Category: Golden Age Article

Golden Age Article

About My New Newsletter

by  • 1 Comment

Two weeks ago, I announced our weekly articles are coming to end. So what is the new bi-monthly newsletter that’s replacing our weekly articles going to look like?

I intended to write this article last week but research for Hot Copy kind of took what time I had for that. (This is why I stopped doing the weekly article.)

Below, I answer some basic questions about the newsletter. Now, as I’ve not actually started the newsletter, or seen what the response will be, this is information isn’t set in stone (except for the last point) and much could change as I continue to figure out best practices.

What will the newsletter be about?: The focus will be on classic entertainment and mysteries. It’s actually a very wide remit since I’ve covered a lot of topics over the years. I will say that in terms of featured articles, I lean a lot more towards audio drama and mystery. So I’m far more likely to write about a mystery TV series from the 1990s or audiodramas from the 2010s than I am a sitcom from the 1970s.

What will be in the newsletter?: There will be an article or two or three in each edition of the newsletter. In addition to that, I’ll share items I find in my research, such as blog posts, articles, and details about new or rediscovered material that seem worthy of your time and on-topic. For example, if I had been doing the newsletter when I was researching Mathew Slade, I might have shared the Wiki entry for star William Wintersole’s character on General Hospital. While Wintersole is best known for his long-running role on Guiding Light, two years on General Hospital saw him as head of a secret agency fighting a villain with a weather control machine. And all these years I thought of daytime soaps as being all about family drama.

I’ll share those fascinating YouTube finds. Some might be interesting interviews. A recent example is John Lithgow explaining how he landed the role of Yoda in the Star Wars. Others might be some great vintage performances, like that time that Dead Eye (aka Red Skelton) met John Wayne.

How often will the newsletter be published?: For starters, I’ll be posting it bi-monthly beginning in May. There will be four issues for the rest of 2025 and I have plans for each one. How often it will be released in 2026 and beyond will depend on the reader’s response.

Who will be writing it?:  We will be employing three writers: me, myself, and I.

Eventually, I hope to feature a few guest pieces. There will be a query process because I don’t want to waste my time or anyone else’s. I hope to make this a paying market, although it will be minimal to start.

Where will it be published?: There are many ways to publish a newsletter. For example, I could start a substack or some other newsletter solution. However, I don’t want to add complexity to either myself or those who follow me, by adding yet another thing. To start with, the newsletter will be published on Patreon.

Patreon has the option to follow a creator for free. As a Free member, you don’t get access to Premium features (such as the extra programs and voting on our summer series for The Amazing World of Radio.) However, you do get access to free features such as Video Theater and Old Time Radio Snack Wagon episodes. And the newsletter will be sent to you. I’m considering giving our paid supporters early access to it, but it will be available to all. You can follow me on Patreon here.

Rather than charging a separate subscription, I leave it up to each subscriber. If you’re a free Patreon supporter who finds the newsletter adds enough value that you want to support me, you can become a paid Patreon supporter. If not, that’s fine too.

Will the Patreon supporter updates continue or will this replace them?: The newsletter is an entirely separate thing. Paid Patreon supporters receive monthly updates from me regarding podcast plans and ideas as well as personal updates and will continue to be paywalled.

The bi-monthly newsletter will be a general publication dedicated to mystery and classic entertainment. So they are and will remain entirely different publications.

In conclusion, I’m looking forward to this new effort and a chance to see where this all goes. If you’re curious and want to see what I come up with, follow me on Patreon.

announcement, Golden Age Article

The End of Our Weekly Articles

by  • 3 Comments

When I first started the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, I began writing weekly articles. For a while, when I was in my 29 and until my early 30s, I was posting two articles per week. These posts came into a wide remit: They discussed old-time radio, detective stories, classic films, classic television, and even detective-themed graphic novels.  Now, after more than 15 years, it’s time to end these weekly articles. In this post, we’ll talk about why I started them, a little bit of history, why I kept them going, why I’m ending them, and a little bit about what we’re going to do instead.

Why I Started and How It Went

I started the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio in the stone age of podcasts, where a common piece of advice was to have a blog to go along with your podcast. I jumped right in. I wrote about 1980s Perry Mason movies, Columbo episodes, Monk TV episodes, religious audio dramas, and Nero Wolfe novels. Doing this podcast and the related blog allowed me to dive into things I’d always been interested in and to write about them at length.

I not only had fun, but the blog posts succeeded, at least in getting traffic to the website. So many days I’d look at my stats and see my article ranking Columbo episodes or Monk episodes or Perry Mason episodes being some of my top-viewed articles. Google liked me, it liked me a lot.

Not only that, many people found my articles useful in their own work. I found a handful of books on Google Books that cited me in their bibliography. In one amusing incident, I was checking Google Books to find if there was any additional information on the radio series The Adventures of Babe Ruth that I didn’t have before I recorded an episode of the Old Time Radio Snack Wagon. I found a book that cited a review I wrote of the series.

I’ve enjoyed most of the books, movies, and radio shows I’ve had to consume to write these reviews. In addition, the nice little bits of research have made for diverting rabbit holes where I’ve often found myself surprised by what I’ll find while doing research.

It’s been fun, but it’s time for a change.

Why It’s Ending

I’d say there are two reasons why this is ending. Part of it has to do with the time commitment of putting out something every week My life has changed a whole lot since I was in my late 20s. For one thing, I’m a dad, and I’m working from home full time. The podcast and this website is part of my business, and writing and researching these articles is a time-consuming process. There are simple reviews I might bang out in an hour, but some of the more complex projects might take multiple hours of research and writing to do. It’s a big ask and a big time commitment.

And sometimes, I just can’t do it. While most weeks, I post something original, there have been some weeks where I haven’t posted anything or did a last-minute repost of an old article (an admitted upside of having such a big archive). With everything else, I have weeks where it’s a struggle.

Now, if this were something essential, or doing what articles did for the site back in the 2010s, it would fall me to find some way to make it happen.

But that brings me to the second problem. The articles just aren’t getting traffic anymore. The reason? It all comes down to Google. Back in the 2010s, most of my traffic to articles came from Google search. That’s just not happening anymore. The issues that people raise with Google and how search engines work are well-known and my articles just aren’t getting that traffic from search engines. This has been particularly frustrating with series that I really put a lot of work into, like “The American Audio Drama Tradition” which just didn’t get the results I wanted.

So, in short, weekly articles are becoming more challenging to produce and they’re also not serving the purpose they were intended to. So in light of that, ending the weekly articles makes sense.

What Comes Next?

Does that mean that I’ll stop writing about all the things I’ve enjoyed writing here? No, but the way I write about them is going to change.

In May, I’ll be launching a free newsletter.  I’ll talk more about the newsletter next week, but one virtue is that it won’t be weekly, so I won’t be under the gun to “POST SOMETHING!” every week. I’ll be able to plan these out, and I also hope to avoid the sort of “quick review of something” that I sometimes ended up doing. With the newsletter, I’ll be publishing less frequently, but hopefully at a higher quality.

Secondly, I may also consider submitting to other E-zines and websites, which really hasn’t been an option in recent years.

Of course, just mentioning the newsletter leaves a lot of unanswered questions. What will it be about? How often will it publish? How can you subscribe? We’ll answer these questions next week and then after that, you can expect a whole lot less text on our front page.

Golden Age Article, Podcast, Telefilm Review

Telefilm Review: Ironside

by  • 1 Comment

Background: In May, 1966, after nine successful seasons, Raymond Burr’s iconic run as the lead in Perry Mason came to an end. Nine months later, NBC would release a pilot film for Ironside, about a former San Francisco police detective who continues to fight crime after being confined to a wheelchair. Ironside would become a regular series for the 1967-68 TV season, and then run for eight seasons, meaning Burr had a run of 17 of 18 seasons as the lead of a mystery program.

I’d never watched a full episode of Ironside in my life, but prompted by a comment in regard to a recent Kojak audiodrama review, I decided to check out the TV movie (affiliate link) on Prime where it is currently available to subscribers for free.

The Plot: 

San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside (Burr) takes his first vacation in 20 years on a farm outside of the city, where he’s felled by a sniper’s bullet. He’s rushed to the hospital when he’s found in the morning, and his demise is anticipated by both the media and his colleagues on the San Francisco PD. He survives, but is left paralyzed for the rest of his life, and retires from the police force. However, Ironside offers his services as an unpaid consultant and sets about investigating who tried to murder him.

The Good:

Raymond Burr got an Emmy nomination for his performance and he deserves it. As a fan of Dragnet, I see a lot of his Dragnet radio character Ed Backstrand in Ironside, a relentlessly driven, smart, tough, no-nonsense cop. Ironside could easily become cartoonish, particularly judging by some of what’s said about him when it’s thought he would die. “You know what he once told me? The only reason a cop should take a day off is for a death. His own!”

Yet Burr makes Ironside believable – a crusty, tough, smart cop who is unapologetically himself and is dedicated to his life’s work. He has no illusions about the nature of the job. He cares for the people around him, even if they don’t always appreciate how he shows it.

The series is also a fascinating time capsule of a time when accommodations for people with disabilities were far less common. Ironside takes charge of making his own arrangements to try and give himself as much a sense of mobility and independence as possible.

The mystery is well-crafted, playing to Ironside’s strengths, with enough surprises to make it a satisfying standalone experience.

The feature length of the pilot allows it to work effectively as a first episode, while at the same time introducing the main character and his supporting cast. I think the film does a mostly admirable job of giving us a feel for who Ironside is. The scenes where his life hangs in the balance are generally effective at helping us understand the man and his place in the world.

The Bad:

The film is strong, with only a few minor hiccups. There is one scene with multiple rapid cuts right in a row that I found unpleasant and disorienting, and it didn’t help that this occurrs at a key moment in the film.

While the telefilm mostly works, there are a few awkward moments as the series defines its lead and supporting cast. The best you can say for the supporting cast is that they’re present, but very one-dimensional. Reasons for that include the facts that 1) Burr’s performance would sell the series and 2) the supporting cast could easily be swapped out for the main run. This happened many times, but not on Ironside, as Detective Sergeant Ed Brown (Don Galloway), Officer Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson), and Ironside’s driver Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) all made the jump to being series regulars. And this isn’t a great introduction to them.

Sergeant Brown suffers the worst in a scene that highlights Ironside’s deductive brilliance. A bag found at the scene of Ironside’s shooting is labeled, “Some miscellaneous nuts.” Brown cheerily volunteers that he’d labeled that himself, before Ironside goes off to explain the very common sense reasons why you shouldn’t vaguely label crime scene evidence, and that the correct term is, “Five Acorns.”

While the moment illustrates Ironside’s genius, it makes Brown look incompetent, and it makes you wonder why Ironside would have him as an assistant. It has me expecting that as I watch the series, I’ll find Brown to be “the stupid one.” It also  undercuts Ironside as a leader/teacher, because Brown serves under Ironside. How did Brown not know better than that?

Some might consider the identity of Ironside’s would be-assassin to be a negative as well. Early in the film, we learn that Ironside made a lot of highly dangerous enemies. So you’d expect some major criminal syndicate or a hardened criminal archenemy to be behind the killing. Halfway through the film, it becomes apparent that that’s not the case at all. I don’t consider this a negative as it just shows how the program is grounded in reality. In the real world, sometimes it’s not the obvious supercriminal that inflicts the most harm. Sometimes, it’s a random person with a weird motive. That’s life and that’s the nature of the job.

Noteworthy:

One of the surprising scenes has Ironside giving a speech that parallels one of Joe Friday’s most well-known speeches on Dragnet. In the episode “The Interrogation,” Friday delivers the famous “What is a Cop?” speech about the trials and tribulations of being a policeman to a young, discouraged policeman. In this episode, when Ironside is thought to be about to die, a news reporter finds a not-for-public-consumption speech that Ironside had given to a graduating police academy class. The TV movie aired only a few weeks after the Dragnet episode, and both were likely in production at the same time. So it’s likely a case of both productions’ writers picking up similar public sentiments about police.

Ironside’s speech is far shorter than Joe Friday’s, and far darker. Friday warns of many struggles that come with being a policeman but paints a picture of thousands of men who know “being a policeman is an endless, glamourless, thankless job that’s gotta be done.” Ironside has a similar message but ups the ante by emphasizing the likelihood of death. “And one day, you’ll stop a bullet, and they’ll decide you weren’t a brute, or a crook, or incompetent. Just a cop. A man trying to do an impossible job. And down at the station house, the squad will take up a collection for your widow, if you’ve been silly enough to get married. And that’ll be that.”

This is neither good nor bad, but definitely illustrative of who Ironside is as man and what viewers can expect from the series.

All in all, Ironside does everything it should: introducing the lead character, establishing the premise of a potential Ironside TV series, and introducing his supporting characters, and presenting a good mystery story. It doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does well enough to make the TV movie a worthwhile viewing experience for fans of Raymond Burr, classic police procedurals, and detective programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Rating: 4 out of 5

 

Golden Age Article

Audio Drama Review: The Great Gildersleeve, Volume 11

by  • 0 Comments

The 11th Volume of the Radio Archives collection begins with the start of The Great Gildersleeve’s fourth season on the radio, with Harold Peary starring as Gildersleeve during the 1944-1945 radio season. It collects twelve of the first fourteen episodes from the fall of 1944.

After big arcs in the previous two seasons (around Gildersleeve’s romance with Leila Ransom (Shirley Mitchell) in Season 2 and around his engagement to Eve Goodwin (Bea Bernadette) and his run for mayor in Season 3), Season 4 sees Gildersleeve promising to avoid getting too serious with anyone, and he keeps that promise as far as he can.

There are actually two shorter story arcs in this set, as well as some episodes that feel more stand-alone.

The season begins by shaking up the status quo. Gildersleeve is fired as Water Commissioner in the very first episode, by the man who bested him in the mayoral primary at the end of Season Three. Whether the decision by the mayor was politically motivated is something the series doesn’t address. If it was, though, Gildersleeve gives him an excuse. The season opener has probably the most ironic ending in the entire box set.

The stories after GIldersleeve is fired as water commissioner of Summerfield and therefore unemployed have some ups and downs, not helped by the show forgetting continuity about the family’s financial situation and Gildersleeve’s own prosperous past when it feels convenient. The overarching idea of the story is that Fibber McGee (from Fibber McGee and Molly) has come up with a post-war plan for a new mouse trap which Gildersleeve is pursuing. It doesn’t appear that this was actually a plot point on Fibber McGee and Molly at the time, so it appears McGee is acting off-air.

I didn’t care much for the plotline. There are some funny individual moments, but the mouse trap scheme is so thin, uninspired, and doomed to fail that it feels like a pointless McGuffin to center plots around. Probably the most interesting aspect of this whole series of episodes is when McGee is looking for a job and has a minute where he and a guest character discuss their feelings of uncertainty about the post-War economic future, as, even with the war still ongoing, some war manufacturing operations are winding down. Given the general positive vibe of the series on the war, that is a fascinating moment.

The second plot arc happens toward the end of the box set and it involves Gildersleeve and Judge Hooker (Earle Ross) trying to help a Spanish dance instructor get started in Summerfield. The judge is interested in her, and Gildersleeve tries to be supportive but is clearly attracted to her. There’s a failed party thrown by Gildersleeve to help her promote her business. Then events conspire to lead her to think Gildersleeve has proposed, and the box set ends up on one of the classic tropes of Golden Age comedy, the breach of promise suit. It’s the more funny and interesting plot and hopefully, there will be more resolution in Volume 12, although that volume has far more missing episodes than this one.

Outside of the overall arcs, the biggest thing to happen in this season is the formation of the Jolly Boys Club. This group would formalize the fraternity of Gildersleeve and his closest friends and also lend themselves to some great acapella performances of great standards of the era.

There is also a nice election day program that begins with comedy and political bluster, but ends up striking the most patriotic tone of any episode so far in this season.

Beyond the individual episodes, what impresses me is how lived-in Summerfield feels in these episodes. When I was listening to the first season, I was struck by how the only real characters throughout the season were Gildersleeve, his niece Marjorie (Lurene Tuttle), his nephew, Leroy, the family Cook (Birdie), and Judge Hooker.

At this point, the series regular supporting characters include Peavey, the druggist (Richard LeGrand), and Floyd the Barber (Arthur Q. Bryan) with both of Gildersleeve’s ex-fiancées continuing to make regular appearances. And there are also a number of recurring characters as well. Not everyone is in every episode, but as Season 4 starts, Summerfield easily feels like a real-world community, rather than just a staging area for a sitcom.

As usual, Radio Archives features a high audio quality on this set. All in all, these are a decent run of episodes. While I do think the first story arc was a bit lacking, the rest of the episodes more than make up for it. And the birth of the Jolly Boys club is something every fan of The Great Gildersleeve should listen to.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Audio Drama Review: Doctor Who: Operation Werewolf

by  • 0 Comments

In the 1960s, the British sci-fi classic series Doctor Who featured a unique mix of time and space travel. Anything could happen in a Doctor Who episode in this era, at least within the budget and the logistics of a series that aired 40-plus black-and-white episodes per year, mostly shot on soundstages, and with as limited a number of retakes as possible.

The series produced some great sci-fi epics, but some great storylines were rejected, and many were far too ambitious for 1960s television. One of these was a story written by famed British TV director Douglas Camfield (along with Robert Kitts) at a time when the series starred Patrick Troughton as the Doctor.

In 2024, the British audio drama company Big Finish recorded and released this story as a licensed audio drama, with second Doctor Patrick Troughton’s son, Michael Troughton, playing his father’s Doctor. He was joined by his father’s co-stars Frazier Hines and Wendy Padbury, reprising their roles as the Doctor’s young companions, 18th Century Scotsman Jamie McCrimmon, and late 21st century science whiz Zoe Herriot. The story was adapted to audio by Jonathan Morris.

The Plot:

The Doctor plans to take his friend to Normandy in 1066 but makes a slight miscalculation, instead landing in 1944. The TARDIS crew find themselves in a confused melee as they run into occupying Nazi forces and resistance fighters, and the Doctor is confused for a British operative who the Nazis are somehow aware of and plan to capture.

The Doctor says that they haven’t landed in the middle of Occupied France in World War II.  They have landed on June 4, 1944, with less than two days until the ground they are standing on becomes one of the bloodiest battlefields in history.

Worse yet, Nazi scientists have a secret plan to turn the tide of the war with new teleportation and brainwashing technology. The teleportation part of the plan is given a huge boost when the Doctor is forced to help them. Can the Doctor and his friends thwart the Nazis and get history back on the right track?

Review:

The story itself is a wild mix of science fiction and history, with no alien race involved in the Nazi plot. It’s a compelling combination of reality and the fantastic.  I also like how the script explores the idea of British Nazi sympathizers before the War taking their own covert action in support of Berlin. I also liked the idea of “The Doctor” actually being the codename for the British operative.

Operation Werewolf captures the spirit of the 1960s series while still being a fantastic adventure full of twists and turns throughout its three hour runtime. It features a large cast, much larger than a typical Big Finish story, to capture all the roles that would have been in the original television storyline. There were doubtless some tweaks to the storyline, particularly with the presence of Zoe, who hadn’t become a companion until a year after the original story was submitted, and was different than prior female companions. Still, the adaptation feels quite seamless.

As the Doctor, Michael Troughton captures the energy of his father’s Doctor. He plays the idea of the Doctor looking hapless but being quite cunning as he manages to play his foes against each other. As usual, Hines and Padbury slip back into the characters they played five decades ago and possess the vocal dexterity to make it believable and seamless. The rest of the supporting cast fits right into making this a believable period piece.

This is further supported by great sound design and music, which manage to create the audio illusion of a story set in the 1940s, being told in the 1960s.

There are minor points I’d critique with the story. The Nazis’ plan is very complex and one aspect of it is built up as a horrible threat (indeed it’s the basis for the name of the story) but it’s rather easily overcome in a way that didn’t quite feel earned. In my opinion, it would be better to have a simpler Nazi plan than to have one that has elements resolved in a way that feels cheap. In addition, a character turns out to be distantly related to Jamie, although they conclude that Jamie likely isn’t a direct ancestor. There doesn’t seem to be much point to this plot element.

Still, these are minor complaints for a story that is a really fantastic 1960s science fiction adventure story that’s chock-full of action and intrigue.

In addition, the release also includes an extras section where the cast is interviewed. The best part is where Hines and Padbury share their lovely memories of working with Camfield as a director.  It also includes a music suite by Jamie Robertson which is evocative of the 1960s.

All in all, Operation Werewolf is a great listen for fans of classic Doctor Who, but I also think if you like classic science fiction adventure, this a story you can enjoy without knowing very much at all about Doctor Who.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Operation Werewolf is available for purchase at BigFinish.com

Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Audio Drama Review: The Kojak Dramas from Power Records

by  • 2 Comments


Background:

Audio dramas and stories released on records were rare but not unheard of before World War 2. For example, the cast of Superman performed several short record-only programs in the first part of the 1940s. However, after the War, children’s records were the primary use of this medium, including  Peter Pan, Golden, and Disneyland records. These companies released albums of children’s music and also began to feature stories. Peter Pan became known for its book and story sets in which kids listening could follow along in the book.

Story records often featured adaptations of public domain stories, as well as original children’s material. Some of these records were read by a narrator, and others were full-cast audio dramas.  Over time, companies began to produce records about popular children’s characters of the day. Peter Pan was a leader in this, as they produced records for beloved children’s characters like Scooby Doo, Bozo the Clown, the Flintstones, and Yogi Bear. Through their label, Power Records, Peter Pan produced records featuring DC and Marvel’s most famous comic creations. Power Records also dipped its toe into other popular series that would appeal to older kids and adults, like Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Space 1999, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Kojak. 

Kojak, the 1970s street-level police series starring Telly Savalas, sticks out in the midst of the Power Records line-up of sci-fi and superheroes. It’s hard to explain why they chose Kojak, as it doesn’t fit their audience. Unfortunately, there’s not much documentation or contemporary reviews of these releases. The best potential explanation I could find is that Power Records competitor Wonderland Records did an album featuring another street-level 1970s cop series, Beretta, the year before, and Power Records decided to match. Of course, we don’t know why Wonderland Records did a Beretta record, but that’s a bit beyond the purview of this review.

 

Synopsis:

There were a total of four Kojak audio dramas produced by Power Records. The first two, “Five Star Final” and “A Question of Honor“, were comic book and record sets, as was normal for many Powers Records releases. Comic books took the place that children’s books had with the Peter Pan releases.  An album was released that collected those two stories as well as two additional tales, “Tourist Trap” and “The Prodigal Son”. The two-record set didn’t include a comic. Each audio drama is between nine and ten-and-a-half minutes long.

In “Five Star Final”, a racketeer leans on a newsstand operator running a small-time numbers game and kills him. In “A Question of Honor”, a white-collar thief selling some hot bonds decides to rob and kill his buyer, take the money and the bonds, and flee. He doesn’t care who he has to kill to make his getaway. In “Tourist Trap”, the owner of one of Kojak’s favorite Greek restaurants is part of an immigration racket to get cheap labor. In “The Prodigal Son”, an entitled junior attorney digs into his father’s files and tries to blackmail a corrupt political appointee. Failing that, the young attorney murders him. Kojak’s investigation into the crime is frustrated by a pompous FBI agent.

Review:

The voice talent in this release is superb. There are six listed cast members (five men and one woman) for the album who voice all the characters that show up throughout four different episodes and you wouldn’t know it. As was typical for Power Records, the actual actors from the TV series didn’t participate. However, the actor who plays Kojak is uncanny and I found myself thinking it was Telly Savalas a few times during the record. It really is a remarkable performance.

The sound effects are good particularly for the era. The Greek restaurant in “Toruist Trap” is well-realized.

This one uses the series’s music as opposed to many other Power records, which had to settle for generic stock music. This gives it a nice bit of authenticity and continuity with the show. And the same goes for the artwork for the comic and record set. The supporting cast members (Captain McNeil, and Detectives Crocker and Stavros) are very good representations of the characters as they appear on television. The overall feel and art for the comic story works fine in the crime genre. My only issues with it are one questionable coloring choice, and a goof where a female police officer who we’re told is a detective is drawn in uniform. But those are minor points in a solid artistic output.

The stories themselves are entertaining, though varying in quality. “Tourist Trap” is the strongest story as it lets us see Kojak in a unique situation. “A Question of Honor” is a very intense tale with so much happening in its nine-minute run time. “Five Star Final” is fine, although it is probably the most forgettable of the four. The titular “Prodigal Son” of the last story is a bit insufferable, made so by a scene where he talks with his dad at his office to complain about how he’s entitled to success as he’s the greatest attorney ever. This is mitigated by satisfying scenes of Kojak pushing around a federal agent.

While fun, the stories are simplified. This means criminals make some dumb mistakes or escalate quickly to bring the story to a head. While it wasn’t the typical practice of Power Records, it may have been a stronger production had Power opted to make two stories of eighteen or nineteen minutes rather than the shorter tales featured. This would make particular sense given the radio revival movement in the 1970s that saw millions tuning in to programs like The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, showing that listener attention spams could support the longer length.

Still, it’s an entertaining curiosity that is a nice treat for fans of Kojak or 1970s detective dramas in general.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5

Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Audio Drama Review: Paul Temple: The Complete Radio Collection: Volume Three

by  • 2 Comments

The third collection (affiliate link) of surviving Paul Temple radio episode serials brings listeners all five Paul Temple radio series released by the BBC between November 1959 and March 1968, starring Peter Coke as mystery writer and detective Paul Temple and Marjorie Westbury as his wife Steve.

Most of the serials were broadcast in eight half-hour installments. The exception to this is 1965’s “The Geneva Mystery,” which was only six parts. There are three serials that were original and two that that were remade from previously used scripts. The 1959-60 version of “The Gilbert Case” may be the most superfluous surviving serial, as the 1954 version of this same serial, which also starred Coke and Westbury, survives, and the scripts are virtually identical, although the supporting cast is identifying. “The Jonathan Mystery” fills in a key gap, as the 1951 version of the serial, starring Kim Peacock and Westbury is missing.

The serials follow very similar formulas. An inciting event presents Paul Temple a baffling set of circumstances that invariably draw him into a case and into danger. He and Steve provide charming banter and are the souls of friendly politeness to all they meet. There are many cordial conversations, and some a bit more rough, as Paul has friends in high and low places. Along the way, there will be a car crash or two, an explosion, and probably an attempted poisoning or two. There are also plenty of red herrings.

Paul Temple mysteries are complex affairs that keep the audience guessing. The crimes are never for the simple straightforward reasons most detective fiction operates in. Paul Temple cases don’t really come down to simple motives like revenge, lust, or greed. Rather, they are complicated affairs involving complex criminal conspiracies for crimes like smuggling, blackmail, and drug trafficking. Thus the mystery doesn’t follow a simple “Whodunit?” plot. The why of the murder is actually the biggest question. The who of the murder involves figuring out where each of the suspects fits (or doesn’t) into the broader criminal conspiracy and who is deceiving Paul Temple for some relatively trivial reason or because they’re secretly undercover detectives.

Paul and Steve have some great conversations about the case and Steve is a great audience representation character for raising the right questions that the audience would ask (at least if they were as clever as her). However, so he doesn’t tip his hand too much to the audience, he often withholds answers or only hints to tease the audience and set up the final denouement, which usually occurs in his flat with all the suspects gathered, and often ends in an escape attempt he hasn’t fully prepared for.

The stories are filled with tropes and cliches, which will annoy some listeners. However, writer Frances Durberidge knew his audience, he knew what they wanted, and he wrote his scripts that way, and also had top-notch casts that carried them off without a hitch (aside from the occasionally dodgy attempts at American accents by the guest cast).  If you listen to one Paul Temple episode and you like the style of the story and want to hear others with the same style, you can listen to any other Paul Temple mystery and be just as delighted.

As tough as it is to differentiate between one Paul Temple story and another, there are some subtle differences in those stories that were original to the 1960s. “The Margo Mystery” of 1961 begins with a really intense moment (for Paul Temple anyway) where Steve is frantic and Temple is at his most grim. There’s also a smattering of minor swear words in the later serials that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today. The only big differentiation I’d call out is that the final cliffhanger in “The Alex Affair” (1968) is probably the best cliffhanger in any surviving serial (although the payoff in the final part is a bit lackluster).

The collection includes the bonus BBC radio program from 2005, Peter Coke and the Paul Temple Affair, where the BBC’s Michael Saunders interviews the then-92-year-old Coke about Paul Temple. Coke had retired from acting to focus on antiquing and his seashell art. Coke is sharp and able to provide keen insights from his time on the series, and Saunders is able to communicate to him how the serials are still appreciated by younger audiences on reruns on BBC 7 (now BBC Radio 4 Extra).

This makes a nice bonus on an already splendid collection. To the end of its original radio run, Paul Temple remained a delightful series that served its audience well. If you’d enjoy a pleasant mid-twentieth British mystery featuring skilled radio actors and crew, this (or the previous Paul Temple sets) are well-worth checking out.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Golden Age Article

The Top 5 Sympathetic Dragnet Criminals

by  • 0 Comments

Dragnet has a reputation for its no-nonsense, tough-on-crime stories. Particularly in the 1960s, Sergeant Joe Friday was known for bringing down the hammer on scummy criminals, which was particularly cathartic in the midst of rising crime. Friday told off criminals in a satisfying way, as when he confronted a racist child molester. “Now you listen to me, you gutter-mouthed punk. I’ve dealt with you before, and every time I did, it took me a month to wash off the filth.”

Yet Dragnet was dedicated to realism and reality, which is often more complex in the ways that human brokenness can lead to crime. Among the perpetrators Sergeant Friday came upon were kids with negligent parents, desperate people, lonely people, and others who’d just lost their way. Despite the pop culture image, Friday didn’t try to throw the book at everybody, and the series didn’t try to make the audience hate them. There are many more examples from both the 1960s TV series and the original radio and TV series of criminals getting a more sympathetic portrayal.

Below are my Top Five. Note when I refer to Friday’s partner, he had one partner in the radio version and another in the TV version.

Spoilers ahead for programs that were all broadcast more than 50 years ago.

5) Virginia Sterling from The Big Shoplift

Radio Air Date: October 11, 1951

Original TV Air Date:  March 11, 1954

Mrs. Sterling (Peggy Webber) isn’t an obvious choice for a sympathetic criminal. She is the well-dressed wife of a wealthy doctor who commits a string of acts of shoplifting that throws suspicion on an innocent sales associate and costs that sales associate her job. When she finally confesses, she reveals that her shoplifting is part of a long-running kleptomania that is aggravated by her loneliness and feelings of low self-esteem. After telling her story, she asks Friday if there is an answer. He laments that there is, but she won’t find it in jail.

4) Stanley Stover in Burglary DR-31

Original TV Air Date: March 6, 1969

Stover (Tim Donnelly) commits a series of burglaries of superhero movie memorabilia. He is in costume as “The Crimson Crusader” and claims to be such. The costume looks silly, as it reflects both being homemade and a bit of 1960s color palette. It is only under questioning that Stover reveals what drove him into a fantasy world and a life of crime. He reveals that he was abandoned by his father and was bullied and beaten up in school. He says the pain didn’t bother him as much as the fact that he hadn’t done anything. He was a fat kid. “Why should people hate a kid for being fat? It’s hard enough being a fat kid without people hating you for it.”

3) Majorie Lewis in The Big Show

Original Radio Air Date: April 10, 1952

Original TV Air Date: January 25, 1953

Lewis (Virginia Gregg) reports that she found a seven-week old baby that had been abandoned by his mother on a bus Lewis had been riding from Phoenix. Friday and his partner investigate and find the truth: the young mother was invented. The driver tells them that Lewis got on the bus with the baby. They confront her with the evidence and she tells them what happened. She had been married to an Army Captain who left her alone when he went overseas. She had gone to a party and ended up having one night stand that led to the pregnancy. She had to choose between her husband and her baby. She asks Friday to help tell her husband about what happened and he and his partner agree to help.

2) Elroy Graham in The Big Present 

Original Radio Air Date: November 24, 1953

Original TV Air Date: October 21, 1954

Friday and Smith are searching for a burglar who has committed eighteen small burglaries and leaves behind a bottle of milk at each robbery. The culprit turns out to be a nearly fifteen-year-old boy named Elroy Graham (Sammy Ogg).  He refuses to talk until he can be assured he’ll appear in the newspaper. One of the other officers pretends to be a newspaper reporter. Eventually, he breaks down and tells his story in tears. He has been bullied by the other kids because he’s small (4’7″, 85 pounds).  The only way he could think of to gain respect was do something big, and the only he could think of was the burglaries. “I didn’t mind the kids saying I was little, but I didn’t want them to think I was small.”

1) Roberta Salazar in The Big Mother

Original Radio Air Date: November 9, 1950

Original TV Release Date: January 31, 1952

Friday and his partner are called to a hospital where a baby has been kidnapped from a nursery. They get a few tips and are able to locate the baby. A Mrs. Salazar (Peggy Webber) had taken the baby from the hospital and claimed him as her own. They arrive at the Salazar home to find a party going on for the baby’s baptism. When confronted, Mrs. Salazar reveals what had happened. She and her husband had gone through more than a decade of infertility, and finally got pregnant. Her husband (Harry Bartel) had to continue to work but sent her to a relative in Phoenix to have the baby because he thought the climate would be better. However, the baby died at birth and she feared having to tell him what happened, when she walked by the hospital and saw her chance due to a hospital security lapse.

Webber turns in a beautifully tragic performance, and Bartel deserves plaudits for his performance in the TV version as he conveys Mr. Salazar’s heartbreak that he doesn’t really express verbally, as he’s trying to be there for his wife. It’s one aspect that the TV version offers that the radio performance can’t.

Of course, these sort of episodes could stir up controversy. Some accused the TV version of The Big Show of condoning adultery.

None of these episodes pretends the crimes committed were right or somehow excusable. Dragnet maintained a strong moral core throughout its radio run and both TV runs. However, the series also reflected compassion and understanding for those whose crimes were the result of mental disturbances and human frailty. Dragnet saw no contradiction between those two ideas.

 

Book Review, Golden Age Article

Book Review: Monk and the Blue Flu

by  • 0 Comments

A version of this article was published in 2011.

How do you get more Monk if eight years wasn’t enough? You can read the Monk novels by Lee Goldberg (or more to the point, listen to the book through Audible). While I could have started with the first Monk novel, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, I decided to skip that one as it was adapted to a Season 5 episode. Instead I opted for a novel had a far more interesting plot – Monk and the Blue Flu.

The Plot:  Police are not getting what they want in negotiations with the city. With a serial killer on the loose, detectives and senior officers phone in sick, staging a “blue flu” to put pressure on the city.

The Mayor of San Francisco offers to reinstate Monk and make him Captain of Homicide if he’ll help out during the crisis. Monk jumps at the chance and takes command of a motley crew of discharged cops called back to duty, including a senile detective, a paranoid schizophrenic detective, and a violent psychotic detective.

The Mystery: Goldberg crafted a fine mystery here, with multiple cases playing out in the novel. We’ve got nine separate murders (with a shoplifting ring thrown in for the heck of it) and three different killers.

One complaint with Monk in the later seasons was that the mystery element of the show seemed weak. No problem here. This is a fun ride with clever cases that really require some thought to solve.

The mystery is in the tradition of the cozy mystery, told without a whole lot of bloody details.  In other elements of the story, Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu is about as clean or even more so than the TV version, with the notable exception of some pretty tacky flirting between two of the psychotic detective’s assistants.

Monkness:

A Monk story is more than just a mystery. The characters on Monk, particularly Monk himself, add the comedy and drama that makes the show a winning combination even when the mystery lets us down. Here, Goldberg falls short.

The book is told from the perspective of Monk’s assistant, Natalie Teager. This is a popular tactic for mystery writers to use when dealing with genius detectives (think Dr. Watson or Archie Goodwin). It’s difficult to see the world through the eyes of a super genius, and that goes double for Monk. However, in the book, using Natalie doesn’t work well, as she doesn’t quite ring true to the Natalie we know from the TV series.

Natalie’s narration is filled with what’s known in the writing business as “telling.” We are repeatedly taken out of the story to get her opinions on everything from politics to shopping.

Her daughter, Julie, doesn’t ring true either, as a somewhat shallow fashion diva, nor does Captain Stottlemeyer seem to be quite right. Even Monk is occassionally not himself, going way over the top, even for him.

In one scene early in the book, Captain Stottlemeyer steps in dog doo at a crime scene. Monk insists that Stottlemeyer remove a shoe and have it sent for hazardous waste destruction and Stottlemeyer actually goes along with this. I didn’t buy Monk going that far, nor Stottlemeyer humoring him to that degree. This also creates a strange inconsistency in the story. When Monk has Natalie surrender a shoe, he insists that she remove both shoes for symmetrical reasons, but no such insistence was made with Stottlemeyer earlier.

While the characters are more expressive about emotions in this story than in a normal episode of Monk, the emotional scenes have less impact.  On the TV show, the writers were experts at showing us things that evoke emotion. Here, we are more told how to feel about different scenes.

Of course, to be fair, Goldberg’s task is a challenging one. While it is difficult to adapt books as movies and television shows, it’s even harder to adapt a television show to a book. While we may have an idea of what a character is like from reading a book, when we’ve seen a character on a TV show, the actor’s interpretation has given our imaginations a solid picture of who the character is, and we don’t like deviations.

You also lose things in translation between the mediums. For example, Goldberg can’t show us Monk during his therapy session with Dr. Kroger due to the limit of having the story told from Natalie’s point of view.

The book does have its moments in several scenes when Monk acts like Monk. Randy Disher is well-done, although we don’t see enough of him in this story.  I will say that while the looney detectives on Monk’s replacement squad are a bit stereotypical, the idea of all of these psychoses coexisting within the same division is pretty funny.

It also continues the Monk tradition of providing hope for those with mental illness. The clear message is that they could overcome their difficulties to function in society, even if their approach to life is a little different. While I won’t give away the exact conclusion, Goldberg does give Monk’s colleagues an amicable ending.

If you read Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, you can expect a pretty good mystery and a story that has its moments. However, don’t expect to get an episode of Monk via audiobook or paperback.

Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu is available on Amazon (affiliate link)

DVD Review, Golden Age Article

Film Review: The Street With No Name

by  • 0 Comments

In The Street with No Name, a young FBI agent (Mark Stevens) is dispatched by FBI Inspector George Briggs (Lloyd Nolan, reprising the role from The House on 92nd Street) to a generic American city to infiltrate an emerging criminal organization led by a charismatic and clever criminal (Richard Widmark) whose wartime experience has inspired some new twists on how criminal organizations work.

The story has a realistic tone to its investigative procedures, with the gimmick of actual FBI agents being involved in the production or appearing in the roles they played in the original case. Nolan turns in his usual solid and believable performance as the officious Inspector Briggs. This was an early role for Richard Widmark, who easily turns in the most compelling performance of the film as a menacing and unpredictable lead villain who commands the audience’s attention each time he’s on screen.

The story of the investigation is interesting enough, yet it’s a bit bland, particularly in comparison to some of the other great procedural films of the era, such as He Walked by Night, T-Men, and especially House on 92nd Street. Outside of Widmark’s character, there are no really interesting characters. The forgettable and interchangeable men who play the thugs in this feature pale in comparison to the colorful German agents of House on 92nd Street brought to life by expert character actors.

The one other character who shows promise of being able to make some sort of impact is the villain’s wife (Barbara Lawrence), who has some strong moments opposite Widmark, but is ultimately and brutally sidelined before the final act.

One of the big interest factors is the FBI’s cooperation, which I can’t help but feel led to them choosing to dramatize a case that put the FBI in a great light, but isn’t nearly as interesting as it could have been.

At the end of the day, it’s an okay crime thriller with two big points of interest that may make it worth watching: the outstanding performance of Richard Widmark and the historical curiosity about older FBI procedures and the participation of actual agents in making the picture.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5

Street with No Name is available on DVD on Amazon. (Affiliate link)

Book Review, Golden Age Article

A Review of the Zeck Trilogy

by  • 0 Comments

A version of this article was posted in 2011.

Holmes had Moriarty, but who did Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe have?

For three books, published between 1948 and 1950, crime boss Arnold Zeck served as an antagonist for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

And Be a Villain

A man who writes a horseracing tip sheet is poisoned on a radio talk show while drinking the sponsor’s product. Wolfe is hired to solve the case by the sponsors and the show’s star.

On the positive side, this mystery had many twists and turns as to who was even the intended victim. At one point, Wolfe gets so disgusted with the show’s staff for lying to him and wasting days of his time that he turns a key piece of information over to Inspector Cramer in the hope that Cramer will find the killer and earn Wolfe’s fee for him. When this plan fails, Archie executes a daring move to get Wolfe back on the case.

This particular novel had a few moments where it became a tad tedious. It takes until Chapter 4 for an exact agreement to be reached as to who will be paying Wolfe and how much. Then we have pages consumed by detailing when the staff came in to be interviewed in what turned out to be pointless and fruitless interviews because they had all agreed to conceal a vital fact. Perhaps this helps us sympathize with Wolfe when he walks off the case, as we’re tempted to as well.

But no one ought to walk away. The book’s look at the world of 1940s radio is worth the read for fans of old time radio. Also, when Wolfe does get back on the case, the mystery continues to twist and turn as we wrestle with who was the target and who had opportunity commit the crime.

In And Be a Villain, Zeck plays a minimal role. He threatens Wolfe to be careful where he treads in investigating the case. Wolfe figures out Zeck’s role in the crime that led to the murder he’s investigating, but as the fact isn’t essential to the police investigation, he leaves Zeck out of it.

Perhaps, this is the great challenges with the Zeck trilogy. While Holmes and Moriarity were driven by ego and intellectual vanity ever closer towards a fatal confrontation, Wolfe would rather not deal with Zeck if he doesn’t have to, and all things considered, Zeck would rather not rid the world of Wolfe because it would make the world less interesting. They’re willing to do what they have to do, but as I finished listening to the audiobook of And Be a Villain, I knew it was going to take something big to get this rivalry off the ground.

Rating: Satisfactory

The Second Confession

Something would come in The Second Confession. Wolfe takes a case for a rich industrialist who suspects his daughter’s boyfriend is a Communist. Zeck calls Wolfe and makes it clear that he doesn’t want the case investigated. He punctuates his demand by shooting up Wolfe’s plant room and destroying thousands of dollars in plants.

However, when the young man is murdered, everything is reversed. Zeck wants the man’s killer caught. Wolfe begins an investigation with plenty of caveats offered to everyone involved. Along the way, Wolfe takes on the American Communist Party to get the information needed to seal his case. The Second Confession shows both the anti-Communist leanings of the Montenegrin-born Wolfe, as well as Stout’s own American-born anti-Communist perspective. With plenty of plot twists and a nice bit of political intrigue thrown in, this is a fun and multi-faceted Wolfe story.

Wolfe begins to realize that a confrontation with Zeck may be unavoidable and so he begins to make preparations just in case. However, all things being equal, he’d still rather leave Zeck alone.

Rating: Very Satisfactory

In the Best Families

As The Second Confession ends with Zeck congratulating Wolfe on solving the case and Wolfe once again reiterating his independence, readers have a sense that this can’t go on forever. Things come to a head at last in the next book in this trilogy, In The Best Families. Wolfe agrees to help a woman who merely wants to know where her husband gets his money. Zeck shows his disapproval of Wolfe taking on the case by intercepting a package of expensive sausages and putting tear gas in its place.

After yet another menacing phone call from Zeck, Wolfe and Archie confer on what to do. Archie figures that since their last encounter with Zeck, they’d taken forty cases, and Wolfe thinks that running into Zeck every forty cases is quite likely. Wolfe and Archie have to decide whether to oppose Zeck or to acquiesce to him and back off whatever case he doesn’t want them on. Archie thinks that, without the other, either one of them might have given in to Zeck, but neither wanted to be seen as cowardly by the other. So their course is set, though Archie doesn’t know what that course will entail.

Archie goes to spend a weekend with the client and her family to get a feel for her husband, and while he’s there, the client is murdered. He calls up Wolfe and fills him in. True to that old saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” Wolfe gets going, fleeing the brownstone, setting up alternate arrangements for his orchids and servants, placing the house on the market, and ordering Archie not to follow him. He leaves his old friend Marco as Power of Attorney.

The next few chapters after Wolfe’s disappearance are fascinating for fans of the Wolfe stories as we get an idea of what the characters would be like in Wolfe’s absence. Theodore, the gardener, sulks; Fritz, the cook, shows almost maternal concern, and NYPD homicide inspector Cramer shows up to offer some friendly advice. Cramer’s appearance is noteworthy, as it begins with Cramer showing that he’s a smart cop and ends with him taking a swing with Archie when the latter suggests Cramer is on the take.

Archie takes center stage in these chapters. Wolfe’s disappearance puts Archie in a bad spot, as the DA believes that Wolfe knows who committed the murder and that Archie knows where Wolfe is. Due to Archie’s reputation as a skillful liar, no one believes him when he insists he has no idea where Wolfe has gone.

In addition to this, while Archie is allowed to collect his salary and stay in the house until a sale occurs, he has been left with nothing to do other than follow up on unfinished cases and collect payments from clients on payment plans. Wolfe has left instructions for Archie with Marco that are incredibly vague: “You are to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.”

Archie is clearly miffed by Wolfe leaving him holding the bag. He also misses working with Wolfe. However, unlike a more modern assistant, Archie follows Wolfe’s command not to search for him.

The Zeck trilogy does a good job showcasing the complexity of the Archie-Wolfe relationship, with its various elements that are understood by the two, even if they are never spoken in a quasi-parental or mentorship relationship.

Wolfe can be protective of Archie. Indeed, when Archie first learns of Zeck in And Be A Villain, Wolfe orders Archie to forget he’s heard the name. And there’s a sense that Wolfe is continuing that protective behavior by leaving Archie out of the loop during the dangerous preliminary stages of his plan against Zeck, only bringing Archie in when it becomes absolutely necessary.

Archie doesn’t care for being protected, nor is Nero Wolfe’s legman meant to sit around for months waiting for Wolfe to make a move. So Archie stops taking a salary from Wolfe and opens his own private detective agency. He hopes his first case will be to solve the murder of Wolfe’s last client. When he fails to get cooperation, he drums up business and prides himself on earning clearly more than Wolfe pays him. Still, when Wolfe comes back, there’s no question of staying on his own.

Given that there were 25 years of Wolfe books after In The Best Families, it’s not a spoiler to say that Wolfe returns and triumphs over Zeck. However, I will say that the final showdown is anti-climatic after the fascinating character drama that drives the middle of the story. The final confrontation between the two (if we can even call it that) is disappointing.

In the final analysis, Zeck disappoints because he is not equal to the task in going against Wolfe. To be sure, he is a dangerous technocrat, but he’s still a technocrat. Zeck builds systems that keep him safe: a network of B, C, and D operatives that shield him while turning a profit. It seems that nearly every racket that Zeck is involved in is one where Zeck thinks he’s figured out how to avoid any danger.

In the midst of his foolproof systems, and risk-free crimes, Zeck seems weak at anticipating human behavior, expecting it to fall into neat patterns. Zeck handles Wolfe with typical mafioso style and forces a confrontation he can’t win. Wolfe’s understanding of human behavior and his ability to see the flaws in Zeck’s systems assures the outcome as soon as Wolfe steps out of the Brownstone.

The actual mystery of who killed Wolfe’s client is relatively simple. And indeed, it’s surprising that it remains a secret for so long, as the key clue is revealed to all important parties early in the book. Readers could be excused as Stout directed our attention to the character-driven story and Wolfe’s dealing with Zeck.

So on one hand, In the Best Families has a weaker mystery and a disappointing villain, but it also offers some insights into Archie and the characters in Wolfe’s world. The middle part of the book is interesting enough to carry the rest of it. So, overall I’ll give the book:

Rating: Satisfactory

The Zeck Trilogy is available for the Kindle. (Affiliate link)

Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Green Acres on Radio

by  • 0 Comments

 

A version of this article appeared in 2010.
Green Acres

 

If you mention Green Acres, people think of the 1965-71 Sitcom starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor. But fifteen years before Green Acres came to TV,  it came to radio.

CBS broadcast Granby’s Green Acres as a Summer replacement series. Granby’s Green Acres told the story of John Granby, a Banker who got fed up with city life and took his wife and family to relocate to a farm.

Sound familiar?

The radio Green Acres were written by a 33-year old writer, who would go on to write 150 of the 170 TV episodes of Green Acres.

There were quite a few similarities between the radio and TV versions of Green Acres. Both featured a scatter-brained Mr. Kimball (although the radio Mr. Kimball ran the county store rather than being the County Agent.) Granby also had a farm hand named Eb. The radio show had some good bits that Sommers would dust off for early TV episodes.

An early Green Acres TV episode where Oliver can’t decide what to plant has its basis in the radio episode, “Mr. Granby Plants a Crop.”

And this great little bit of dialogue was transplanted directly from the radio:

Oliver: I’d take a seed, a tiny little seed, I’d plant it in the ground, I’d put some dirt on it, I’d water it, and pretty soon, do you know what I would have?
Lisa: A dirty little wet seed.

At the end of the radio run. John Granby (Gale Gordon) told listeners to send letters in to their local CBS station with their thoughts on Granby’s Green Acres.  The show never returned to the air.

There were many reasons the show didn’t make it in 1950. First, I don’t think audiences were ready for it. Americans had migrated in large numbers to cities like New York and Los Angeles in search of economic opportunities. Granby’s desire to move to the country seemed absurd. When Green Acres appeared on TV, it was a very different world with violence, unrest, and crime on the rise. Moving to Hooterville sounded a lot less crazy and made us more sympathetic with Mr. Douglas.

The biggest problem with Granby’s Green Acres may have been that it just wasn’t ready for prime time. Granby is too much of a cantankerous blowhard. The radio version gives you an appreciation of the talent with which Eddie Albert played the role of Oliver Wendell Douglas, as a complex mix of bombast, idealism, practicality, and romance that makes the character a joy to watch.

In the radio version, Sommers only had given real airtime to Mr. Kimball from the store, and a know-it-all all County Agent who always ate Granby’s supper. Pretty thin gruel.

Not continuing Granby’s Green Acres was a smart decision. Even with great comics like Burns and Allen leaving radio for television, radio comedy was still undergoing a golden age and Sommers’s creation simply was not in the same league as shows like Our Miss Brooks, Life of Riley, and Life with Luigi.

It also had a nice aftermath. Sommers continued to develop as a writer and work in the world of television, writing on such shows as Amos and Andy, Dennis the Menace, and Petticoat Junction. When Green Acres got its second beginning, it became one of television’s most beloved sitcoms.

It features Pat Buttram turning in the role Mr. Haney, who is always trying to sell Mr. Douglas something, Eva Gabor as the sweet but often confusing Hungarian princess Lisa Douglas, and the Ziffels, who treat their pig like he’s their son, and much more.

While the radio show didn’t have these elements, it serves as a rough draft of Green Acres, which makes it an interesting listen.

You can listen to Granby’s Green Acres here. You can currently watch Green Acres for free with Pluo.

DVD Review, Golden Age Article

Telefilm Review: Kojak: How Cruel the Frost, How Bright the Stars

by  • 2 Comments

Kojak
Background:

Kojak was a 1970s series starring Telly Savalas as a bald NYPD Greek-American Lieutenant Theo Kojak. The series was in the top 20 for ratings in its first three seasons. The series and Savalas won multiple awards during its run. In its third season, Kojak featured its first and only Christmas episode, which aired on December 21, 1975.

The Plot:

A skeleton crew is set to work on Christmas Eve at the 11th precinct, with Kojak having the night off. Those plans get scuttled as two different cases emerge with life-and-death stakes. A man who shot a woman in a bar and was injured in the process is still on the loose. In addition, a young woman from a wealthy family wants the police to track down her boyfriend because she fears he’s going to commit a robbery to get her a Christmas present.

Review:

There are crime shows that pretty much abandon their premise for Christmas, but Kojak didn’t. While the stakes were not as big as in other episodes, Kojak still offers two separate cases that involve peril with at least one life on the line in each case. The episode is well-paced and sticks to a mostly realistic plot and story structure, but with some nice Christmas moments, such as when Kojak and his Captain receive presents from his men. The scene of the Christmas party in the precinct gives some good character insight about Kojak and the men who work under him.

The guest cast is competent and features a couple of noted talents. This is the TV debut of Veronica Hamel, who’d go on to net five Emmy nominations for her work on the 1980s police classic Hill Street Blues. A young future Emmy Winner John Laroquette (Night Court, Boston Legal, The Librarians) has a small role as well.

It’s Kojak who has the most memorable moments, showing both wisdom and compassion when confronting difficult situations, and having a lovely personal moment before events interrupt his date.

The biggest challenge with this episode is figuring out how to view it as a Christmas episode. Unlike some Christmas episodes, it doesn’t overwhelm you with Christmas cheer or atmosphere. It also isn’t one of those depressing or truly dark holiday tales that are popular in some quarters. The situations, while serious, are not grim or dire, and neither situation ends up as bad as it could have been.

It’s tempting to view the episode as coincidentally set at Christmastime for the sake of it. The episode approaches a subtler theme of the Christmas story – that of sorrow at the current state of the world. While not depressing, the episode does have some downbeat moments, which makes sense for an episode that aired in a post-Watergate and post-Vietnam world with skyrocketing crime rates.

The opening dialogue-free street scene features a minute of a song of lament (I couldn’t find the title and the IMDB page only listed the traditional Christmas songs in the music credit). It begins with:

What have we lost in
all of the days flown by?
A dream or two has gone to die.
What have we lost in only a year gone on?
We’ve seen some sadness and felt the cold.

One of the episode’s key scenes features Kojak talking to a young Greek lady who immigrated to the United States three years ago. She has very high English proficiency and a grasp of the current cultural situation, but has only picked up vague information about past events. As a lifelong New Yorker, Kojak tells her about the past. This leads to some humorous moments, such as her getting confused about why the Giants are playing in New York rather than San Francisco, and not really understanding why Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were ever a team.

It also finds Kojak reflecting on how life has changed in the city. There’s a whiff of nostalgia, but Kojak also acknowledges that the past had its problems, reflecting on how the streets were dirty, yet not smog-filled as they have become, and not with the level of crime. He reflects, “Summer nights, believe it or not, you could walk in the park—any park in New York.

“And downtown, the Lower East Side. Great place. Pushcarts and selling watermelons and pineapples and bananas and flowers and people and laughter and like that. You let the fun go out of this city, Eleonora. Everybody’s afraid of everybody else now.”

Yet, this sorrow doesn’t sour Kojak. Towards the end of the episode, Kojak warns that everyone in the city will be wearing bulletproof vests if folks don’t wake up, and then adds, “But you know something, Frank? It’s our neighborhood, right, baby? We gotta love it.”

And fundamentally, that’s what makes this episode work. It’s about a man who sees the sorry state of the world but does love and serve the people of his community and mitigate the damage while longing for better days.

Kojak shouting, “Love thy neighbor, baby!” might not be the most usual moment in a Christmas episode, but it sums this one up nicely.

Rating: 4.25 out of 5.

All Five seasons of Kojak are currently streaming on Amazon Prime.(affiliate link)

DVD Review, Golden Age Article

DVD Review: Hawkins: The Complete TV Movie Collection

by  • 0 Comments

A version of this article appeared in 2016

A recognizable and beloved Hollywood actor from Hollywood’s yesteryear playing a sharp and folksy lawyer who solves mysteries? That description will make people think of Matlock, starring Andy Griffith. However, more than a decade before Andy Griffith played the hot-dog-loving Southern lawyer, Jimmy Stewart brought the concept to the small screen as Billy Jim Hawkins, a homespun West Virginia lawyer with a penchant for getting to the truth and winning tough cases.

The Warner Archives DVD set (affiliate link) includes all eight of the Hawkins telefilms that aired in 1973 and 1974. The first film is ninety minutes long. The other seven are seventy-five minutes long, as they aired along with another mystery series to compete with the popular NBC Mystery Wheel.

In each case, after a sensational murder has been committed, Hawkins is called in to defend the accused, who generally has a massive amount of circumstantial evidence pointing towards their guilt. Hawkins usually has to win his client’s trust, insert himself into his client’s world, and get to the bottom of the case, with the help of his assistants, to clear his client.

Like Matlock and Perry Mason, every movie ends with a climactic courtroom scene where Hawkins reveals the true killer. There are a few more nods to legal procedure in this series than in either of those better-known series. In particular, the series acknowledges that, as Hawkins hasn’t been licensed to practice law in every state, to appear in those states, he needs to be working under a local attorney who will serve as the Attorney of Record for the defense, even though Hawkins will do the arguing.

The Supporting Cast

In each episode, Hawkins is helped by one or more assistants. One of the key points of Hawkins’s backstory is that Hawkins has an enormous extended family of more than a hundred people. In different episodes, different members of that family show up to assist. Most frequently, it’s R.J. Hawkins (Strother Martin), but Jeremiah Stocker (Mayf Nutter) and Earl Coleman (James Hampton) take turns as well. Stewart has the best chemistry with Strother Martin, and R.J. Hawkins is the most interesting character, which is probably why R.J. Hawkins is in the final three films without any other assistants after only appearing in two of the first five.

The guest stars are generally quite competent. There’s an early performance by Tyne Daly, as well as appearances by Golden Age Hollywood notables like Lew Ayers and Teresa Wright, along with character actress extraordinaire Jeanette Nolan. One of the more interesting guest appearances is James Best, playing a serious role as a sheriff in the episode “Blood Feud.” In a few years, he would take on the role of the ultimate comic sheriff, Rosco Coltrane.

The Lead

Ultimately, while the scripts were decent and the supporting cast is competent, it’s Jimmy Stewart who makes the series worth watching. While watching the first few minutes of the opening film, I thought Stewart had overplayed the folksiness, but once he settles into the role, he makes Hawkins special. Hawkins is a country boy, and he doesn’t put on airs. Everyone who meets him is urged to call him Billy Jim.

Yet, at the same time, Hawkins has a keen mind and is aware of how the world works. Like many of the characters Stewart played over the years, Hawkins lives by a code.  His life is dedicated to the core principle that everyone’s entitled to a defense. Hawkins has a great way of connecting with and gaining the confidence of clients who’ve been unwilling to act in their own defense before.

In the courtroom scenes, Stewart is superb, building a level of rapport and using subtle humor to undercut the prosecution and then delivering an innocent “aw shucks, I’m just a country lawyer” type of comment to deflect objections from the prosecution. The scenes where he confronts the genuine murderer are incredibly compelling. Hawkins was one of the more credible TV lawyers to be featured in this sort of program. In many ways, he seems true to life to other nationally known trial attorneys, such as Gerry Spence, as opposed to a character someone made up.

Stewart’s acting netted him a well-deserved Golden Globe Award for Best Actor.

Why It Only Lasted One Season

In addition to Stewart’s win, the series was nominated for a Golden Globe, as was Strother Martin for Best Supporting Actor. However, despite critical recognition, the series went away after a single season. Why?

CBS created the series as a counter to NBC’s rotating mystery programs, and CBS didn’t quite seem to understand a big part of why NBC enjoyed success. NBC rotated Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife along with a few other series that only lasted a season or two. The beauty of the mystery wheel was that these programs all appealed to the same audience and if you liked one, there was a good chance you liked them all, and NBC could count on you to watch their mystery movie every Sunday night.

CBS on the other hand rotated Hawkins with the TV series Shaft, based on the Blacksploitation film series of the early 1970s. The two series drew two very different audiences and there was little crossover in audiences between the two shows and as a result, both got cancelled. Hawkins could have lasted longer if not for the network’s scheduling mistake.

Is This Series For You?

If you love classic lawyer series, these films are for you. Stewart’s Hawkins is at least as good as Perry Mason or Matlock. If you’re a fan of Jimmy Stewart’s later work, this is also a must, as this was arguably Stewart’s last great role before his career went on the downswing and hearing loss drove him to semi-retirement in the early 1980s.

Overall, I found Hawkins to be an enjoyable series that stands up well when compared to most of its 70s peers.

 

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0

 

Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Audio Drama Review: The Great Gildersleeve, Volume 10

by  • 0 Comments

*The tenth volume of Radio Archive’s Great Gildersleeve collection collects all of the circulating episodes of The Great Gildersleeve from March 12-June 25,1944, which includes the conclusion of the 1943-44 radio season, and also wraps up the third season’s storyline.

There are lost episodes in sets for this season, but thankfully, the final nine episodes are in circulation, which is really helpful, as the ongoing story really takes center stage. Gildersleeve (Harold Peary) has already decided to run for Mayor of Summerfield, but he also ends up proposing marriage. School principal Eve Goodwin (Bea Benaderet) has agreed to marry Gildersleeve if he manages to win victory in the June 25 primary. If he doesn’t … she keeps her cards pretty close to the vest on what her response will be.

Gildersleeve’s relationship with Eve is interesting. There’s a three-episode arc involving Eve’s mother’s visit to Summerfield and Gildersleeve meeting her. It’s an interesting dynamic. He’s initially nervous but actually finds himself liking her. But when the dynamic between Eve and her mother starts to get in the way of romance, Gildersleeve has to try to work through the complicated and difficult wartime travel situation to get her back to her home. It’s a very different sort of mix and shows a bit more nuance than the typical hostile relationship.

The light-hearted campaign storyline was interesting to listen to, particularly as a far less lighthearted election was playing out while I was listening to the volume. One thing I had to appreciate is that they worked up a backstory for Summerfield’s political situation. Because people of all parties listened to the radio, they didn’t want to offend anyone. So there are two generically named parties in Summerfield and the writers worked up an entire story of how they split, and Republicans and Democrats ended up in both of them. Now, it might take some suspension of disbelief to believe that Summerfield formed its own pocket political universe, but the writers earn right to the benefit of the doubt with the detail they put into this explanation.

The war figures in this story in subte and not-so-subtle ways. In addition to creating a plot point that makes it hard for Eve’s mother to leave town, the end of the show is given to in-universe PSAs that are surprisingly effective.

Gildersleeve’s challenge to the incumbent Mayor gets off to a rocky start. However, a turning point is when the Mayor decides to put Gildersleeve on the spot and have him sing at the town picnic. Gildersleeve wows the crowd and is asked for countless encores, gaining in popularity and heading to frontrunner status. However, as election day and potentially the date for setting his wedding near, we’re treated to the same internal conflict that Gildersleeve shows in the previous season. He’s a man of big ambitions and big dreams but he also likes his status quo life and is afraid of it changing. Will he win despite himself or will subtle (and sometimes not-too-subtle) self-sabotage doom him?

Without giving away the ending, I like the way the writers handle it. The show’s final episode offers a satisfying conclusion to Gildersleeve’s story line without feeling like a retread of season two’s conclusion, while still being true to the character. As usual, the series features strong supporting performances, with Gildersleeve’s iconic supporting characters like Judge Hooker (Earle Ross), Mr. Peavey the Druggist (Richard LeGrand), Floyd the Barber (Arthur Q. Bryan), and his cook Birdie (Lillian Randolph).

There are few points for real complaint with the box set or the season as a whole. As usual, Radio Archives provides a high-quality production which provides a better listening experience than most circulating Gildersleeve episodes. One might wish that there were more episodes, with a greater focus on Gildersleeve‘s supporting cast. But the number of lost episodes makes this judgment hard, as there could have been more episodes focusing on supporting players, but they’re lost. The only real complaint is that the character of Gildersleeve’s niece Marjorie (Lurene Tuttle) seems a little less mature this season, which leads to some weaker jokes.

Still, what we have of season three is very strong. It mixes music, romance, comedy, drama, and a bit of political satire for good measure to create a really grand listening experience.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5