Old-Time Radio Retrieved, Part 3: Suspense

I won't be able to talk about the January 10, 1946 Suspense episode "This Was a Hero" without discussing the episode's twist, so be warned - spoilers follow.

"This Was a Hero" is told from the perspective of a police officer portrayed by Phillip Terry. As it opens, the officer is informing a woman that her husband has been killed - and he was the officer who killed him. The dead man was a veteran and his death raises questions the wife can't put away, so the officer agrees to delve further to learn why her husband wound up dead.

So now, the twist - it's our old friend the unreliable narrator! I'm not one to fall for this technique, buddy - I've listened to so many Inner Sanctum Mysteries where the big twist is the protagonist was the killer all along and didn't know it. There are always telltale signs and an obvious one is when the investigator talks to a witness, then the witness turns up dead.

Why I want to discuss this twist is because the villain of the story turns out to be the central character - the police officer. Given the worship of the police in the USA, it's rare to find a story like this. Usually if there's a bad cop such fiction, the story is told from the perspective of the good cop who stops him, but that doesn't happen here. The show doesn't dance around the fact that this man whom the media dub a "hero cop" is actually a murderer abusing the power granted to him. And that is, unfortunately, bound to be an eternal truth about policing in the USA - because so much latitude is granted to authorities to enable them to do their jobs but so little is done to dissuade them from abusing the trust placed in them. Heck, just this weekend the USA saw major protests after yet another horrific crime perpetuated by the police was revealed to the public.

For those reasons this episode hits a nerve that other unreliable narrator tales don't. It leaves unsettling questions about why the policeman's account is recounted by the media as fact, despite the dead man being an unlikely criminal. It's possible that this story hits harder today than it did in '46.

You can find "This Was a Hero" here!

Old-Time Radio Retrieved, Part 2: Quiet, Please

I've written many times of my admiration for Wyllis Cooper's program Quiet, Please. When I first heard an episode I was astounded; how had I been an OTR fan for so long and not known of this series? Although most of the show is still available there remain tantalizing gaps in the series.

The "missing" episode I'm looking at is "Meeting at Ticonderoga" from March 15, 1948.

It's important to recall that Quiet, Please wasn't built from the same material as Inner Sanctum Mysteries, the Mysterious Traveler or even Cooper's earlier show Lights Out. Quiet, Please might best be described as a dark fantasy program. Not every episode is meant to be frightening; several are humourous; others are melancholic journeys into isolation. But always, there is Ernest Chappell, "the man who spoke to you."

This time, Chappell narrates but he isn't the lead character. The lead role belongs to a Scotsman who offers sanctuary to a killer, then learns the victim was his own cousin. Although it involves the supernatural, it isn't a scary program. It feels like a tale plucked right out of Sir Walter Scott, which might be what Cooper was trying to achieve. I won't call it a great episode of Quiet, Please but the Scottish accents make it unique and the atmosphere which Cooper creates is as tangible as anything he wrote.

You can find "Meeting at Ticonderoga" here!

Tomorrow: My hero?

Old-Time Radio Retrieved, Part 1: Inner Sanctum Mysteries

I have been an old-time radio fan since around the early 1990s but it was only around 1998 when I first got on the internet that I began to understand just how vast the hobby was - and what the limits were. There are simply many, many shows without even a single surviving episode and few indeed are the programs who have a complete run of episodes still available.

Certainly missing programs turn up from time to time but my interests aren't that broad. For instance, Suspense is one of my favourite old-time radio programs and has been since I began to be an OTR fan. And how many recovered episodes of Suspense have turned up in the last 25 years?

So... about that. Recently I noticed collector Jerry Haendiges was posting rare programs from his collection online. He was posting a lot. He had "missing" episodes from many popular OTR shows, some of them of major historical significance, others merely fascinating curios.

Among them I found three episodes from my favourite series. I'm going to look at those three episodes here over the next 3 days. After all, how often do I have something "new" to say about these programs?

We'll begin with Inner Sanctum Mysteries' October 19, 1941 episode "Hell Is Where You Find It," starring Burgess Meredith. I had it in my mind that the Lipton Tea era was the point where Hollywood really came calling on the old creaking door, but here's an episode to prove me wrong - Meredith was considered a major up-and-coming actor at the time - he'd already starred in Of Mice and Men, probably the biggest film he earned starring credit for. And here he is on the Inner Sanctum!

In "Hell Is Where You Find It," Meredith portrays a wealthy cad who toys with women's affections, not caring if they kill themselves. One day he meets a fascinating "prince" who encourages his caddish behaviour and steers him towards murder. Could this be the prince of... Hell?

If you're a typical internet Inner Sanctum naysayer then you'll assume the Devil is not a character in this show and that there'll be a cop-out ending. In that case, you'd better listen... you might be surprised.

You can find "Hell Is Where You Find It" here!

Tomorrow: A folktale.

"Outstanding." Avatar: The Way of Water review

I have seen director James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water and I have many thoughts to share - spoilers below the poster.

I am not one of those people too proud to admit they liked the 2009 film Avatar. There have been plenty of smarmy "no one liked that movie, lol, why are they making a sequel?" takes on the internet over the intervening years but I've always liked the movie. I watched it 3 times in the cinema and waited for the limited edition collector's DVD to own (I watch it at least once per year). So yeah, I'm an Avatar fan.

Yet even I wasn't so sure about the sequel and on that score, I did understand where all those clickbait articles were coming from. The 2009 film was just that - one film. Is it possible to turn it into a franchise? Or will the sequels simply retell the same basic story over and over again?

I avoided seeing trailers or reading articles about the sequel, I wanted to give it a chance but not to have any particular expectations. Still, over the years I did wonder what the sequel would do. The best idea I had was that -- as the film is really about the effects of colonialism upon indigenous people and the environment and humans are the primary antagonist - what if the humans tried to divide the Na'vi loyalties, finding tribes who resented other tribes, making alliances with them and thereby pit the tribes against each other.

Well, that didn't happen. The film brings back Stephen Lang as Colonel Quaritch, the villain of the original film. Having died, he's returned via the Avatar process, existing now as a human/Na'vi hybrid with most of the original Quaritch's memories. He has a whole squad of Avatars like himself but they're just mooks and are not to be taken seriously.

Plenty of characters from the original return, even most of those who died. Heck, I think Michelle Rodriguez and Wes Studi were the only major performers not to return - although considering how high CCH Pounder and Giovanni Ribisi were listed in the cast I'm a bit disappointed that they only turned up for very brief cameos.

Because Ribisi's character survived the first film I assumed he'd return in the sequels as the evil corporate guy. Instead, his place is basically taken by an extremely obnoxious Aussie played by Brendan Cowell. Where Ribisi was weaselly and spineless, Cowell's character is so reprehensible that I did hope his character would meet a gruesome fate. I was not disappointed on that front.

The movie doesn't spend time reminding the audience what happened in Avatar. You're simply dropped in the story and left to either recall how the world works or to pay attention and see it unfold. There are many, many call-backs, especially from Quaritch (who is, after all, a clone). In fact, Quaritch plays something of a shadow self to Jake Sully's journey in the first film; where Jake awakening in an Avatar body was a moment of wonder, Quaritch awakens angry and begins beating up his own people; he likewise punches out an Ikran while bonding to it; and he swipes Jake's line "oustanding" too.

Yet Jake Sully isn't quite the protagonist this time. The film concerns itself primarily with the character arcs of he and Neytiri's children. I wasn't expecting that and I found the new characters appealing. As the cast moves from the forest to the reefs (permitting Cameron to indulge himself in his love of the ocean) the different environment allows even the characters who were born on Pandora to learn something new.

I was particularly fond of the arc of Sully's son Lo'ak, who befriends a massive sea creature called a Tulkun. The Tulkun is permitted a lot of personality, especially in the big fight at the end where it displays some amusing tactics while outsmarting the odious Aussie character (and ultimately killing him, again to my amusement).

I think I expected an Avatar sequel to attempt something even bigger than the previous film. Cameron seems to have wisely noted that what audiences really connected with in the first film was the lush 3-D environment of Pandora, not as much the big fight scene in the climax. Consequently, most of the money in this sequel seems to have gone to making Pandora look beautiful. That was the right call. There is a big fight scene at the end but it's not on a larger scale or even the same scale as the previous film. The stakes are lower - Jake is fighting for his family, not for the survival of an entire species. The emotional stakes make the sequel just as momentous as the original. It's as though after 40+ years of filmmaking James Cameron actually knows how to put a picture together! Again, I'm astounded at how many people assumed this movie would be a colossal failure. I think they were the same people who predicted that about Titanic, come to think of it...

The film ends with a definite nod towards yet another sequel and I'm sure it's coming since apparently they filmed this and the next film at the same time. I still don't foresee Avatar as some long-running franchise like, say, Indiana Jones (whose latest trailer ran in front of this film). But if Cameron gets to tell all the stories he wants to tell with the concept then that's enough. I think Avatar: The Way of Water is a worthy addition to his filmography.

Finally, I was pleased to see a reprisal of much of James Horner's music in this film. As I've said on the blog many times, he was my favourite film composer and I loved sharing a birthday with him. His Avatar soundtrack was like a "greatest hits" encompassing all the best music of his career. Hopefully some of that music will continue in any future sequels.

Old-Time Radio Christmas, 5 of 5: The Man at the Gate of the World

Welcome to the final installment of my five-part look at extra-Biblical Christmas stories in old-time radio! I have a real odd duck for you this time: it's Mr. President and the story "The Man at the Gate of the World." The story in question was written by W. E. Cule and first published in 1929.

Mr. President is a real odd duck; it starred Edward Arnold, known to be one of the more conservative Hollywood actors. Each week in the series he would portray a different President of the USA, referred to in the script only as "Mr. President" until the close of the play. The concept was an interesting one - it challenged listeners to guess which President was the week's protagonist.

Of course by its nature, Mr. President had a very shallow well to draw from - there simply weren't that many Presidents (or interesting stories about them). Despite this, the series ran from 1947-1953. To pad out the series, each Christmas Arnold would feature a non-presidential story - his adaptation of "The Man at the Gate of the World."

In the story Arnold portrayed Caspar the Persian, one of the fabled Three Wise Men (which means this story is more closely connected to Epiphany than Christmas but we'll let it slide). The name "Caspar" has a long tradition in the church but it's not from the Bible - none of the three wise men received names there. Caspar returns to Bethlehem just after the slaughter of the innocent children there. Incorrectly believing the Christ chid he visited is dead, Caspar mourns him. Eventually he learns Christ evaded the slaughter but is once again too late, hearing of his crucifixion. Caspar makes his home in Damascus and then, one day, in walks Judas Iscariot...

Now, hold on... Judas hung himself after the crucifixion, right? Well, not in this story - here, Judas explains that story was told by the other Disciples. Caspar's encounter with Judas sets in motion the meaning of the story --- forgiveness.

Again, this is an odd duck. Not the place you'd expect to hear a quasi-Biblical story. But Arnold was a very fine performer and acquitted himself well. You can hear the 1949 version of his performance here.

Merry Christmas to all!

Old-Time Radio Christmas, 4 of 5: The Boy Who Sang for the King

Welcome back to my five-part series on quasi-Biblical Christmas programs heard in old-time radio. After three outings by author Charles Tazewell, it's time for another author: Frank Pachling. Pachling wrote the story "The Boy Who Sang for the King," which was heard during an episode of A Day in the Life of Dennis Day on December 25, 1946. You might recall that's the same day Bing Crosby read "the Small One." These were clearly the salad days for quasi-Biblical Christmas stories!

A Day in the Life of Dennis Day is something of a spin-off from the Jack Benny Program. Supposedly it was about what Dennis was up to while not singing for Mr. Benny. Really, it was its own show; it was made by many of the people who worked on the sitcom radio program the Life of Riley; if you like the Life of Riley you might like this program too (you'll certainly hear a lot of familiar voices and product jingles).

Like the story "the Lullaby of Christmas," this one concerns a boy who visits the newborn Christ child. In this instance, it's a boy who is determined to one day sing for a king; in Bethlehem, his hope is granted.

You can hear the episode of a Day in the Life of Dennis Day featuring "The Boy Who Sang for the King" at the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Library!

Old-Time Radio Christmas, 3 of 5: The Small One

Today's entry in quasi-Biblical old-time radio Christmas programs is the story "the Small One" by Charles Tazewell. It's probably the best-known story Tazewell ever wrote and he owes a lot to Mr. Bing Crosby, who presented the story as a Christmas special on his radio program. Bing went on to cut a record of his dramatic reading of the story and made reading it an annual radio tradition for some time.

The story concerns a small boy and a small donkey. The boy wants to spare the donkey's life by finding a new owner for the creature; he finally does so when the couple Mary and Joseph purchase him. I'm not sure where the tradition of Mary riding on a donkey to Bethlehem came from - it's not from the Bible. Not being Roman Catholic I do find it a little objectionable because Jesus himself rode a donkey into Jerusalem - it feels as though it's according Christ's divinity to Mary. Then again, it might be an innocuous piece of art, the animal chosen for its humility rather than any allusion to Palm Sunday.

You can hear Bing's original performance of "the Small One" on the December 25, 1946 broadcast of Philco Radio Time at the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Library!