Jeff Kallman's excellent The Easy Ace: A Journal of Classic Radio
is a wonderful place to spend hours on end, rediscovering the Golden Age of Radio
as it's meant to be discovered and celebrated. Article after article
is filled with a wonderful new vignette about Golden Age Radio History.
---The Digital Deli Online.

[I]n his matchless on-this-day approach to chronicling “yesteryear,”
he easily aces out a less organized mind like mine,
which promptly lapsed into a more idiosyncratic mode of relating the past.
---broadcastellan.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Another Enchanted Cottage: The Way It Was, 24 September


Disfigured and embittered following a harrowing road accident, Livia Ashley (Joan Fontaine), who owns a coastal honeymoon cottage accepts the friendship of a blind sculptor (Tom Tully), and---crying out in her loneliness---proposes to his plain assistant (William Johnstone), to ward off the entreaties of her sister and brother-in-law to return to their high society life.

But their marriage of mutual self-protection falls unexpectedly under the cottage's reputed, honeymooners'-only spell, a spell of which she was unaware previously, which now carries unnerving ramifications when her sister (Lurene Tuttle) and brother-in-law (Dan O'Herlihy) return to visit the newlyweds . . . provoking a surprising consequence.

This version stays more strictly along the line of the original Arthur Wing Pinero drama than to the popular (and enchanting) 1945 film adaptation starring Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire (which they re-created in a striking installment of Lux Radio Theater)---in which they played a socialite disfigured in war and the cottage's plain, lonely caretaker (with Mildred Natwick as the cottage owner, a widow who masks her grief in brusqueness), but it's still an engaging if too-abreviated listen.

Mrs. Morgan: Gloria Gordon. Announcer: Ken Carpenter. Music: Wilbur Hatch. Director: Jaime del Valle. Writer: Walter Brown Newman, adapting the Arthur Wing Pinero play.

CHANNEL SURFING . . .

THE WHISTLER: BLIND ALLEY (CBS, 1943)---A weak-willed playboy, whose wealthy grandfather has threatened to cut him off until or unless he reforms, learns the hard way where his wastrel life of wine, women, and gambling---patterned after that of his father, who met an early death because of it---might lead if he's foolish enough to think he can't be burned . . . or buried, after a night on the town and a jarring accident with his new girlfriend and her shifty, blackmailing brother. Nella: Possibly Lurene Tuttle. Investigator: Possibly Jeff Chandler. Additional cast: Unknown. The Whistler: Bill Forman. Music: Wilbur Hatch. Director: J. Donald Wilson. Writers: J. Donald Wilson, Harold Swanton.

THE GREEN HORNET: UNDERWATER ADVENTURE (ABC, 1946)---The Hornet (Bob Hall) and Kato (Rollon Parker) target a salvage company they suspect is a front for mass theft, even if they're the only ones who believe it, looking to thwart a crooked salvage scow doing business with an unsuspecting city operation and hot for a sea-buried bank haul. Axford: Gil Shea. Announcer: Possibly Hal Neal. Director: Possibly Charles Livingstone. Sound: Fred Fry, Bill Hengsterbeck, Ken Robertson. Writer: Fran Striker.

THE HAROLD PEARY SHOW: RENAMING BOOMER PARK (CBS, 1950)---Warding off Billy's (Will Wright) suggesting that he offer racing tips on his morning radio show is nothing compared to Harold (Peary) trying to romance an Evie (Mary Jane Croft) who thinks he wastes too much time on "frivolous" local crusades. Stanley: Ken Peters. Gloria: Gloria Holliday. Old Doc Yak-Yak: Joseph Kearns. Additional cast: Frances Robinson, Jerry Marron, Jack Moyles. Announcer: Bob LaMond. Music: Jack Meakin. Director: Norman McDonnell. Writers: Gene Stone, Jack Robinson, Dick Powell, Harold Peary.

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