In addition to being the mastermind behind radio’s Screen Directors’ Playhouse, Don Sharpe was an agent whose specialty was packaging radio series for Hollywood stars—with a roster that included Lucille Ball (My Favorite Husband), Jeff Chandler (The Adventures of Michael Shayne) and Lloyd Nolan (Results, Inc.). By taking over the reins as producer of Dangerous Assignment—an espionage drama that debuted over NBC Radio July 9, 1949—Sharpe added actor Brian Donlevy to his stable of stars as well.

“Yeah, danger is my assignment,” Donlevy would intone in the program’s opening each week, “I get sent to a lot of places I can’t even pronounce. They all spell the same thing, though—trouble.” Brian played private eye Steve Mitchell, a globetrotting troubleshooter who served as an independent contractor for an unidentified federal agency—assigned to each investigative mission by a similarity unnamed commissioner (played by Herb Butterfield). Mitchell’s job, according to Jim Cox in Radio Crime Fighters, was to “prevent or put out fires in foreign fields.”

Dangerous Assignment is a good example of the kind of series introduced in radio’s later years that showcased top Hollywood stars in an effort to woo back an audience lured away by television’s siren song; Donlevy—who’s best-remembered for playing the title role in the classic 1940 comedy The Great McGinty and screen heavies in movies like Beau Geste and Destry Rides Again (both 1939)—certainly gave it the old college try. But Assignment suffered from a suffocating sameness week after week; its plots never quite managing to be compelling enough to develop a loyally faithful audience. The show also sounded similar to The Man Called X (1944-52), another spy series starring Herbert Marshall. (Perhaps if Donlevy had cultivated a British accent or a consonant code name, he’d have been in like Flynn.)

Dangerous Assignment began as a summer series in 1949, and became a permanent part of NBC’s schedule beginning February 6, 1950 and ending February 23, 1953. Several sources, including Cox, report that the series also enjoyed a brief run on CBS as a quarter-hour show from February 25-July 8, 1953. If this is correct—and I have little reason to doubt it isn’t—then the episode I listened to at work last night (“Assignment in the Islands”) shouldn’t be dated April 29, 1953, since its running time is 25 minutes and it’s definitely of NBC origin. In this entry, Mitchell investigates sabotage of some naval bases in the Pacific, and soon runs afoul of a former Nazi naval officer who’s in the area. The episode is no great shakes, to be sure, but the cast—which includes Ben Wright, Martha Wentworth, Roy Irwin, Paul Frees and Betty Lou Gerson—certainly makes it worth a listen. Donlevy is not too shabby on radio, either, though his narration is a bit rushed—he reads it as if he were double-parked or something.

“I enjoyed my two years at Annapolis and my adventures during World War I, but they were topped by my roles in Dangerous Assignment on both radio and television,” the actor was once quoted as saying, in what surely must be one of the most truth-stretching statements made with regards to Radio’s Golden Age. I mean, here’s a guy who joined the U.S. Army at 16 to hunt down Pancho Villa and later served as a pilot with the Lafayette Escadrille—and reading a radio script was more rewarding? (“Hey, Brian…tell ‘em about the time you got that nasty paper cut…”) It’s not like Donlevy had a sponsor to suck up to—the show was sustained for most of its radio run, with brief periods of sponsorship by Ford and General Mills. But as the actor mentioned, Dangerous Assignment did transplant briefly to television in 1952-53, with Donlevy reprising his radio role as Steve Mitchell—only this time he had shed the private eye trappings and was working as a full-fledged undercover U.S. government agent (series regular Butterfield also made the jump to the tube).

Dangerous Assignment had one last gasp in 1953-54, as an Australian version of the series was briefly syndicated to U.S. stations; I listened to an episode (“Road to Mandalay”) of the Aussie series last night—and let’s just say that Lloyd Burrell isn’t going to make anyone forget Donlevy anytime soon. I think that because I’ve enjoyed Brian’s performances in flicks like The Glass Key (1942) and The Big Combo (1955) it’s hard for me to really dislike Dangerous Assignment—and since approximately 106 episodes of the series have survived for today’s listeners, I think you’ll enjoy it, too.
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