Theater of the (Old) Mind
Nigel Bruce (Watson) and Basil Rathbone (Holmes)
Conrad (top left) and the main Gunsmoke cast
Jack Webb
The cast of Superman
Welles as The Shadow
Jack Benny and Fred Allen
Edward R. Murrow
Roosevelt
I try not to bore you with too many of my quirky hobbies… but my dear friend Dale sent me a link http://www.old-time.com/mcleod/top100.html to a list by radio historian Elizabeth McLeod of the 100 most significant “moments” in radio. Now, I really really like old time radio (OTR), and thousands of hours of it can be found online. Almost all of it is in public domain now (with notable exceptions like The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, any BBC stuff, and anything post-1962).
Many many of the radio things she mentions are unfortunately lost, or otherwise not available to the OTR web community. But I wanted to talk about some of her entries that I am conversant with:
#98 SHERLOCK HOLMES is indeed made for radio... it’s all exposition and verbal banter and deduction. The first ongoing series was the 1939-1946 Rathbone and Bruce version, which is pretty corny but still entertaining; their American successors don’t fare as well. The really good productions are British; John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as Holmes & Watson, for goodness’ sake! And the late-90s productions for BBC-4 with Clive Merrison and Michael Williams (later Andrew Sachs) are the defining work; they are beautifully written, elaborately produced, wonderfully performed, and bring these characters so richly to life that it’s hard to go back and listen to the older stuff.
#75 GUNSMOKE is my favorite radio drama... If all you saw was his “Cannon” TV days, you wouldn’t appreciate what a really really good actor William Conrad was. His Matt Dillon is a marvel of understated complexity, and he did it all with just his voice. Like McLeod’s listing says, this is not a western where the good guys always win and there’s trumpet fanfare at the end. If I was one o’ them cinema historian guys, I’d say that the ‘anti-hero’ and ambiguity of so many late-60’s-early-70’s films goes directly back to the radio version of Gunsmoke. Lots of times Dillon has to choose between bad and worse. Not Ronald Reagan’s kind of western.
#69 DRAGNET is of course a blast... It’s really no different than the TV show, except there’s no crazed drug smokin’ hippies turning on by tuning out, man (“is that right, fella?... Well listen up, you forgot one thing...”). Of course, Joe Friday is single and lives with his mom, who calls him “Joseph.” And he stays out on stakeouts with his partner Frank Smith until all hours. And he scoffs every time good old married guy Frank tries to fix him up with a date. But he’s not gay... Clear?!? Not gay!!! He’s... he’s... metasexual!
#66 SUPERMAN is about what you’d expect... except (as noted in McLeod) there are many less-than-subtle messages (in the scripts and in the PSAs done by the cast) against bigotry, intolerance, and hate. It’s truly astonishing. For all the complaints that the right sends up today about the ‘messages’ kids get from Sesame Street, etc., there is no way that this kind of blunt proselytizing would ever be allowed on a kids program today. I don’t know enough about the history of the show to know what the genesis of this was, but it sounds radically out of place in 1946, and (at the risk of overstatement) it makes the movements of the 60’s more understandable with this as a preface...
#53 THE LONE RANGER is, also, about what you’d expect... but with no surprises. Not my favorite, if that’s not heretical to say. It didn’t have the weirdness and camp that makes Superman palatable for an adult. It is surprising how often the bad guy outsmarts LR and he has to go to plan B…
#51 THE SHADOW with Orson Welles. Welles is always fun to listen to... In several of the episodes I have, young Welles seems to believe that great acting requires stepping on the last word of your co-star’s lines, usually Margo Lane’s. By the end of the episode, she’s started stepping on his lines (you can actually hear the frustration) and he’s on hers and neither of them ever gets to finish a sentence. But great hammy stuff for Welles.
#47 LIGHTS OUT, Columbia Workshop, etc.... Some really odd stuff starting to happen here, much more troubling and personal than 99% of TV today. This is the seedbed for Playhouse 90 and Rod Serling and his amazing blend of fantasy and social commentary.
#26 JACK BENNY, FRED ALLEN- Jack is one of my all-time favorites; my parents told me that when I was little I would never miss an episode of his TV show. He generally plays the straight man, letting the chaos flail around him; his only power is that he controls the money, a fact he never lets his cast forget (and vice versa). It’s really situation comedy. Allen’s shows, on the other hand, were much more an odd combination of a sketch comedy that often had an opening monologue, very acerbic and very funny, and very topical, which is why it doesn’t hold up as well, and probably why Allen faded as TV ascended…which is ironic since Saturday Night Live (and now-gone people like Johnny Carson and Jack Parr) owe much to Allen.
#21 LONDON AFTER DARK. I’ve only heard a couple of these, but if you can get your 21st century ears around the idea that this is real, not a drama, they’re amazing. Live “play-by-play” descriptions of bombing raids, shelters, and life in the blackouts. It was led by CBS’ Edward R. Murrow, and backed by a team of notable broadcast journalists (including Larry LeSueur and Eric Sevareid) as well as authors like J.B. Priestly and Vincent Sheean. If the closest thing you’ve come to WW2 is watching war movies, this is the real thing. And if you wondered how England held out so long while waiting for the Americans to come to their senses, you’ll come to understand how damn tough those Brits were.
#8 HINDENBURG DISASTER and #10 WAR OF THE WORLDS: Only 18 months apart, the shocking immediacy of the first added greatly to the incredible-yet-believable drama of the second. I hope my generation isn’t the last to hear and appreciate these icons to the power and intimacy-shared-with-millions magic of radio.
#4 PEARL HARBOR: The halting delivery of a stunned newscaster, breaking in to regular programming; the updates throughout the day describing the extent of the carnage; Roosevelt’s “forever in infamy” speech... That was their 9/11, when nice normal predictable American lives were suddenly dragged into the pain other humans had known for years. And to listen to the newscasts in the weeks and months preceding December 7th, it is stunning for someone my age to understand that it was no sure thing that we were going to battle Hitler and Tojo; there was a real good chance we were going to try and sit it out. Amazing.
And the list rightfully concludes with #1, D-DAY: I’ve only heard the CBS broadcasts, with Collingwood onboard a landing craft at Normandy. To say there’s a difference between the journalists of that day, and the Anderson Cooper’s of today, goes without saying; the difference centers around the inability to get out of the way of the story.
