Tag: fair review

Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Review: Sealtest Variety Theater

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Doing a live radio broadcast from a Houston hotel ballroom to a rowdy crowd on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1949 seemed like a good idea to someone. That infamous 1949 broadcast of the Sealtest Variety Theater became one of the biggest live radio fails in history and what the series is remembered for.

The Sealtest Variety Theater had a total of 42 broadcasts between its premier in September 1948 and it going off the air in July 1949. It was hosted by Dorothy Lamour who had co-starred in most of the Road movies with the legends Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. The show featured a dazzling array of stars including Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, William Powell, Boris Karloff, and Sidney Greenstreet along with legends such as Hope, Abbott and Costello, Jim and Marianne Jordan as Fibber McGee and Molly, Norris Goff and Chester Lauck and Lum ‘n Abner, Harold Peary as the Great Gildersleeve, and Ed Gardner as Archie from Duffy’s Tavern.

Lamour’s charisma and star power was on full display. She remained likable throughout the series run and provided nice musical performances as well. She appeared to have been enjoying the series, laughing regularly and making the audience want to laugh along with her.

Additional musical entertainment was provided by Henry Russell and his orchestra and the Crew Chiefs. The music is all pleasant to listen to and on par with what you’d hear on most other radio programs.

Through the show’s first seven months on the air, the format included plenty of music, a dramatic sketch between Lamour and the guest of the week, and a comedy bit. Sometimes Lamour performed in the comedic sketches. Other times, a comedy team like Abbott and Costello would perform a typical routine or there’d be an occasional stand-up sketch.

The comedy was pretty solid for the Golden Age. The dramatic sketches were a mixed bag. Some were fairly good, but others seemed trite, silly, or simplistic. I mostly enjoyed them, but there were a few times I felt bad that a talented actor had to work with that material.

The infamous Saint Patrick’s day performance fell during this run. The wild crowd and technical difficulties led to sound quality issues and a profanity being spoken over the air by a male voice. To her credit, Lamour remained calm through it all. It was radio veteran Gardener who lost it and ignored her attempts to keep the show on script by trying to come up with something random that would make the crowd happy.

The event made headlines and Lamour didn’t run for it. In one sketch later on where she had to boast of what deeds made her character tough enough for something, she said, “Oh yeah, well I did a show at a hotel in Houston.”

In April, the show tweaked its format. The music stayed, but the dramatic sketches and individual comedy guest spots were done away with. Eddie Bracken joined the series and it became something of a sitcom like Lamour and Bracken playing fictionalized versions of themselves, with Bracken finding ways to get himself and Lamour into trouble every week.

Bracken was a fair comic talent. In many ways, his style called to mind Alan Young’s style as an exuberant born loser who often believed Hollywood actors were exactly like the people they played in the movies.

Young filled in for Bracken in an incident that illustrates the culture of the golden age of radio. Young happened to be at the studio to record his own program and did the guess spot on Sealtest on 15 minutes notice. You couldn’t even tell the script had been written for another actor.

Overall, this is a decent comedy/music program.It didn’t have mind-blowing comedy or music, but it’s a pleasant and fun listen with some great talent. It deserves remembered for more than technical difficulties and some rowdy drunks ruining its Saint Patrick’s Day program.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5

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Audio Drama Review, Golden Age Article

Audio Drama Review: Four by L’Amour

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As I’ve mentioned before, Random House adapted several stories by the great Western Author Louie L’Amour to audio. Most of these are available as single releases, but some are available as collections, particularly those who have the same lead character. However, this collection of four audio dramas only has the irresistible rhyming title with four different heroes (all but one a one-shot character.)

In “No Man’s Man,” Gunslinger Lou Morgan is hired to get rid of a suitor to a woman he was madly in love with. However, he arrives to violence and so many complications.

I like this story. Even though it’s in the Old West, it reminds me of a classic hard-boiled detective novel: There’s a lying client, dangerous hoods, a mysterious woman who captures our hard-bitten hero’s heart. It has great action and a solid story.

In “Get Out of Town,” fourteen-year-old Tom Fairchild is the man of the house at his farm after his father dies and he goes to town to findhelp. He chooses to hire an ex-convict, Riley, against the advice older men in town. Tom’s an interesting character and this is a coming of age story for him. In the course of the hour audio drama, we see how he changes, in his relationship to Riley especially, as there’s a romantic spark between Riley and Tom’s mother. The story’s ending isn’t quite what you expect, particularly if you’re looking for big western action, but it’s still good drama.

In “McQueen of the Tumbling K”, Ward McQueen, the foreman of a ranch, sees a wounded man fleeing through the Tumbling’s K spread. In town, he learns a gambler is setting up a town and making advances towards the female owner of the ranch. In the middle of this, McQueen is waylaid and left for dead.

This story’s not horrible, but it’s the weakest story of the collection. The villain is painfully obvious, but McQueen is also too strong a hero. Once his physical survival is assured, there’s  not much of a question of the outcome. Everyone in town knows him and no one knows the villainous gambler. The earlier stories worked because you had established lone strangers in Morgan and Riley facing off against local bad guys without any locals having a reason to back them up. Here it’s reversed and doesn’t work as well.

Finally, we have “Booty for a Badman,” featuring one of L’Amour’s well known Sackett characters, Tell Sackett. Tell has had little luck as a miner, which makes him the logical choice to transport the other miners’ gold. Every miner who has left the camp as a known success ended up dead. If they send out someone who everyone knows has a failing mine, he shouldn’t get stopped–in theory.

Carrying $40,000 worth of gold is a risky proposition and it becomes even riskier when Tell encounters an Army wife who has had a breakdown and runaway as she can’t take the strain of living in the West.

This is a good story with a great sense of drama as well as a strong action scene. While we only get to spend an hour with Tell, we get a strong idea of his character. The resolution was one I could have seen coming a mile away, but it’s still a fun story.

Overall, while I liked some stories more than others, this is a nice sampling of stories from one of the most beloved best-selling authors of all time.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0

 

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Golden Age Article

DVD Review: Just Off Broadway

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In Just Off Broadway , Private Detective Michael Shayne is serving on a jury. He becomes convinced the defendant is innocent, so he votes not guilty and debates it in the jury room….

Actually, that’s what he would do in a rational world. Instead, Shayne conceals evidence from the police, gets a sleeping draft from the sheriff, and uses it to drug his roommate so he can escape a hotel room where he is sequestered with the rest of the jury and sets off on a madcap night of investigation to find the real killer.

The story works well as a Comedy Mystery, particularly as it’s an early film for Phil Silvers, who the first television generation would come to know as Sergeant Bilko. His role is relatively small but he plays it to the hilt. Nolan’s Shayne is very fun and charming. Majorie Weaver is solid if not outstanding as the female lead.

The quality of the restoration is very nice and probably better than most films in the series that have released, and the physical disk itself has a very elegant look. However, this comes at a cost. It is more than a bit expensive for a sixty-five minute B-movie even with the better quality.

It is far from the best movie in the series, but it’s still an enjoyable hour despite the fact that Shayne isn’t given a shred of motivation for his illegal actions. However, I liked the end, which, after so much absurdity, offers a realistic ending in a very funny way.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.0

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Book Review, Golden Age Article, Philip Marlowe

Book Review: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration

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Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration was published in 1988 on the 100th Anniversary of Chandler’s birth. The book collects more than twenty Marlowe short stories. While most of them are by newer authors, the book includes “The Pencil,” (1959) Raymond Chandler’s last completed Philip Marlowe story which (heretofore) has only been published in this collection.

To begin with, I’ll take a look at “The Pencil.” In it, a former mob figure asks Marlowe’s help in disappearing when threatened with being penciled out by mob hitmen. The story is good, astonishingly so. It was published in 1959 a year after Chandler wrote the awful Playback and it’s stunning to think the same author wrote both. The story isn’t quite the equal of, “Red Wind,” but stands up with the other Philip Marlowe stories published in Trouble is My Business.

“The Pencil” recaptures the feel of mean streets, fascinating characters, hard boiled dialogue, and a battle with the underworld that made Marlowe stories so good in the beginning. The story also brings back Anne Riordan from, Farewell, My Lovely who is a far more interesting character than Chandler’s insipid and vapid “love interests” of his 1950s novels. It even has Marlowe getting money out of the deal, so it’s a wonderful story and it’d be great if this story were added to future editions of Trouble is My Business so  a wider world of Marlowe fans could enjoy this story.

So that’s the last 30 pages of the book. What about the twenty plus stories and 339 pages that proceeded it? The writers were all admirers of Chandler and all competent as modern mystery writers. Many of them made a good try. For the most part, their stories weren’t on par with the originals but they were fairly enjoyable.

However, some stand out, both for good and ill.

  • “Saving Grace” by Joyce Harrington is one of the closest stories to Chandler stylistically. However, I  don’t like the end. It brings in the idea of sex crimes against children and a Jerry Springeresque final confrontation that leaves a bad taste.
  • “Malibu Tag Team” by Jonathan Valin captures a lot of the spirit of Farewell, My Lovely.
  • “Sad Eyed Blonde” by Dick Lochte  is a great take on Marlowe and the only pastiche that’s a sequel to a previous Chandler story. This story reintroduces characters from, “The Gold Fish” in a different sort of mystery. The end is pure hard boiled detective and is a great set-up.
  • “Dealer’s Choice” by Sara Paretsky, creator of V I Warshawski, takes a superb turn that really captures Chandler’s cadences in a tale that deals with the Japanese internment.
  • “Consultation in the Dark” by Frances Nevins, Jr. may not capture all of Chandler’s feel but it’s probably the second best story in the book behind, “The Pencil.” It’s a suspenseful tale when Marlowe is out of town, and a man comes to Marlowe asking for help. Marlowe’s reluctant but the man’s got a bomb tied to his chest.
  • “In the Jungle of the Cities,” by Roger Simon is a dull tale that rejects private eye tales to talk about the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was written back when Simon was on the left, and he’s since moved right. Whether he’d write something more interesting and less political now that his politics have changed or write something that’s as dull only with a right wing slant is an interesting question, and indeed far more interesting than this story.
  • “Star Bright” by John Lutz sees Marlowe involved in a search for and protection of a potential Hollywood starlet. It’s a compelling story that captures the essence of the character, and post-war Hollywood is a superb location for a Marlowe story.
  • “Locker 246” by Robert Randisi is an interesting tale where Marlowe is manipulated into a trip to New York. Marlowe’s sense of honor is reliable, in fact it’s predictable which works to someone’s advantage in a tale of Marlowe’s brief but action-packed trip to the Big Apple.
  • “Bitter Lemons” by Stuart Kaminsky creates a great Chandleresque character in Warren Hluska, a man who swore he’d never win a beauty contest but he actually did.
  • “The Man Who Knew Dick Bong” by Robert Crais is one of those stories that left me with mixed feelings. It works fine as a private eye tale, just not as a Marlowe tale. It’s also the story in the book that uses the most swearing. To be fair, Chandler did include a dash of swearing in the rich, sweet language of his novels. Emphasis on “a dash.” Crais uses more in his twenty-two page short story than Chandler used in some novels and generally more severe. Given how creative Chandler was with language, Crais’s story was jarring for its repetitiveness. Still, the plot was interesting.
  • “In the Line of Duty” by Jeremiah Healey is a story where I don’t think the author quite gets Marlowe’s sense of justice. Marlowe might go against established rules, but there’s always a reason. This story doesn’t capture how Marlowe thinks.
  • “The Alibi” by Ed Gorman captures the tone of Marlowe from The Long Goodbye. The dour, world-weary shamus gets a request for help from one of his few friends on the force. Anyone expecting a happy ending hasn’t been paying attention.
  • “Asia” finds Marlowe at a personal low in his life in 1958. However, an Asian woman gives him a chance to be a hero again. This is a great look at the Knight in Tarnished Armor. The actual case Marlowe gets into isn’t solved this story. In fact, it barely begins, but it’s a great character journey.

Each story is prefaced by a stylistic illustration and many of them are quite evocative of the era.

While this book is out of print, it is available cheaply (1 cent plus shipping on Amazon at the time of this writing.) That makes it a no-brainer for any fan of Marlowe or hard boiled detectives in general to pick up. “The Pencil” is a superb Chandler story and at least some of the rest of the stories in the book should catch the reader’s eye.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5.0

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