From Those Were the Days:

1922 - Radio station WEAF (now WFAN) began broadcasting from new studios atop the Western Electric Building in New York City. The station would later be named WNBC, then WABC, then.. oh, never mind...

1939 - Lights Out, radio’s “ultimate horror show,” was heard for the last time on NBC Radio. In 1942, Arch Obler brought the show back to life on CBS Radio. The show’s most familiar trademark, guaranteed to put you under the covers on a dark night was, “Lights out, everybody!”, followed by 12 chimes of a clock.
10:24:01 AM    comment []  trackback []  

“For swell tasting snacks…for good, hearty sandwiches…for thrifty, easy, hot dishes…”

Ah, yes…good ol’ Dan Herlihy, extolling the virtues of Velveeta—a cheese-like product manufactured by Kraft Foods, who sponsored The Adventures of The Falcon from 1950-51. I looked at this series back in May of this year, and was inspired to listen to a couple more after Terry Salomonson of Audio Classics Archive mentioned to me that he had received a good response from customers when he released a few shows on CD sometime back.

To briefly recap, The Falcon examines the exploits of Michael Waring (Les Damon), a hard-boiled private eye with an eye for a shapely leg and a head for analytical detail. In the first of two episodes that I listened to, “The Case of the Gangster’s Girl” (3/4/51), a woman named Sue Sanders is threatening to leave her boyfriend, a hood named Murray Ross. Ross works for a big-time gangster named Al Burkett, who’s entrusted Ross with one of his prized operations but is unaware that Ross is skimming off the profits in order to one day strike out on his own. When Burkett does find out, Ross assumes that Sue is the one who tipped him off:

MURRAY: Hello, baby doll…surprised to see me?

SUE: No…should I be?

MURRAY: Heh heh…look out, I’m comin’ in…

SUE: All right… (SFX: walking, door closes, key in door lock) Why are you locking the door?

MURRAY: I’ve just come from Burkett’s…

SUE: Oh…?

MURRAY: …he knows about the finagling…

SUE: H-How’d he find out?

MURRAY: How’d he find out…that’s rich…

SUE: Well, he…he let you go…

MURRAY: Yeah! Yeah, he let me go…says I can still be useful but now he’s gonna keep his eye on me…won’t that be real cozy! (pause) Somebody’s gonna pay for this, baby doll…

SUE: Well, you don’t think that I…

MURRAY: Somebody tipped Burkett…he didn’t have proof, but he knew about the deal…

SUE; Well, if he…didn’t have the proof…

MURRAY: He can always get proof once he was wise…so I had to come across... (another pause, then in a threatening tone) C’mere, baby doll…

Sue is able to talk her way out of this jam by suggesting that one of Burkett’s henchmen, Hilliard, may have squealed. When Hilliard turns up with a bad case of dead, Michael Waring swings into action. Written by Jerome Epstein, “Gangster’s Girl” is an okay entry that benefits from fine performances from the likes of Jan Miner and Everett Sloane.

The second show is a truncated version of a program originally broadcast April 8, 1951 (short because the commercials have been deleted), “The Case of the Carved Ham.” This one’s a notch above the previous entry, and focuses on a gangster named Joe Santos who’s obsessed with a gal named Doris Webster—and is jealous of her relationship with her actor boyfriend, Stewart Van Dine. Santos hires a mug named Bryan King to mess up Stewart’s pretty boy face, but when this situation escalates into murder, once again Michael Waring—and his pal Sergeant Corbett (Ken Lunch)—is called in to investigate. This entry is particularly noteworthy in that it features the late Jackson Beck as Santos, and a performance from radio veteran Mason Adams (“With a name like Smuckers, it’s got to be good…”) as Stewart. Adams is probably best remembered by OTR fans as the titular character of the radio soap opera Pepper Young’s Family.
10:21:55 AM    comment []  trackback []  

“Here’s my hope that we all find our Shangri-La.”

The films of director Frank Capra often stir inside me a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde conflict between cynicism and idealism. For example, I love Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the movie classic with James Stewart as a naive, rookie Senator who goes on to defeat the corrupt businessmen of his state (as well as fellow Senator Claude Rains)—but sometimes it’s difficult for me to watch because the rational realist in me knows that the workings of government presented in the film are sheer fantasy at best. So it’s interesting that my two favorite Capra films are, in a sense, fantasies: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Lost Horizon (1937), the latter of which I rented from Netflix last week.

Based on the best-selling novel by James Hilton, Horizon tells the story of British diplomat (and would-be Foreign Secretary) Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) who, along with his brother George (John Howard) and three other passengers (Thomas Mitchell, Isabel Jewell and Edward Everett Horton), escapes from revolution-torn Baskul on a plane headed for Shanghai. But in this case, Shanghai is a verb, not a city—a pilot has commandeered their plane and crash lands it in the remote mountains of Tibet, whereupon a mysterious Asian stranger (H.B. Warner) escorts them along a series of treacherous mountain paths to Shangri-La, an idyllic Utopia that knows no war, crime, famine, etc., and is completely isolated from the outside world. Angry at first because they believe themselves to be prisoners, our adventurers soon find peace in their new surroundings; in fact, Robert is asked by Shangri-La’s High Lama (Sam Jaffe) to take his place as the city's ruler upon his death.

Longtime Capra scribe Robert Riskin (and, uncredited, Sidney Buchman) made a few changes in bringing Hilton’s novel to the silver screen; for example, Conway has no brother in the book—instead a nonconformist named Mallinson is transformed into Brother George. Riskin also divided in two the character of the Manchu princess, providing both brothers love interests in the form of Sondra (Jane Wyatt, who’s in love with Colman) and Maria (Margo, who begs Howard to take her with him as he is determined to “crash out” of Shangri-La). Jewell’s character, that of tubercular prostitute Gloria Stone, was originally a missionary named Miss Brinkley—and Horton’s character—paleontologist Alexander P. “Lovie” Lovett—was added to provide a little comic relief.

For many years, the 132-minute version of Lost Horizon was available only in a truncated 95-minute form (which was as a result of its being reissued as Lost Horizon of Shangri-La during WWII), even though the original preview was close to three hours long. In 1973, efforts were made by the American Film Institute to restore the movie, which had seen its original nitrate negative deteriorate six years earlier. (There is speculation that the interest in restoring the original came about as a result of a 1973 remake of the film, which was turned into a musical—if you should have the misfortune of coming across this one night while channel-surfing: run fast, run far...I can say no more.) Pooling resources from archives around the world netted all but seven minutes of the original release, so when the UCLA Television and Film Archives finally pieced the movie together they had to use freeze-frame images from the film along with surviving production still photos over the seven-minute gap (the audio track of which has luckily survived). This is the version that usually plays on cable today—I first saw this on VHS during my Blockbuster Video days.

The DVD of Lost Horizon, however, has added some new features: the opening titles from both the 1937 version and WWII reissue, an alternate ending (which differs only from the original in that you see Wyatt’s character beckoning Colman upon his return to Shangri-La), and a couple of sequences containing deleted footage—one being a pivotal conversation between Jewell and Wyatt that, sadly, has no surviving audio track.

Danny Peary, in Guide For the Film Fanatic, is sort of harsh in his review of the film; he feels that the movie has not aged well and cracks, “Who wants to watch people vacation at a spa?” I have to confess, I did chuckle when I read that—but the movie has cast a wonderful spell on me nevertheless; I think this may be Colman’s finest hour on screen, particularly that wonderful moment when, after being conned into leaving Shangri-La by his cabin-fever-afflicted brother, he takes one last longing look back at what he’s leaving behind. The bleeding-heart idealist in me wants to believe that Shangri-La exists, which is why I keep coming back again and again to this timeless, magical classic.
10:13:40 AM    comment []  trackback []