Saturday, November 27, 2021

Radio Recap: The Chase

The Chase was an NBC radio dramatic series which was originally broadcast for about one year from April 1952 to June 1953. The series was produced by Lawrence Klee, who also wrote most of the episodes.

My local radio station only broadcast one episode of The Chase as part of their repeating block of old-time radio shows. That lone episode was the debut program, "The Big Cat." I was intrigued by the series because the episode was an unusual type of thriller. The plot concerns a man who learns a big cat has escaped from the zoo. He finds inspiration in the cat's escape to freedom and decides to make a change in his own life by becoming bolder and brasher than before.

The intro to the series was as follows:

In the animal world, there is the hunter and the hunted; hound and fox, hawk and sparrow, chicken and worm. We, in the top-most species, have also joined the hunt. But who is to judge precisely which of us are hounds or foxes as we enter... The Chase!

I only recently went through and listened to all of the episodes of The Chase which I hadn't heard. It had been a low-priority for me because when I had tried before, I simply became bored. I complained before in my recap of cloak and Dagger that I find NBC radio a little tiresome because they repeated so many musical cues and didn't do much with sound effects. They also had a knack for bringing in voice actors who grate on my nerves. This is, after all, the network who produced Archie Andrews (for my money the most irritating program in old-time radio). And all of this is true about The Chase as well.

But it's difficult to talk about what The Chase was because, although nominally a thriller series, it lacked an identity. All episodes were centered around the loose idea of a "chase." In fact, most episodes contain a line in the script where someone says "the chase." But the show is hard to pin down. It isn't like Escape, Suspense or even Romance whose bill of fare was more-or-less explained in the series title. The Chase involves a chase of some kind. It could be a thriller, or a light comedy. This is not helped by the series' second introduction which seems to have been used at the opening of more episodes than the original:

There is always the hunter and the hunted; the pursuer and the pursued. It may be the voice of authority or a race against death and destruction, the most relentless of the hunters! There are times when laughter is heard as counterpoint and moments where sheer terror is the theme! ...But always, there is THE CHASE!

The line which bogs down this wordy intro is "there are times when laughter is heard as counterpoint." Against tense music trying to hype your audience on the adventure you're about to present, why would you pause to say, "oh, if you don't like that there's humour too." In trying to demonstrate how flexible their series is, the showrunners instead weaken the already shoddy-concept.

According to the Digital Deli, The Chase started out as a proposed television program but wound up on radio instead. Perhaps Lawrence Klee really wanted to get out of radio (a dying medium then) and was desperate to show his versatility via The Chase. But it's hard to imagine radio fans back in '52-53 had much interest in what he produced.

For instance, one week the show presented a light romantic comedy called "Cathy Sutter Meets James Carter" (the episode titles are pretty utilitarian). Suppose you listened to that episode by accident - you didn't know what The Chase was about and were pleasantly surprised by the romantic comedy you happened upon. So you tuned in next week, which was "Murderer Row," the story of a man who murdered his wives for their money. There is nothing in any episode of The Chase that prepares the listener for what the episode will contain or what to expect next week, nothing outside that awkward intro. And if you were a fan of the adventure and thriller episodes, the comedic and romantic episodes would probably leave you cold.

I suppose it's also worth noting that The Chase recycled a few scripts here and there; episodes included "Special Delivery" and "Long Distance" (both from Radio City Playhouse), "No Contact" (from Dimension X) and the two frequently-retold stories, "The Most Dangerous Game" and "The Creeper" (I wrote about adaptations of "The Creeper" here).

For all that, the series is not all bad. There's an interesting crime drama called "The Apprentice" (not written by Klee; it might have been recycled from another program). And Nelson Olmsted starred in an interesting supernatural drama, "Professor Calvin and the Voice" (unfortunately it has a very disappointing climax).

If you haven't listened to The Chase I don't think you're missing much; but if you, like me, have already heard the best, you might want to try the rest.

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