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!"

Radio Recap: Shorty Bell

Shorty Bell was a short-lived but somewhat fascinating radio program. It aired as a sustained program on CBS March 28 to June 27, 1948. It starred Mickey Rooney and was overseen by director William N. Robson (who left the series Escape to helm this program). It was a newspaper drama created by two journalists - Frederick Hazlitt Brennan and Richard Carroll - and was introduced as a "novel for radio."

The series was meant to be something of a prime-time soap opera drama, following the ongoing trials of Shorty Bell (Rooney), a short newspaper truck driver whose great ambition is to become a journalist. By the end of the debut episode, Shorty gets his first chance to prove himself to the publisher. Presumably the intent was to follow Shorty as he rose the ranks at the newspaper and proved himself as a writer. Certainly journalism is a great source for adventure and drama on radio.

Now, unfortunately, we only have four episodes of Shorty Bell and I don't quite what happened between the first episode and the next surviving episode (dated June 13, 3 months after the debut) but clearly the show was being retooled. Although Robson remained the director (he's even heard as himself on the June 13 episode), Brennan and Carroll were gone, replaced with writer Walter Newman (who also wrote for Robson on Escape). The tone of the June 13 episode is entirely different; Shorty Bell is now a sitcom with a studio audience!

The sitcom version of Shorty Bell follows the same character and situation introduced months earlier, but now it's played for laughs. Rooney is now accompanied by familiar sitcom voices like Alan Reed and Dink Trout (both veterans of CBS' Life of Riley) and the studio audience sound as though they were imported from a broadcast of Archie; they were clearly young and very loud and laughed especially loud when someone flubbed a line of dialogue.

The next surviving episodes are from June 20 and 27 and the tone has shifted back to drama (although a studio audience can be heard on the 27th). Whereas the June 13 episode departed from the series' premise for a typical sitcom plot about Shorty's novel being picked up for a dog hero movie, the other episodes are back to following Shorty's gradual ascent at the ranks at the newspaper. But clearly the series wasn't working because the episode of the 27th was the final broadcast. Rooney hung around to host a new program, Hollywood Showcase (a talent scout program) and Robson went back to Escape.

Shorty Bell had a very promising start; what went wrong? Rooney was a popular star, although by 1948 he was trying to change his image. Maybe audiences didn't respond to him in a dramatic role, so they tried to win them over with more comedy. I think if the series had stuck to its guns and kept to the original idea of a "radio novel" it still would have flopped, but the remaining fragments would be more valuable.

You can hear the four remaining episodes of Shorty Bell at the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Group Library.

Radio Recap: Rocky Jordan

Rocky Jordan started out as a CBS adventure serial called A Man Named Jordan, which ran from 1945-1947. Then in 1948 it returned as a half-hour weekly program that lasted until 1950. It came back as a summer show in 1951, then went away for good. Originally Rocky Jordan was set in Istanbul but in the half-hour program he moved to Cairo and owned the Cafe Tambourine. In both versions, Rocky owned a nightclub and would inevitably encounter criminals and have to get himself out of trouble.

Jack Moyles played Rocky Jordan for almost all of the series, until George Raft took over the part for the show's final season (Raft's Hollywood career was basically over when he stumbled into the role). Jay Novello portrayed Sam Sabayya of the Cairo police, Rocky's best frenemy. While Sabayya was an amiable and helpful police official (though frequently he would issue very earnest warnings to Rocky about the episode's trouble), Sabayya's lieutenant Greco (Lou Krugman) was a vicious thug who was all-too-willing to find crimes he could pin on Rocky.

After a few months without a sponsor the show picked up Del Monte food from summer 1949 til summer 1950; advertisements would address the lady of the house, suggesting that a number of women made up the show's listening audience despite the hard-boiled nature of the program. Don't make assumptions about what appeals to different genders, I guess!

The cast benefited from the usual stock of CBS players; Paul Frees turned up frequently, usually in multiple roles per episode. It was lacking in actual Egyptian voices but the series made some allowances for that as Rocky would usually wind up embroiled in some trouble created by a tourist - as his bar was frequented by expats, not by Muslims.

Most of the programs are from the Jack Moyles years and they're very good adventure yarns that sound a lot like the ones CBS was producing simultaneously for Escape (it helped that writers like William Froug and John Dunkel wrote for both shows). One particularly fun episode is "Portrait of Rocky" (April 3, 1949) in which Rocky meets an Egyptian private eye who idolizes radio detectives such as Sam Spade - it includes some funny shout-outs to the Adventures of Sam Spade and even plays the show's theme as the story fades out!

When George Raft took over the series for the summer of 1951, there was quite a shift. Jay Novello and Lou Krugman continued in their respective supporting roles, but the bartender character Chris - previously a very minor person - was suddenly elevated to narrator of the series and portrayed by Lawrence Dobkin. In the Jack Moyles years, Moyles narrated the series from first-person perspective; it feels considerably less visceral and fast-paced when all of Rocky's actions are narrated after-the-fact by Chris, who wasn't even present at the time of the events he would narrate. As the series was announced as being "partially transcribed," I wonder if Raft did all of his recording on transcription with Dobkin and other performers being added later? At any rate, Raft's performance is lackluster and wholly inferior to that of Moyles.

Cliff Howell produced and directed the program from start to finish; his other radio credits included directing episodes of Jeff Regan, Investigator, the Adventures of Philip Marlowe, Broadway Is My Beat and - improbably - Amos 'N' Andy.

You can listen to Rocky Jordan at the Internet Archive.

Radio Recap: Romance

For much of the Golden Age of radio, CBS had three dramatic anthology programs whose single-word titles summed up what the audience could expect from the program. There was, of course, Suspense; then there was Escape. But how much attention have you paid to Romance?

Somehow, despite a healthy run on radio (1943-1957) and a large archive of episodes, Romance is a series I've seldom seen revisited by old-time radio fans. I first learned of the program's existence in John Dunning's On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio and his entry for Romance was pretty sparse and dismissive. He presented the data surrounding the program's timeslots and production credits but he didn't offer even one paragraph of commentary about the series itself.

Like all anthology programs, Romance was indeed a mixed bag, but the sheer scope of years and formats under which CBS presented Romance demonstrate that it's a program well worth seeking out. At times it was a sponsored program with big-name Hollywood stars; at times it adapted famous Hollywood movies (especially 1944-1946 when called Theater of Romance); sometimes it told romantic stories; other times it was "romantic" in a classical sense. In all its eras, it benefited from CBS' strong production values. And small wonder! The 1944-1946 programs (Theater of Romance) were produced by Charles Vanda of Suspense; the 1950-1953 programs were produced and written by Norman Macdonnell and John Meston just prior to their joint creation of Gunsmoke; and Suspense's Antony Ellis and William N. Robson oversaw the final years of the program, abetted by familiar names from Suspense and Escape like writers Kathleen Hite and E. Jack Neuman. Some scripts were even recycled from Escape, including "Wild Oranges," "Loup-Garou" and "the Cave."

During the period where it was called Theater of Romance it sounds like the same orchestra that performed on Suspense! Great radio performers like William Conrad, John Dehner, Harry Bartell, Georgia Ellis, Hans Conreid, Paula Winslowe and Lawrence Dobkin were heard on Romance through most of its history and the Theater of Romance included big name stars like Humphrey Bogart, Joseph Cotten, Cary Grant, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, Ray Milland, Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall.

The Theater of Romance era of the show is very interesting, although the movie adaptations are a bit odd - because the program's premise was that it was a romantic program, they would often strip the movie plots down to simply the romantic passages. The adaptation of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," for example, is concerned more so with the titular Mr. Chips' relationship with his wife than his career as a schoolmaster.

Still, there are some especially fine programs during the Theater of Romance period. Be sure to check out Bogart in the murder story "Conflict" (September 11, 1945). From the rest of the series I recommend most strongly "Pagosa" (August 6, 1951), a western tale with William Conrad, Georgia Ellis, writer John Meston and producer Norman Macdonnell together prior to Gunsmoke; the sci-fi farce "the Strip Teaser and the Space Warp" (March 24, 1956); and the humorous "the Lady and the Tiger" (May 12, 1956).

You can hear the Old-Time Radio Researchers Group's collection of Romance episodes at the Internet Archive.