Halloween Week, Day 7: "The Thing on the Fourble Board"

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

When I first heard the Quiet, Please episode "The Thing on the Fourble Board" I was doubly amazed; amazed that after so many years of listening to OTR there could still be a series I had never even heard of - and that the episode could be so good -- so scary!

I think most people who discover Wyllis Cooper's Quiet, Please enter via "The Thing on the Fourble Board." It's easily the best-known episode and that's probably why I haven't discussed it on this blog until now.

Ernest Chappell portrays "Porky," a roughneck working on an oil drill site in Wyoming. One night, Porky and his friend Billy discover something very odd among a recent drilling - a petrified finger. When the mud is removed from the finger, it vanishes from sight. And then the real terror begins.

"The Thing on the Fourble Board" aired on Quiet, Please on August 9, 1948. You can hear this episode at the Quiet Please website.

Halloween Week, Day 6: "Sorry, Wrong Number"

The old-time radio hobby is vast and, most happily, filled with thousands of surviving programs. Yet I think there are three particular shows you can guarantee a hobbyist will hear eventually, no matter what their inclinations are; there's the Mercury Theater on the Air version of "War of the Worlds"; there's the live news broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster; and there's the Suspense episode "Sorry, Wrong Number."

Suspense was still a young program on its first year when they presented Agnes Moorehead as the star of the first production of Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number." It went on to be presented a total of 10 times on Suspense; Fletcher adapted her script into a stage play and Hollywood made it into a motion picture starring Barbara Stanwyck in 1948 and a 1989 TV movie with Loni Anderson.

Yet familiarity so often breeds contempt; when OTR fans bring up "War of the Worlds" they might have differing opinions of the program but most of them like it. I have seldom, however, heard an OTR fan champion "Sorry, Wrong Number." I think the commonly-held view is that it's good, but not the greatest episode of Suspense. Heck, it wasn't even the greatest script Lucille Fletcher wrote for Suspense (they adapted her terrific story "The Hitchhiker" in their first year too)!

And that's a shame because if you've never heard "Sorry, Wrong Number," you're in for a treat. It's instantly memorable and a true representation of the kind of drama radio could do so well. Moorehead portrays one Mrs. Stevens, a lonely bed-ridden woman whose only link to the world outside is her telephone. One day she accidentally overhears a conversation in which two men are planning a murder and determines she must do something about it.

Consider how great a debt Suspense owes to the Columbia Workshop, where producer-director William Spier helped make his reputation, Lucille Fletcher produced many of her earliest scripts and talents were given the freedom to pursue unusual ideas for dramatic radio. If "Sorry, Wrong Number" had been aired on Columbia Workshop it would probably be remembered as one of the series' better entries and as good an example as there is of what radio can achieve; instead, it's unfavorably compared to the best of Suspense and found to fall short of the crown. So who needs a crown? It's a great episode in it's own right; never grade OTR on a curve.

"Sorry, Wrong Number" first aired on Suspense on May 25, 1943; one of the actors jumped his cue at the very end of the broadcast, so it was done again on August 21, 1943 not only because it was immediately well-received but so they could render a more satisfactory production. You can download the first version from the Internet Archive here and if you prefer to hear it without the cue jump, the 2nd one is here.

Tomorrow for Halloween: "We found something once - me and Billy Gruenwald - and... something found us. I'll tell you about it."

Halloween Week, Day 5: "Behind the Locked Door"

"Behind the Locked Door" is one of the best-known old-time radio horror episodes among fandom, yet I've never featured it in any of my previous Halloween blog posts. Let's repair that now! It was an episode of the Mysterious Traveler written by Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan, who wrote most of the episodes of the series.

In "Behind the Locked Door," Cathy Evans confronts her boyfriend Martin, an archaeologist who just returned from an expedition but gone into hiding. Disheveled, Martin tells Cathy what he and his professor found on their expedition - an underground civilization of humans who adapted to life without sunlight and the hideous result of their changes. This episode is famous primarily for how it ends - when the titular locked door is opened!

"Behind the Locked Door" was originally aired on the Mysterious Traveler on May 24, 1949 but the surviving version we have was aired November 6, 1951. You can download this episode from the Internet Archive here.

Tomorrow: "Don't worry. Everything's okay."

Halloween Week, Day 4: "Dead Man's Holiday"

A man narrowly survives an accident aboard a train. Awakening from the crash, he soon finds the whole world seems to be involved in a conspiracy against him; his wife is missing; his name and his face have been changed; he seems to be a wanted criminal. Such is the premise of "Dead Man's Holiday."

It's such a good premise that Inner Sanctum Mysteries told this story twice. Four years after "Dead Man's Holiday," someone had the idea of recycling the script but altering the protagonist from a man to a woman. There were a few other changes made to the plot, but for the most part the result, "The Unburied Dead," is the same story, just gender-swapped.

"Dead Man's Holiday" aired on Inner Sanctum Mysteries on June 19, 1945. You can download it from the Internet Archive here. "The Unburied Dead" aired May 16, 1949. You can download it from the Internet Archive here.

Tomorrow: "A noise came from its throat that was more that of an animal than a human being."

Halloween Week, Day 3: "Murder from the Grave"

The Shadow, of course, featured a hero with the hypnotic power to cloud men's minds so that they could not see him; although that's a pretty fantastic ability, most episodes of the Shadow pit the hero against normal men. Sometimes they were extremely dangerous men, men who were arsonists, poisoners or submarine commanders. But there are only a few episodes where the Shadow is pit against an enemy who is, like himself, something paranormal.

An exception is "Murder from the Grave." In this episode, a doctor at a morgue gets the bright idea (in retrospect, very poorly-thought out idea) of resurrecting a dead mobster with his secret formula. Before long, the mobster has control of the formula and is using it to raise recently-killed criminals from the grave, building an army of dead men to go on a crime spree!

This episode is from the era of the Shadow where the hero was portrayed by the excellent Bill Johnstone, with Marjorie Anderson as his faithful companion Margo Lane.

"Murder from the Grave" aired on the Shadow on April 6, 1941. You can hear this episode on YouTube.

Tomorrow: "Somebody's done a perfect job of framing me. Either that -- or I'm a murderer."

Halloween Week, Day 2: "Perigi's Wonderful Dolls"

The Dimension X episode "Perigi's Wonderful Dolls" feels like a long-lost Ray Bradbury story - a story in which children are kind of terrible but also a bit slow to realize when something horrible is trying to pit them against their parents.

The story was written by George Lefferts as an original tale for Dimension X. It concerns the toymaker Perigi, who is all to eager to give one of his toy dolls to a little girl out shopping with her mother - particularly because the girl's father is an official in the Pentagon. The girl's doll, Toto, is quite a chatterbox, always talking... including some disturbing speech about dolls ruling over humanity.

"Perigi's Wonderful Dolls" aired on Dimension X on August 4, 1950. You can download the episode from the Internet Archive here.

Tomorrow: "We ain't very pretty, are we? Well, nobody is - once they've been dead!"

Halloween Week, Day 1: "Dead Man"

I have an annual tradition on this blog of revisiting some scary old-time radio shows around Halloween, and I try to keep from spotlighting shows that have appeared on the blog in previous years. This year I'm going to look at 7 programs in the week leading up to Halloween.

We begin with the drama "Dead Man" starring Humphrey Bogart, which was created as a pilot for a radio series that was never picked up. It's not technically a horror program, but it has a unearthly vibe; it concerns a drifter named Lucky who accidentally causes the death of a railroad detective. Thereafter, Lucky is "haunted" by the dead man - or, rather, his conscience causes him to imagine the dead man's voice in his mind.

"Dead Man" was a 1936 short story written by James M. Cain. Bogart had already had some success with Cain on the radio - he starred in an adaptation of Cain's novel Love's Lovely Counterfeit on Suspense. Post-war, Cain's books were becoming hot properties as successful movies such as the Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce had already been in cinemas prior to Bogart's version of "Dead Man."

Although this very impressive pilot did not result in a series, two years later Bogart would launch his own syndicated radio adventure series - Bold Venture - which he starred in with his wife, Lauren Bacall.

"Dead Man" was recorded as an audition program on September 17, 1949. You can download it from the Internet Archive here.

Tomorrow: "By the time they arrive my people will have prepared something quite shocking!"