Series: The Avengers
Season 4, Episode 23
Original Air Date: March 5, 1966
“The House that Jack Built” begins atypically for an Avengers episode. Mrs. Peel (Diana Rigg) shows up to find John Steed (Patrick Macnee) developing photos. There’s no big case. She just stopped by for a friendly chat before heading off to look at a house her solicitor sent her a letter saying she’d inherited.
When Mrs. Peel arrives, she’s trapped inside the house and forced to wander through a series of confusing rooms, traps, and weird contraptions seemingly meant to reduce her to a state of terror.
This is a brilliant episode. The directing is superb, giving this situation a very haunting claustrophobic atmosphere throughout. The design of this house and all the related traps lend to the suspenseful feel.
This episode is also a showcase for Diana Rigg. While Steed finds clues that put him on Mrs. Peel’s trail and allow him to be in on the finale, the focus is on Mrs. Peel as she creeps through this house with few words. Rigg is superb. Mrs. Peel is one of the few female characters on television in this era who wouldn’t break out in hysterics. Rigg plays Mrs. Peel with appropriate coolness, without portraying a flippant bravado that would take the viewer out of the episode.
While the Avengers had a fun light touch, this episode shows the series could work with a serious and suspenseful tone, too. This episode is a classic that’s well worth watching.
Theater Five was the first great attempt to revive network radio drama after the end of the Golden Age of Network Radio Drama on September 30, 1962. Theater Five was launched in 1964 as a five-day-a-week series broadcast on ABC and originated in New York.
The Theater Five Project seeks to document the series and upgrade the circulating episodes of the program. In celebration of the sixtieth anniversary, a newly upgraded sixtieth-anniversary collection was posted. In addition to improved audio and thorough documentation, the collection includes one newly recovered episode that has not been in circulation among collectors, “And Dream No More.”
“And Dream No More” was broadcast on June 3,1965 and starred Conrad Nagel, a silent film matinee idol and later as a character in multiple mediums as well as a radio and TV personality and host. Nagel plays Dr. Roger Borton, a psychiatrist who has reached the portion of his career where he’s given up actually paying attention to what his patients say. In an early scene, Borton prescribes a pill to a patient dealing with a fear of crowds who objects. The doctor makes no attempts to respond and just tells him to do it and see him back there. Borton has developed a grand theory of everything that explains all mental illnesses: that they all come down to a fear of death. When a maid (Frances Cheney) for a wealthy client comes in troubled by predictive dreams, Borton already “knows” what’s going on and plans to treat her in time to leave for a golf game with a fellow doctor. But does he really?
Both Nagel and Cheney are great. Cheney does a good job portraying someone who really wants help but is in doubt of his very confident but also very pat answer. Nagel is superb in bringing a super-confident and overbearing character to life. The script by science fiction pioneer Nelson Bond is a taut piece of work that examines not only predictive dreams but the limits of human knowledge.
It’s a solid and thought-provoking script that enhances the already-strong circulating Theater Five canon.
The late Jim French is best remembered for his greatest creation, the Seattle-based, modern private eye Harry Nile. However, French produced many detective and crime shows during his remarkable four-decades-plus in radio. Imagination Theatre: The Investigators (affiliate link) from Radio Spirits is a sampler pack of nine different crime shows that French produced over the years as part of his Imagination Theatre
The set kicks off with three episodes of Harry Nile. These shows come from 1999, towards the tail end of the run of Phil Harper (the original actor to play Harry Nile). We’ve reviewed this series extensively before, but for those who haven’t heard of it, Harry Nile is a period piece set in late 1939 through the late 1950s. Initially, the titular detective worked out of Los Angeles, but then he moved to Seattle, where French’s research and attention to detail really shine. The episodes are superb. They’re tailored to provide a complete, compelling mystery in just about twenty minutes.
Next come three episodes of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which isn’t to be confused with the BBC Radio series of the same name. This stars John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes and Lawrence Albert as Watson. I’d listened to one of these before and hadn’t thought much of it. However, I did enjoy these. While they’re not the greatest of the Holmes pastiches, and a few of the British accents are a bit iffy, the stories do have a Doyle-esque feel to them. While I wouldn’t consider them in the same league as Big Finish’s or the BBC interpretations, it’s better than the 1947-49 radio version with John Stanley. If you enjoyed that take, you’ll enjoy this one as well.
Following that, we’re treated to two episodes of The Adventures of Dameron, which I was happy about. Dameron was French’s first radio detective. The episodes in this set aired in 1972 and were set in contemporary times. Dameron (Robert E. Lee Hardwick) is a freelance troubleshooter who takes on all sorts of cases. He’s like a 1970s Frank Race, though generally with better production quality. There’s a dearth of 1970s radio detectives, so the two in this set are a definite treat. We also get to hear actress Pat French, who later played the role of Harry Nile’s secretary and partner, Murphy.
We further get two episodes of Mr. Darnborough Investigates, starring David Natalie. These are cozy mysteries made in 2005 and 2015, but they could have been done in the Golden Age of Radio or over the BBC in the 1940s. Darnsborough is a gentleman detective who calls to mind Campion and Lord Peter Wimsey. If you enjoy those characters, you’ll like Darnsborough.
Then we get a couple episodes of Kerides the Thinker. This series has a different setting for a mystery series: third century BC Alexandria, Egypt. Kerides (Ulrick Dihle) is a travelling Greek student who goes around solving mysteries, accompanied by Adria, a former slave girl (Sarah Schenkkhan), who was freed after Kerides revealed her former master is a murderer. On one hand, I love the idea for the setting and it’s clear that the writers did their homework. On the other hand, the mysteries are so-so and the way Adria is written makes her seem insufferably whiny and unpleasant. Instead of being grateful for her freedom, she’s upset that she has lost her place in the world and has no idea what to do. It’s an interesting concept, but the way it’s realized doesn’t quite work for me.
Next up are three episodes of Kincaid, the Strange Seeker, starring Terry Rose. This one is a series about a TV reporter who investigates mysteries that always have a supernatural cause, such as bank robberies that turn out to be done by ghosts. I’m not a fan of supernatural mysteries, and I also wasn’t sure how to feel about these episodes. They aren’t scary and they don’t have a Twilight Zone-style twist. The stories seem off-the-wall more than anything else. In addition, I was bothered by how Kincaid gets hit with unwarranted skepticism despite a solid track record. Other than that, the production values are still good. This just wasn’t my thing.
Following this, we’re given three episodes of Raffles, the Gentleman Thief, starring John Armstrong. These are based on the character of A.J. Raffles, a brilliant gentleman thief created by E.W. Hornung. These were popular in their time but have faded from public consciousness. The adaptation does a good job of capturing the spirit of the original stories with good acting and good effects. The first two episodes are adaptations of Hornung’s original stories and the third is a solid pastiche. I’m not a huge fan of Raffles, but I could appreciate the way they handled the character. My only complaint is that Raffles, particularly as portrayed in these stories, isn’t an investigator of any sort, but plenty of people who enjoy detective fiction love Raffles. If you do, you will enjoy these stories.
Then we have the Hilary Caine Mysteries, which is my second favorite thing that Jim French Productions put out. It features Australian actress Karen Heaven as Hilary Caine, an on-staff “girl detective” for the British Tittle-Tattle Magazine. The series is set in the 1930s and finds Hilary stumbling into a crime scene being investigated by Inspector Finn (Randy Hoffmeyer). At first, she seems to be a bit silly, but ultimately she shows her cunning in solving the case. These are fun, light mysteries and Heaven is wonderful in the role of Hilary Caine.
The collection rounds up with two episodes (including one double-length episode) of the Anthony Rathe Chronicles, which is a modern British drama that follows the career of a guilt-ridden attorney who solves crimes to atone for a case he got wrong. It definitely has a modern BBC feel. It’s a bit soapy for my tastes, but the mysteries are well-written.
Overall, this was a fun mix of programs. While I liked some more than others, it was interesting to hear or re-listen to such a variety of detectives. It’s great to have a chance to appreciate all the audio dramas Jim French put out over nearly half a century, when most people thought audio drama was a thing of the past. I also think the success of this set may help Radio Spirits determine whether they release larger sets for Jim French series outside of the quite popular Harry Nile and Sherlock Holmes series.
As the World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers starts this weekend, I thought it’d be appropriate to share some baseball podcast episodes I’ve recorded for your listening pleasure. We’ve done A LOT of baseball-themed or baseball-linked programs over the past sixteen years. Detectives such as The Saint, Bulldog Drummond, and Boston Blackie have all had baseball-related capers. So this is not an exhaustive list by any means.
Snacks:
My latest podcast, the Old Time Radio Snack Wagon, features bite-sized podcast episodes and we’ve already featured some baseball-related snacks.
Of course, we’ve featured Abbott and Costello performing their famous “Who’s on First” sketch.
Then, we also played an episode of The Adventures of Babe Ruth, a series dedicated to the most iconic player who ever lived. A man so larger-than-life that he inspired this series of fictitious and fictionalized adventures.
Most recently, we featured a rare 1947 interview of the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, by a group of teenage baseball players from New York’s Police Athletic League.
Detective Stories:
In the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, the number of episodes that have some baseball tie-in is quite high. However, not every episode features a Baseball Hall-of-Famer, and in honor of both of this year’s World Series teams, we have shows featuring both a Yankee and a Dodger Hall-of-Famer.
In “The World Series Crime,” Ellery Queen is called in to find a star baseball player’s lucky bat before the start of a World Series game. Ellery Queen featured a panel of “armchair detectives” who would hear all the evidence that Ellery was provided and then guess at the solution before the radio audience was told who did it. One of the armchair detectives was Yankee second baseman and reigning American League MVP Joe Gordon. Gordon would go on in a few weeks to win the actual World Series that year.
Of course, Gordon didn’t act in the radio play. However, Dodgers legend Jackie Robinson did make a radio acting appearance in an episode of The Adventures of the Abbotts, in which Pat Abbott tries to solve the murder of a baseball catcher.
Of course, if you don’t care about Hall-of-Famers or your traditional baseball detective boilerplate stories, you might want to check out one of my favorite oddball episodes. It’s the only surviving episode of the New York anthology series The WOR Summer Playhouse. It’s a little story entitled “The Mystery Of The Perfect Throw From Left Field And The Conga Dancer’s Aunt.” It’s a quirky story about a part-time “clownpire” who can also play detective (and don’t even start to ask him about his day job).
Miscellaneous Baseball Old Time Radio
During the spring of 2020, when the Major League Baseball season was on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I did my bit to alleviate baseball fans’ hunger with a six-week mini-series. I’ll highlight three of these.
Gary Cooper stars in The Lux Radio Theater adaptation of his classic film Pride of the Yankees, where he plays all-time baseball great Lou Gehrig, whose greatness on the diamond was only matched by his courage and class in dealing with the tragedy that ended his baseball career and would eventually cost him his life.
Destination Freedom was a Chicago-based Golden Age radio series that told the stories of Black Americans. In “The Ballad of Satchel Paige,” the series tells the story of one of the game’s all-time greats and larger-than-life figures with appropriately epic musical accompaniment.
Finally, a bit further removed from reality is the X Minus One story “Martin Sam.” Now, X Minus One isn’t alone in imagining sci-fi baseball. In the 1990s, I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which often came back to the game, with it even being played on the Holodek. The Klingons, Bajorans, and Ferengi were similar enough to humans that they could easily play the game. However, Martian Sam asks what if we encountered an alien completely different from us, and he wanted to play baseball, and it was impossible for humans to beat him.
Conclusion
Whether you’re wanting to hear the voice of one of the game’s greats, relive a great story or hear a far-out adventure involving a Conga Dancer or an alien from outer space, I hope you’ll find these enjoyable listens, either in between games or when you get hungry for baseball in that long season when true fans are waiting for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training.
Solving a mystery is hard. It’s even harder if you’re trying to do it on an Earth nearing an apocalypse. It’s particularly challenging if you’ve been dead for thousands of years. However, Professor River Song (Alex Kingston) has to do just that to return to her family and a happy electronic afterlife in the first box set, “Last Words”, for her new Doctor Who spin-off series from Big Finish Production, The Life and Death of River Song.
Background
For the uninitiated, or even those who only saw Doctor Who on television, some explanation is in order. River Song was introduced as a character in the fourth series of Doctor Who in 2008 in the two-part story, The Silence in the Library andForest of the Dead. She and the Doctor arrive at a mysteriously abandoned library planet. She knows who the Doctor (David Tennant) is but he doesn’t recognize her. The Doctor is a time traveler and she’d met him in his future and they’d had a life of adventures together and (it’ll eventually be revealed) she had married the Doctor. These adventures would play out onscreen during the tenure of Tennant’s successors, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi.
In her first adventure on-screen, she dies heroically saving the Doctor. However, in last dramatic scene, the Doctor is able to save her data pattern and mental essence onto the library’s massive cloud, along with all the friends she had with her when they came to the Library, giving her a happy digital afterlife.
Of course, her further on-screen adventures add depth to her backstory. They also establish that she operated as a private eye during the 1930s, using the name Melody Malone.
In addition to her on-screen work, Kingston appears in twelve series’ worth of box sets in her previous series, The Diaries of River Song, as well as making guest appearances in numerous Big Finish Doctor Who audio series. None of these extra adventures are necessary to understand this set story, which occurrs after her time being stored in the library.
The Set-Up
It’s the distant future and apocalyptic solar flares are threatening to devastate Earth and its terrestrial-bound inhabitants, who long ago abandoned space travel. A multi-billionaire mogul (Greg Wise) has a bunker and plans to remake the world in his own image once the dust settles. But there’s a fly in the ointment, and mysterious forces could undermine his plans. To get to the bottom of this, he needs help. He acquires the library where River’s essence is housed and extracts that essence into a cloned body – a decaying cloned body.
He tasks River with finding a missing scientist who is the key to the whole conspiracy. If she helps him, she’ll get placed back in the library. If she doesn’t, she’ll die and be forever separated from her family. River thus finds herself alone, in an apocalyptic world of failing technologies and a doomed humanity. Her life depends on her uncovering a dangerous secret that people will kill to keep her from discovering.
Review
This isn’t the first time River Song has played detective (see my review of Series 7 of The Diary of River Song) but this story is different in that the entire four-hour box set tells a single story, a single apocalyptic mystery adventure. While the chapters have different titles, this is mostly a continual stream of the same story. Only the second chapter, “Fate and Fatality”, could be said to be set apart, as some listeners might be confused by River Song apparently being in a regency historical. But really it’s all the same piece.
What we’re given is a complex and well-developed plot that blends the detective and mystery genres seamlessly into the apocalyptic setting. The result is a thoroughly engaging bit of techno-noir within the frame of the Doctor Who universe.
As usual, Big Finish provides a solid cast of regulars from the British acting community with solid performances all around. Greg Wise is appropriately sinister as the ruthless billionaire. Jamie Parker does a great job playing a complex character whose morality and motives remain a mystery until the final chapter.
It’s Kingston who puts in the best performance. Writer Rob Valentine had been under the impression that this would be the last River Song story and wrote it accordingly. In the midst of the mystery and high-speed chases, Valentine shows sensitivity in exploring River as a character with emotional beats as she deals with living in a world without her husband or her library family. However, Valentine avoids making this a navel-gazing production by letting River Song’s actions show who she is more than her words.
Overall Thoughts:
It’s tough to make a four-hour full-cast audio drama work. But Big Finish nailed it. Last Words offers an engaging mystery, sci-fi action, a few laughs, and some beautifully played emotional moments that make this one of the best Big Finish releases of the year, and one of Kingston’s strongest performances.
Colonial Theatre released the third of its Perry Mason audio dramas, “The Case of the Lucky Legs.” As with the first two, this is an audio drama based on the original Perry Mason novels of the 1930s, but produced in the 21st Century.
Perry Mason is retained initially to take legal action against a beauty contest promoter who cheated small-town businessmen and a local young woman by promising her stardom as the winner of a Lucky Legs contest and then leaving her high and dry in Hollywood. When Perry goes to have a discussion with the con man, he finds the man murdered.
Perry finds himself dodging the police until he can find the truth, questioning the witnesses, all while not even sure who the client is, as the man who gave a retainer for $5,000 to file the lawsuit keeps changing who Perry is supposed to represent.
The recording is quite a bit shorter than the previous Perry Mason stories that Colonial Theater had done and the length works for this story. It really creates a very tight and well-paced mystery. The plot is full of twists and surprises. At one point, Perry even hires another detective agency to spy on Paul Drake’s operative, only it turns out they are working for the man who paid him.
If there is one criticism I have for the production, it is that role of the winner of the Lucky Legs contest had a voice that didn’t fit the part. She sounded more like 14 rather than 21. Still, that’s a minor flaw in a brilliant production.
H.C. McNeile’s novel Bulldog Drummond (originally Bull-dog Drummond) successfully re-introduced the character of Hugh Drummond to the world (following a little-regarded short story in The Strand in which Drummond was a policeman). In the novel, Drummond is a veteran officer of the First World War who finds himself bored with peacetime living. He puts an ad in the London Times advertising for adventure and gets it when a young woman’s concern about his father’s business acquaintances puts Drummond up against a dangerous of ruthless gang of international conspirators.
Bulldog Drummond fits into a continuity of adventure and mystery literature. The catch-and-release game that Drummond and his foes play calls to mind books like The Lone Wolf and its protagonist, Michael Lanyard, a well as many other adventure books of the era. The concern about sensational conspiracies threatening civilization originated from Anarchist activity prior to World War I, the war itself, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. A shadowy conspiracy overthrowing the established fo made for a good villain. It also called to mind several later works. Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence would use a similar newspaper ad to find adventure in The Secret Adversary two years later. While reading about Drummond’s escapades and the activities of the men who joined him, I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Saint novels by Leslie Charteris.
What sets Bulldog Drummond apart is the titular character. Drummond is unusual in that one of his most noted characteristics was that he was utterly unattractive. (This was an element that films forgot when casting actors like Ray Milland to play him.) The other key point is that Bulldog Drummond came out in an era when many literary adventurers were various shades of gray with criminals and ex-criminals like Boston Blackie, The Saint, and the Lone Wolf. By contrast, Drummond is a heroic figure, whose decision to delay involving the law reflects honor and love, not attempts to acquire boodle. Drummond is proficient and resourceful, but no genius, which means the spots he gets himself into believable and relatable.
Drummond comes off as a simple, likable hero. He defends the world from forces that seek to overthrow it, not because he believes in the status quo, but because he thinks that evolution, rather than revolution, is key to solving society’s ills.
Beyond that, Bulldog Drummond is a good solid mystery adventure story. If you enjoyed the other stories I’ve mentioned and are in the mood for something fun that’s similar to those, this is worth checking out.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Bulldog Drummond is in the Public Domain and can be read for Free at Project Gutenberg
As I was researching the career of James Earl Jones, I found out he had a detective series from 1990-91 called Gabriel’s Fire. The series has not been officially released on DVD but the pilot has been posted on YouTube.
Gabriel Bird (James Earl Jones) is an ex-cop serving a life sentence for murder. A friend is murdered in the prison yard and his friend’s lawyer Victoria Heller (Laila Robins) wants Bird’s help to find the killer, but Bird refuses to cooperate. She decides she wants his cooperation and so sets out to have him freed from prison and gets his two-decade-old murder conviction thrown out on a technicality.
If Heller getting Bird released from prison and getting a murder conviction thrown out without his cooperation is so uncomplicated (compared to actual cases) that it calls to mind comedian Ryan’s George’s catchphrase, “super easy, barely an inconvenience,” Bird’s reaction is much more grounded. While Heller had hoped for gratitude and for Gabriel to agree to help her investigation, what she gets is anger from a man who had long ago given up hope of getting out, and now has to cope with an unfamiliar world he isn’t ready for.
Jones is compelling throughout the episode, capturing the range of emotions of a man who has forgotten what it’s like to be on the outside and is unsure of his place of the world, plagued by his own feelings of guilt, and his fear of being abandoned and forgotten. He’s a man in his 50s who’s trying to figure out who he is. It’s a difficult process, but with some highlights. One of the best scenes is shortly after his release, when he orders a hot dog. It’s a simple scene that shows Jones’s superb talent.
Beyond establishing Bird as a character, and also establishing some plot points that could be addressed in the series proper (his missing ex-wife and daughter, and the police having it in for him), the episode spends most of its time with Bird in the stage of “rejecting the call to adventure,” a stage of the hero’s journey. When he does finally take the case, he manages to solve it within minutes of screen time. The pilot probably would have benefitted from being TV movie length. Still, for as quick as the resolution was, it was still dramatically satisfying and moved Bird’s character forward.
All in all, it was a fascinating hour of television that left me eager to view more. It’s easy to see that Jones won an Emmy for his work on the series. I really hope that rights holders will make this series available on streaming or DVD.
James Earl Jones passed away on September 9th. He was a part of American culture in so many ways. His voice was Darth Vader and Mufasa, and his “People Will Come” speech from Field of Dreams is something every good baseball fan watches every year.
Yet there were other roles. One of my earliest experiences with James Earl Jones was in the 1980s “Mathnet” sketch on PBS’ Square One TV, where Jones plays Chief Thad Green. These programs helped build my love of mysteries. I decided to review one of these cases that made its way onto the Internet.
Background:
Square One TV aimed to teach kids mathematic principles through a series of sketches. These included game shows, sitcom parodies, a Pacman-themed video sketch called “Mathman”, an animated do-gooder called Dirk Niblick, and there was even music videos. Who could forget the Meatloaf-inspired 8% of My Love?
But the segment I loved the best, and which came to dominate the show in its later seasons was “Mathnet.” This Dragnet pastiche features two mathematicians who use math to solve criminal cases. The narrator/Joe Friday parody was Kate Monday (Beverly Leech). In later seasons, she’d be replaced by Pat Tuesday (Toni Di Buono). The partner throughout was Office George Frankly (Joe Howard), who leaned into the zaniness Harry Morgan brought to the role of Bill Gannon. Jones played their boss, Chief Thad Green.
The character’s name is a major Easter egg for fans of the original Dragnet. The name of the second boss on the Dragnet radio series and during the first Dragnet TV episode in 1951 was Thad Brown. This indicates the level of awareness and respect the creative team had for the source show, even though they were making a kids’ TV sketch.
“The Problem of the Passing Parade” was aired as a 9-minute segment on each daily episode of Square One between February 9 and February 13, 1987. The program begins when Green asks the two mathematicians to help him use some math to plan the logistics for a parade to honor music legend Steve Stringbean (a Bruce Springsteen knock-off played by Alan Schrock). They work out various aspects of security and crowd control using math, but then get word that Stringbean has been kidnapped. With the aid of a young eyewitness, and drummer nicknamed Rimshot (Andre Gower), who is a friend of the kidnapped superstar, they set out to solve the case.
Educational Value:While I was very entertained by the series as a kid, watching it as an adult nearly forty years later, I realized, “They were teaching us some things.” Some of the mathematics in this particular episode may have been a bit over viewers’ heads, likely with the hope that they would retain them long-term as they dealt with some of the mathematics of music and the chromatic scale. But for the purpose of the episode, they make it simple enough that your average elementary school kid can follow it. Beyond just the type of math, the episode teaches problem-solving skills. It also introduces kids to the ideas of databases and gives an understanding of how those work, which is something that would become very relevant in the lives of many viewers. In addition, the whole episode makes math look like something relevant that viewers would use in their everyday lives, without being preachy about it. It’s a very solid and worthwhile approach that still stands up.
Comedy: Joe Howard is a delight as George Frankly, making the character hilarious and lovable. While he’s a bit kookier than Gannon, that works for fine on children’s television. Yet he’s never too wacky, can contribute to the problem-solving and knows his math. However, whenever they’re not calculating, George can deliver the most unexpected lines as Kate Monday somehow tries to keep the case moving along despite George’s beautiful strangeness, such as when he does an oral recitation of “I Love a Parade.”
Kate Monday begins segments after Monday by saying they’re watching clips from the previous day’s show, which is an amusing bit of fourth wall breaking.
The Mystery: The case has a reasonable benefit. Like Dragnet, it’s a procedural approach, as they use different mathematical methods and follow clues in order to locate Steve Stringbean. One of the key clues involves touch-tone dialing, which many children of the 1980s and 1990s might appreciate, but might be unfamiliar to more recent arrivals to the planet. Beyond that, it’s a good mystery story that, due to the nature of being told in nine-minute segments, requires big cliffhanger moments every few minutes.
The episode also captures some of the key stylistic beats of Dragnet without becoming farcical about it. Two scenes in particular stood out: a press conference in Green’s office where they speak to reporters about the case, and the capture of the criminals. This was a series that (when it wanted to) could really capture the cadence of the show was imitating.
The Chief: Given that Jones’ passing led to me taking this trip down memory lane, I focused a bit more on his performance. Chief Green, like the captains on the old Dragnet series, has the job of being the voice of authority, and the one who assigns cases to our heroes. In this episode, Green also interacts with the press. Jones was a pro and he delivers everything you could ask for. At this point in his career, he had already won a Grammy, a Tony, and a Golden Globe, and gotten nominated for an Emmy and Oscar. He was arguably overqualified for the part, but still, he adds an air of legitimacy to the proceedings.
Negatives: If there is one part of the proceeding that’s a bit off, it’s Rimshot, in particular, some of his dialogue, which seemed weirdly anachronistic and unnatural. It feels like dialogue from the late 1950s or 1960s, not the 1980s. For me, this sounded a discordant note.
Overall thoughts: This is a fun “Mathnet” story that has all the elements that would make it a beloved favorite that connected with so many viewers. It’s a great mix of math, mystery, and clever nods to Dragnet. Some elements (such as the evolution of databases and telephone technology) do make the story a bit of a cultural artifact that shows how things used to be done rather than providing insight into the way things are currently done. However, it also represents an approach to educational TV that’s not often taken in the 21st century and deserves another look.
The Telltale Clue was a summer 1954 TV series starring Anthony Ross (the original actor to play Danny Clover in Broadway’s My Beat) as Captain Richard Hale of “The Criminological Division” of the Police Department. Each week he solves a case where a key clue leads to the solution of the crime.
This particular episode of The Telltale Clue aired July 29, 1954. It is noteworthy for having been written by Gore Vidal under a pseudonym, and also for featuring a young Leslie Nielsen.
The story opens with a woman with a bullet wound being thrown from a moving car. With her dying words, she says she was shot by her husband. While that’s a strong piece of evidence, Captain Hale needs more. He finds a whole family’s worth of suspects, with her husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law all sure she was cheating on her husband.
As a mystery, the story is reasonably well-done. The mystery is a puzzle and manages to throw out a real red herring. However, as an overall production, it operates very close to the sort of melodrama that defined New York’s radio culture, and would figure in its future as a soap opera mecca for decades to come. In some ways, it’s an odd series to be on television, as CBS chose to launch this as a police procedural when more realistic programs like Dragnet were dominating the airwaves.
Most of the performances play to the heightened, almost soap-operatic style, and certainly Ross fits that mold. Captain Hale is still a sympathetic character in the end, but has to cut a probable solution in under thirty minutes. Ross does a good job, but the same can’t be said for many of his fellow actors, as there are a few bad performances that are either a bit too stiff or a bit too over-the-top for the story.
Twenty-six-year-old Nielsen turns in a solid performance. As with all of Nielsen’s work prior to Airplane in 1980, he turns in a solid dramatic performance as a man who knows more than he’s letting on.
All in all, this is a decent TV episode if you enjoy early live television and if you like your mysteries a little bit soapy.
Radio Archives’s ninth set of Great Gildersleeve episodes featuring Harold Peary contains twelve episodes, all the circulating programs from September 19, 1943 to March 19, 1944. The bulk of the third season of Gildersleeve focuses on Gildersleeve’s love life. The over-arching through-line in the story is about the love triangle between himself, the very newly widowed Leila Ransom (Shirley Mitchell), and elementary school principal Eve Goodwin (Bea Benaderet), who both find themselves vying for Gildersleeve’s affections.
Beyond this, the episodes are mostly self-contained stories that cover a lot of ground. In one episode, Gildersleeve having agitated against the old water commissioner in the previous season, he finds himself in “hot water” when low water pressure becomes a problem. My favorite episode is “Sleight Ride”, in which Gildersleeve gets together some male friends in the hopes of getting Eve and Leila to join them. The episode is nice for some fun character interactions. It’s also a bit of a time capsule, capturing a practice that you don’t see anymore except for some really rural parts of the country. It was probably out of style by 1944 in most places, but it was a plausible good time to have in a small town where gas rationing limited how much people could drive. The set ends with Gildersleeve launching a mayoral run (and immediately trying to ditch an important meeting with a congressman for the sake of his social life.)
The relationship angle is the most prominent part of the set and also the most frustrating. Once again, this has nothing to do with Radio Archives, but with the episodes missing from circulation. Of the twenty-seven episodes that aired during this time period, there are only twelve in circulation, and the fourteen missing episodes come in chunks of three, seven, and four weeks, so you feel like you’ve missed a few important points in the ongoing romance angle.
Gildersleeve, as a great sitcom hero, manages to provide plenty of situations that lead to misunderstandings, mostly in understandable ways. He’s non-committal and wants to avoid making up his mind, and when he does, he manages to say the wrong thing and botch things up. And by the end of this set, due to his indecision, rivals are emerging for him in both women’s lives, so maybe we’ll write about a love pentagon in the next set. Of course, he’s not the only one to cause problems. In one episode, Leila tricks Gildersleeve’s cook, Birdie (Lillian Randolph), into letting her take Gildersleeve’s roast. A major issue in an era defined by meat rationing!
The only real issue with Gildersleeve that seems a bit too stupid to be funny is that he keeps actively working to bring Lelia and Eve together for social occasions. They don’t like each other, it’s awkward, and ends uncomfortably for him. There’s no logical in-universe reason to do it. It just makes the story a bit convenient for the writers.
Still, it doesn’t happen that often in twelve episodes, and the series is enjoyable, with a solid ongoing cast. And, as always, Radio Archives does a beautiful job with the transfers. If you’ve enjoyed past GIldersleeve sets, you’ll enjoy this one, even while wishing we could hear all the missing episodes in this collection.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been posting reviews that focus on Batman actors in other detective and mystery programs as part of our Amazing World of Radio Summer Series. However, we’re getting creative this week. The only thing this week’s villain has was a brief cameo as himself, in the second-to-last episode of Kojak. So I decided it’d be nice to review a CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode with another Batman villain who didn’t appear during the Golden Age of Radio, but did some work during the era of radio revival. I’m referring to Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in seasons one and two of Batman.
In the March 1974 episode, a woman (Newmar) grows alarmed when her father becomes increasingly scared and paranoid. She summons her fiancé (Mandel Kramer) back from his trip to China to help sort things out. The fiancé checks with his millionaire future father-in-law and finds that he’s joined the Prometheus Society, a secret society that wants to bring back moral order to the world by doing stuff (making movies, releasing books) that they’ve not actually done with the donations they’ve received. They are led by a man who claims the ability to control fire, which he demonstrates by setting himself on fire without being burned at every meeting.
The millionaire future father-in-law has been commanded to fork over a million-dollar donation. One of his fellow society members had declined to do so, only to have his feet catch fire while he was at home, leaving such severe burns on his leg that it put him in a wheelchair. The fiancé calls in an old Marine buddy from Vietnam, who had since become a private detective, to help sort of everything out.
All in all, this is a solid mystery. There’s some great atmosphere and a good puzzle throughout that’s well-acted and even has one shocking surprise towards the end of the second act. The ending is harsh, with rough justice being arranged in a way that reminds you that this isn’t the Golden Age of Radio, although it has a strong “moral” about the danger of playing with fire.
My big complaint is that there’s not a ton for Julie Newmar to do in this. Her character brings in the fiancé, and her father reveals what’s going to the fiancé on the condition the fiancé not tell his adult daughter because I guess she can’t handle it. After this, she gets two scenes with nothing to do. It’s a waste of a talented actress, who had a significant number of credits to her name. I can only imagine that this script wasn’t written with her mind, but she happened to be available at the time and took the work, which usually amounted to half a day for a modest wage. On the bright side, she didn’t have to do much work for it.
Overall, other than the waste of Julie Newmar and a so
We continue our reviews that focus on Batman actors in other detective and mystery programs as part of our Amazing World of Radio Summer Series, focusing on their old-time radio work. This week, we take a look at Zsa Zsa Gabor, who guest-starred in a 1983 episode of Matt Houston, “The Purrfect Crime.” This episode originally aired January 9, 1983.
Background:
Matt Houston (Lee Horsey) is a Texas oil millionaire who moves to California to oversea off-shore drilling, but focuses most of his time on his hobby—being a private investigator. Horsey played Archie Goodwin in the 1980 Nero Wolfe series (See my review). Pamela Hensley plays his lawyer C.J. Parsons, who assists him on his cases, and, in a typical role for him, George Wydner plays Houston’s business manager whose purpose in the series is to hyperventilate about money.
The Plot:
A Cat Food tycoon who kept exotic cats is killed by his favorite tiger. Murder is suspected and his will bars any of his ex-wives (Gabor, Barbi Benton, Pat Crowley, and Janis Page) from collecting a dime of his money. This appears to be resolved when the police arrest the young, “simple” man (he’d probably be considered on the autism spectrum today) on the general principle of the police arresting the wrong person without any real evidence or motive.
Matt Houston is not convinced (and who could blame him?) and continues his search for the real killer.
This episode is ludicrous. However, some of it is clearly meant to be. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s character owns a spa (which her character in Batman also did.) She has a protective karate master boyfriend, played by Sonny Bono. Sonny. Bono. His character also announces when he’s about to go into karate fighting mode by screaming, “Karate!”
The episode also included an amusement park chase scene where our hero chases his quarry in a bumper boat and then face plants down a water slide after him in hot pursuit. Some of this is entertainingly goofy, but there are also a few moments of genuinely bad acting and some absurd lines that don’t land.
Horsey attempting to deliver homespun aphorisms is something else. “The kid knows no more about murder than a hog knows about a buggy whip.”
The solution, once you get through a bunch of artificially imposed drama and hoops, is painfully simple. Of course, the question of whodunnit isn’t quite as clear. But based on the limited evidence, it could have been anyone of three of the deceased’s ex-wives. We’re not really given a clue that supports Houston accusing the murderers. But he’s able to prove his theory with a little bit of trickery.
I’ll admit this is my first experience with the series, so I won’t judge it based on this one episode. According to one reviewer of this episode, this was the most goofy episode of the series. That says something, given the description I found of at least one other episode in this series. According to TV Tropes, in one episode, “Matt is abducted by real aliens in an episode where he’s investigating a (fake) claim of abduction covering up a murder. Of course, he doesn’t remember, no one else sees it, and the abduction has no relevance to the rest of the plot at all.”
All in all, while I can’t say I found the plot all that challenging, I was nevertheless entertained. Sonny Bono’s performance is a delight to watch. The more you appreciate detective programs that go a bit wacky, and enjoy ’80s cheese, the more you’ll like this episode.
We continue our reviews that focus on Batman actors as part of our Amazing World of Radio Summer Series, focusing on their old-time radio work. This week, we take a look at Tallulah Bankhead’s starring role in the 1944 film Lifeboat.
Eight American and British citizens are survivors of a passenger ship sunk by a Nazi U-boat. The first to arrive is famed photographer Connie Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), and she is joined by others, including an engine room crewman (John Hodiak), a wealthy industrialist (Henry Hull), the ship’s steward (Canada Lee), a nurse (Mary Anderson), and a mother (Heather Angel) who lost her baby. The cast is rounded out by actors Gus Smith and Hume Cronyn. They then pull up a U-boat crew survivor (Walter Sleazak), who has plans of his own.
While set in the middle of the ocean, the action is confined to the titular lifeboat, which both gives the film a claustrophobic feel, and a resemblance to a well-done stage play. This effect is furthered by director Alfred Hitchcock’s decision to forgo the orchestral score during the body of the film, with the only music coming from characters singing accompanied by another character on a flute.
That the film feels like a stage play makes it a natural vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead, one of the greatest stage actresses of her era, making a relatively rare film appearance. She gives a performance that shows a nice range. While by default, Connie is a very cynical character, there are softer and lighter moments, as well as a few more extreme moments. At each point, Bankhead is flawless.
Another stand-out performance was William Bendix, best known for his comedy roles, particularly his radio/television work in The Life of Riley. Bendix shows some real dramatic chops in his performance as Gus. Walter Sleazak also portrays a surprisingly complex Nazi character, who is eerily likable for most of his time on screen.
The film is smartly written, and while it’s got a pro-Allies propaganda message, it’s subtler than many of its contemporaries, which caused major controversy at the time. While different from many other Hitchcock vehicles, it still has many hallmarks of the great director’s other work. The limits on budget imposed by wartime hardship are apparent but it makes the most of what it has.
With strong performances all around, this remains an entertaining and engrossing war-time drama even 80 years later.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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We continue our reviews that focus on Batman actors in other detective and mystery programs as part of our Amazing World of Radio Summer Series, focusing on their old-time radio work. This week, we take a look at Vincent Price, who guest starred in the final Snoop Sisters TV movie, A Black Day for Bluebeard.
Background
The Snoop Sisters was part of NBC’s classic Mystery Wheel programs, which featured rotating detective programs designed to be aired in a ninety-minute time slot. Rather than being a full hour weekly program, each series would turn out several “movies” each year. The anchors of this format during its run were McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and the best of them all, Columbo. Viewers would tune in at the same time each week and see one of these programs. The wheel program began the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie.
In addition to the three mainstays, other series rotated on Sunday. In There was a Wednesday (later Tuesday) Mystery movie series launched as well. None of these series made it long-term in this format, mostly lasting only a season or two. One of these series was The Snoop Sisters, which aired in rotation as part of the Tuesday Mystery Movie. The series was part of the mystery wheel during the 1973-74 season and there were a total of five Snoop Sisters movies made.
The series focused on two elderly sisters, spinster mystery writer Ernesta Snoop (Helen Hayes) and her widowed sister and poet Gwendolyn Snoop Nicholson (Mildred Natwick) who drive around in a mid-1920s Lincoln and end up stumbling into mysteries that they solve with the help of their chauffer Barney.
The Plot:
The sisters are attending a festival of a friend and horrible horror movie actor Michael Bastion (Price) who is hoping to revive his career, and shows off his showmanship by arriving in a coffin. However, his wife is upset with him and uses the occasion of the festival and his attempted comeback to publicly announce she’s divorcing him.
She gets murdered during one of Bastion’s films and, unfortunately for him, he’s said some incriminating things that make him look like he murdered his wife for her money. However, Bastion insists that his wife wrote him out of her will and turns to the sisters to prove his innocence.
Review:
The Snoop Sisters has been compared to Murder, She Wrote for both having older female writers as the lead characters. While the concept is similar, the feel of the films is a bit more like Miss Marple but with a decided comedic edge to the material.
Both leads are delightful and bring a great sense of balance. Ernesta is the more serious-minded and somewhat more straight-laced sleuth. She does the heavy-duty questioning of witnesses and the humor she brings is a lot more subtle. Gwendolyn is the fun sister. She might be pushing 70 but thinks nothing of cosplaying as the Bride of Frankenstein at the horror movie marathon. She makes up outrageous cover stories to get them into places to investigate, hilariously stalls Bastion so he doesn’t get in the way of their investigation, and even improvs being a palmist to stall for time.
Vincent Price is good in this, playing a character that has a lot in common with him. Not only did Bastion make a lot of horror movies, he also has many extravagant tastes and, like Price, is an expert cook. One big difference is that Bastion is a bad actor, while Price was a good one. Bastion’s poor acting is the reason the sisters believe in his innocence. He’s too bad of an actor to actually fake innocence or surprise. Thankfully, only a good actor like Price can play a bad one like Bastion and have a result that’s good. Price is a marvelous guest star, as Bastion has some fun, over-the-top moments, but also does a good job playing the straight man to Gwendolyn’s scheming.
The story leans more towards the comedy than the mystery angle. That can work and mostly does. My main complaint is that before they even begin to investigate the murder, Bastion sends them to his house to retrieve his wife’s will. This means it takes a good long while to get the actually investigating of the murder. While there were some funny moments, plotwise, it comes across as padding. There are also a few minor plot elements that could have been improved. While this was enjoyable, this is a story that feels like it could have been a bit more tight.
Connections:
Roddy McDowell, who also played a villain in the 1960s Batman series, is among the guest stars in this series. On the creative end, three old-time radio veterans contributed to the story. The episode was directed by David Friedkin, who was part of the old-time radio writing team with Mort Fine. They wrote many old-time radio programs, including Broadway’s My Beat. The story was by Jackson GIllis, who wrote for many radio programs, including Let George Do It. One of the co-writers of the screenplay was Tony Barrett, who was a versatile radio character actor who also wrote for some radio programs towards the end of the Golden Age of Radio.
Rating:
I’d gotten the Snoop Sisters DVD a while back but hadn’t gotten around to watching it and was glad this series gave me an excuse to try the series out. Overall, if you love a good cozy mystery with a comedic spin, particularly with an older protagonist, this is a fun film to watch.
Rating: 3.75 out of 5
Availability:
The Snoop Sisters is not available on streaming anywhere. However, unlike many of the shorter-lived mystery wheel series, this one did receive an official DVD Release. (Affiliate link.)
