orson Welles?’ That ought to needle the boy wonder.” I think one of Welles’ most endearing qualities was his ability to laugh at himself, as anyone who’s ever heard his guest appearances on The Jack Benny Program or the famous “Les Miserables” skit on Fred Allen’s show will attest.
11:22:29 AM    comment []  trackback []  

”…the bulkiest, balkiest, smartest, most unpredictable detective in the world…”

One of the most popular fictional detectives in the 20th Century was Rex Stout’s sleuthing creation Nero Wolfe, who first appeared in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post in 1934. Wolfe was an eccentric bon vivant whose fondness for both orchids and fine food often necessitated his using his deductive powers to support the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. He rarely left his apartment (except in dire emergencies), leaving the legwork to his assistant, Archie Goodwin—a hard-boiled, wisecracking ladies’ man who had an eye for a shapely leg. (Check out this interesting website for some more detailed background on the Holmesian sleuth “who rates the knife and fork as the greatest tools ever invented by man.”)

The Wolfe character made his debut on the silver screen in 1936’s Meet Nero Wolfe, but he didn’t achieve prominence on radio until 1943, with the “gargantuan gourmet” being played by J.B. Williams over a New England network. The detective then went national over NBC Radio beginning July 5, 1943 with Santos Ortega in the role of Nero (later replaced by Luis Van Rooten) and John Gibson as Archie; this series lasted about a year, and then another version cropped up on Mutual in 1946 with Francis X. Bushman (playing Nero) and Elliott Lewis (as Archie). Wolfe’s final incarnation was played by rotund character actor Sydney Greenstreet (The Maltese Falcon, The Mask of Dimitrios) in a show that ran on NBC from October 20, 1950 to April 27, 1951.

I listened to a couple of episodes of The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe last night in-between Suspense shows and I was genuinely pleased with the results. It’s a shame the program didn’t last longer than it did; Greenstreet made the perfect Nero Wolfe, and both episodes are well-scripted with a nice mix of humor and mystery. The first of the two, “The Case of the Dear Dead Lady” (11/3/50), contains a humorous exchange between Wolfe and his minion Archie Goodwin (Herb Ellis), who tries to drive home to his boss the idea that he needs to generate some much-needed cash after the detective places a large grocery order:

NERO: You seemed to be worried…

ARCHIE: Oh, I am…this means naturally that I’m supposed to handle Hausbrecker’s delivery boy when…and if he shows…

NERO: I had thought of leaving that simple matter to you…

ARCHIE: And what about the simple matter of the money?

NERO: Money?

ARCHIE: I hate to bring up a vulgar subject, but where’s it coming from?

NERO: Oh, of course…you’re right, Archie, I should have said…

ARCHIE: Said what?

NERO: Charge it.

ARCHIE: Boss, look…you don’t realize, I know…but we’re into that truffle broker for 500 odd bucks and change…

NERO: All right, all right…we’ll give him a check…

ARCHIE: Okay…okay, I will give him a check…and I hope they’ll let you keep the orchids in your cell…

NERO: You’re a wit, Archie…

ARCHIE: Mm hmm…you know, I’m on the bank’s mailing list…we got a notice this morning…

NERO: You don’t mean…

ARCHIE: Oh, but I do…

NERO: Again?

ARCHIE: Yeah, you just can’t take money out of an account, boss…sometimes you gotta put some in…

The two men are visited by a religious fanatic, Ted Olifant, who asks Nero to save the life of the woman with which he’s fallen in love (her another suitor, a bruiser named Jack Hunter, has threatened in a fit of jealousy to kill her). Archie pays a visit to the woman—and stumbles over her corpse in the process. In the second episode, “The Case of the Vanishing Shells” (2/2/51), an actress contacts Nero and Archie when she’s afraid to leave her hotel room after receiving a series of threatening notes. Gerald Mohr (a.k.a. Philip Marlowe) essays the Archie Goodwin role in this broadcast, and therein lies the interesting puzzle behind The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe: in its brief season on the air, the program went through five Goodwins: Wally Maher, Lamont Johnson, Ellis, Mohr, and Harry Bartell. (I guess good help is hard to find after all.) Of the quintet of Archies, I’d give Ellis the edge—although I think the actor who played the role best was Elliott Lewis from the 1946 series.
10:08:07 AM    comment []  trackback []  

On this date in the Golden Age of Radio

From Those Were the Days:

1928 - NBC radio debuted one of radio’s first variety shows. The Dodge Victory Hour starred Will Rogers, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra and singer Al Jolson. The cost to produce this one show was $67,600.

1932 - NBC Red presented The Carnation Contented Hour. The show continued on network radio for 19 years as a showcase for top singers and musicians. Why The Carnation Contented Hour? Because Carnation evaporated milk comes only from contented cows, of course.

1935 - Bob Hope was first heard on network radio as part of The Intimate Revue with Jane Froman, James Melton and the Al Goodman Orchestra.
8:00:50 AM    comment []  trackback []