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.