Suspense:

“A Good and Faithful Servant”

(6/2/52).

***

Quiet, Pease:

”Inquest”

(8/3/47).

***

X minus one:

“Martian Sam”

(4/3/57).

***

Murder at Midnight:

“The Lodger”

(8/14/47).

***


Right Click here to download

In this segment is an episode of Suspense  that first aired on June 2 of 1952 starring none other than Mr. Jack Benny.

Suspense is one of the classics of old time radio. Some fans have special favorites in the thriller/chiller/macabre genre, but most agree that Suspense is right at the top.

The guiding light of this show was William Spier, whose formula of human drama set in interesting situations attracted the best of Hollywood and radio actors. Orson Welles was in many episodes. Cary Grant said, “If I ever do any more radio work, I want to do it on Suspense, where I get a good chance to act.”

Spier’s method with actors was to keep them under-rehearsed, and there-by a bit uneasy. He got great performances, and the show gained great popularity.

All the production values were first class. With Bernard Hermann, who had worked with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theater and would work with Alfred Hitchcock, doing the musical scores.

Jack Benny is one of the great American comedians. His work spans the 20th century, from vaudeville to radio and movies to TV. In vaudeville, he delivered the snappy comebacks and one liners with intelligence and wit, but it was only with the continuing development of his personal trait comedy that he really became the Jack Benny we all know so well. “Who else could play for four decades the part of a vain, miserly, argumentative skinflint, and emerge a national treasure?The secret of his success was deceptively simple: he was a man of great heart.” That’s John Dunning’s assessment from “On the Air, The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio,” 

In the Suspense program, “A Good and Faithful Servant,” Jack Benny stars as a man who devises his own retirement plan by faking a robbery and hiding the loot in his desk. It just goes to show that even the most “perfect” employees, may not be what they seem.

“A Good and Faithful Servant” was written by Richard M. Powell and produced/directed by Elliott Lewis. Also appearing were Hy Averback, Charles Calvert, Joseph Kearns, Gerald Mohr, Doris Singleton, and Norma Varden. This episode aired on June 2, 1952.

.

 

The second segment this week consist of an episode from Willis Cooper’s excellent Quiet, Please 08/73) “The Inquest” which first aired on August 3 of 1947.

Quiet, Please ran from June 8th of 1947 through June 20th of 1949. Appearing on the Mutual Network until September the 13th of 1948, then moving, for the rest of its run, to ABC.

Behind the series at Quiet, Please were Wyllis Cooper (creator, writer and director) and Ernest Chappell as the star and host. It was Cooper who created the popular horror series Lights Out in 1934. There are many similarities between the shows. In each the listener is invited to shut off outside noise and turn down the lights to fully concentrate on the story.

Cooper and Chappell worked well together, having been close friends before the series began. Chappell’s sympathy with Cooper helped him to understand and portray the characters Cooper created. Knowing Chappell so well, Cooper was able to write characters tailored to his strengths as a performer. This level of partnership brought about a depth of characterization that was and is uncommon in any performance media.

Often intense with it’s tight writing Quite, Please challenged the usual formulas of entertainment.

Chappell would introduce the story to the strains of a dark and somber music that engendered a mysterious mood. Then the story would begin. Always a tale with a touch of the supernatural. Each episode concluded as atmospherically as it began, a few seconds of silence. Then the slow strands ofCesar Franck‘s Symphony in D Minor would swell up and the end came.

After living with his contentious, yet pleading, sister for more years than he can remember, Mr. Ross has had enough and decides to do something about it. Unfortunately, things get out of hand and Mr. Ross finds himself at a coroner’s inquest trying to explain to a jury why it was, really, justifiable homicide.

With James Van Dyke (the coroner), Pat O’Malley (Malcolm), Syvia Cole (Eileen), John Morley (Arthur), and Ernest Chappell (Ross).

Snippet: “Yes, it certainly was. But is that MY fault? I offered not once but a dozen times to take her to a doctor and have the arm re-broken and set again. Could have been done very easy. Just re-break it and set again but…”

I must confess that the audio quality on this and, in fact, every existing transcription of  Quiet, Please  is substantially below par. Fortunately, the original script is available. So if you’d like to read along as you listen, you can download the the script from:

 Here .

Heading in towards home base with runners on all 4, X minus one is up to bat with “Martian Sam” from April 3 of 1957.

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.

For all of us who were weaned on  The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and for the Trekkies (er,Trekkers) among us, you should know that X Minus One is the forefather of the science fiction you grew up on. You will find that it still is some of the best Science Fiction ever aired.
X-Mius-One

Look, I know that sometimes you can cheat yet still be, strictly speaking, with-in the rules.

But a Picher with eight arms? And what if one those arms is 32 feet long ? Now is that kosher?

The LA Dodgers intend to find out.

Also in this segment is a short story from the LibriVox Project ,  Lost in the Future written by John Victor Peterson  and published Fantastic Universe for November of 1954

Lost in the Future

“Did you ever wonder what might happen if mankind ever exceeded the speed of light? Here is a profound story based on that thought—a story which may well forecast one of the problems to be encountered in space travel.

They had discovered a new planet—but its people did not see them until after they had traveled on.”

 

And Peter Lorre’s mystery in the air  brings it all home with “The Lodger ” from August 14 of 1947.

There can be no doubt about it. Peter Lorre was born to do radio. He always just saunters in and begins to chew up the scenery. He does it every time. He does it in Mystery In The Air. His NBC summer replacement show for the Abbot and Costello program.

There is another familiar voice on this show, that of the announcer Mr. Harry Morgan. We all tend these days to think of Morgan as a T.V actor ( Col. Potter of  M.A.S.H.). But like most early T.V. actors Morgan had deep roots in radio.

Sponsored by Camel Cigarettes the show ran  between 1945 and 1947. Today  I can find only eight episodes (those are from 1947). We can, however hope. Although it does not happen every day, or even very often. It is not unheard of for lost episodes of old radio shows to reappear covered with the dust of time and the cobwebs of someone’s attic.

You never know. It could happen.

In there have been several adaptations of the film The Lodger a silent film directed by Hitchcock in 1926 Which concerns the hunt for a “Jack the Ripper” type of serial killer in London.

The story was adapted for the CBS Radio series Suspense, turned into an opera in two acts composed by Phyllis Tateand. And has also been the basis of four other films:

If you are interested in seeing the original, silent, version of the film It is available on the Internet archive…Here