20thcenturyradio

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Sunday Spectacular: Experiment Perilous

“Yours is not the madness of genius, Mr. Bederaux, it’s the madness of despair.”

Tonight at 8:00 pm (Pacific), we present Experiment Perilous, courtesy of Studio One, with an introduction by Producer Fletcher Markle.

A psychiatrist (Ralph Bellamy) becomes involved with a beautiful woman (Gertrude Warner) treated like a child by her controlling, manipulative and wealthy husband (Everett Sloane).

The story based on a 1943 novel by Margaret Carpenter.

Listen Live 24/7! Catch our full lineup of drama, suspense, comedy, westerns, detective stories, science fiction and more. Click here!

Tune in every Sunday evening for a full hour of seriously entertaining radio and the very best from the golden era of radio right here on 20th Century Radio!

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Sunday Spectacular: The Moon’s Our Home

The Moon’s Our Home is a screwball romantic comedy in the vein of The Philadelphia Story; a warm and witty romp in that unmistakable 40’s style! Plenty of assumptions and misunderstandings will keep you laughing right up to the finish.

Tonight at 8pm, (Pacific time), we present a full hour with Lux Radio Theater, featuring an introduction by the one and only Cecil B. Demille. It’s the 1941 re-broadcast of The Moon’s Our Home, starring Carol Lombard and James Stewart. For a unique and truly delightful time, tune in and travel with your listening time machine back 75 years, right here on another cool autumn evening, on 20th Century Radio.

Listen Live 24/7! Catch our full lineup of drama, suspense, comedy, westerns, detective stories, science fiction and more. Click here!

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Doubleday Broadcasting was a subsidiary of Doubleday Publishing.  It started in 1967, when the company purchased the Dallas-based Trigg-Vaughn group of radio and TV stations. After expanding during the 1970s and 1980s, Doubleday sold the broadcasting division in 1986.

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Sunday Spectacular: Anchors Aweigh

Tonight at 8 (Pacific): Romantic comedy at its best!

Two lonely sailors on shore leave in Los Angeles are out to find girls, but one is shy and needs a few pointers.

Hilarious and unforgettable Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, also starring Kathryn Grayson. A big hit as a movie (1945) and on the radio too. This Lux Radio Theater adaptation first aired December 29, 1947.

Below is a scene from the move, Gene Kelly singing I Begged Her.

Tune in every Sunday evening for a full hour of seriously entertaining radio and the very best from the golden era of radio right here on 20th Century Radio!

Listen Live 24/7! Catch our full lineup of drama, suspense, comedy, westerns, detective stories, science fiction and more. Click here!

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Now Playing: The Treasure Chest of Don Jose

Suspense: 1944 http://owl.li/TaVmI  Starring J Carrol Naish

[20thcenturyradio]

Sunday Spectacular: Sorry, Wrong Number

Tonight at 8 (Pacific): Sorry Wrong Number starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster. Presented by Lux Radio Theater (1950).

Producer William Keeley introduces his classic noir radio drama. “Tonight’s play reverses the usual relation between radio and motion picture. Sorry, Wrong Number was first a radio drama. And it achieved such success on the air that Hal Wallace decided to make a picture of it. He assigned the author Lucille Fletcher to expand her short drama into a full length screen play, and the result was a triumph of suspense drama. The rest of the success story you know because the Paramount picture, with Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster as the stars, was one of the top films of the year. Tonight completes the circle and Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster come back to radio with in their original screen roles.”

THE PLOT “Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) is the spoiled, bedridden daughter of wealthy businessman James Cotterell. One day, while listening to what seems to be a crossed telephone connection, she hears two men planning a woman’s murder. The call cuts off without Leona learning very much other than it is scheduled for 11:15, when a passing train will hide any sounds. She calls the telephone company and the police, but with few concrete details, they can do nothing. Complicating matters, her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) is overdue and their servants have the night off, leaving her all alone in a New York City suite….” (from Wikipedia).

Tune in every Sunday evening for a full hour of seriously entertaining radio and the very best from the golden era of radio high drama right here on 20th Century Radio!

Listen Live 24/7! Catch our full lineup of drama, suspense, comedy, westerns, detective stories, science fiction and more. Click here!

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Sunday Spectacular: The Citadel

Tonight’s 1949 MGM Theater of the Air broadcast stars Fredric March, Florence Eldredge and Ivor Francis. Andrew Manson, a young, enthusiastic doctor takes his first job in a Welsh mining town, and begins to wonder at the persistent cough many of the miners have. When his attempts to prove its cause are thwarted, he moves to London. His new practice does badly. But when a friend shows him how to make a lucrative practice from rich hypochondriacs, it will take a great shock to show him what the truth of being a doctor really is. Read more at IMDB. The 1938 movie, adapted from A.J. Cronin’s best-selling novel, was nominated for several Academy Awards.

Fredric March won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in 1947 for The Best Years of Our Lives.

We hope you’ll join us tonight, 8:00 pm. US Pacific time. Take a look at our Super Schedule to find your favorite shows all week long! Listen Live 24/7 !!!

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Radio legend William Conrad was born September 27, 1920. He is best known as “the first man they look for and the last they want to meet” - US Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. But Conrad’s stentorian boom was in great demand on radio; he could be heard on Suspense, as the “Voice of Escape,” The Adventures of Sam Spade, Richard Diamond, and The Adventures of Philip Marlowe to name just a few. During his career, he played more than 7,500 radio roles.

Although his portly physique cost him the television role of Matt Dillon, Conrad went on to small screen success as Cannon, Nero Wolfe, and in Jake and the Fatman. His voice could be heard narrating The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Fugitive on television.

In honor of his birthday, I’ll post more of his radio performances today. For more from the Golden Age of Radio, click here to subscribe to the “Down These Mean Streets” podcast in iTunes.

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Sunday Spectacular: True Confessions

We’ll hit a lighter note this week.

I’ve read three plot descriptions of this story and none of them sound like a comedy, but if anyone can carry this off, it’s Loretta Young (a compulsive liar) and Fred MacMurray (compulsively honest). Failing careers, murder, romance, blackmail. And I’ll bet it has a happy ending, too!

A rare radio romp though drama, romance and comedy in equal portions.

Lux Radio Theater, 1940. Introduction by the producer, Cecil B. DeMille.

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Wow. That’s quite an ad!

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company - 19260925 Collier’s

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Sunday Spectacular: Anthony Adverse

Tonight at 8pm (Pacific) tune in for Fletcher Markle's 1947 production of Hervey Allen's massive novel, Anthony Adverse (Studio One), with Clayton (Bud) Collier and Mercedes McCambridge.

The story tells of Anthony’s mission to track down the Gallegos, the long-time debtors of his guardian, Mr. Bonneyfeather, who have mysteriously disappeared, and of Adverse’s romantic interludes with two Cuban beauties, Dolores de la Fuenta and Neleta.

Written from 1929 to 1933, the book became a critically acclaimed movie in 1936.

Get ready for a truly exotic tale in radio adventure land!

Listen Live 24/7 right here on 20thCenturyRadio.

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Sunday Spectacular: The House By the River

Tonight. 8:00pm Pacific time!

Starring John McIntire and Dan Hurley. Directed by Anton M. Leader.

Gather 'round, my friends. This story is certainly well-calculate to keep you in … SUSPENSE. Producer Robert Montgomery introduces the story: "Most of us think of poetry… as something soft and lovely, and without violence, but that's not always true. Poetry can be violent, and hard and dark, with tales of terror and horror. The popular idea that a poet is always a soft and fragile fellow is also untrue. Poetry grows from the stuff of life, and the poet is heir to all the ills of other men. He is a frequent walker upon the dark paths of life, as well as in the sunlit fields. And finally, it's not true either that a poet worth that name must live in a lonely garret, in obscure poverty, sleeping on the stacks of his unread rhymes. Some poets find fame and fortune early and live richly in comfort and adulation. In fact, that's the kind of a poet we have in our story tonight. "Steven Burns, who at 35, was already being compared with Keats and Shelley; who had in a few slender volumes made himself the voice and the conscious of all England. His home, standing on the bank of the Thames, was known to a million Englishmen as The House by the River. Here he lived in peace and contentment with his wife Margery and his brother John, a civil servant in London. "Here on the breast of the great sluggish river, he lived and studied and worked, until… the evening of June 15th, last summer... Steven stood at dusk in his garden watching the water beneath him turn black as night came on with a rush … The scene was set for a strange adventure."

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Sunday Spectacular: The Black Curtain

Tonight 8:00 Pacific. Suspense, 1948. “radio’s outstanding theater of thrills”

After a slight accident on a tawdry street, Frank Townsend goes home - only to discover he hasn’t been there in years. Suffering from amnesia, accused of murder, and the object of a deadly pursuit, he must overcome the crime that time has thrust upon him. (Goodreads)

Hosted by and starring The Earl of Hollywood, Robert Montgomery.

Based on the popular 1941 novel by Cornell Woolrich, The Black Curtain is the premiere broadcast of the full hour version of Suspense.

Listen Live 24/7 right here on 20th Century Radio.

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Sunday Spectacular: The Glass Key

Tonight at 8pm (Pacific) we bring you the high art of radio noir, Dashiell Hammett’s, The Glass Key. This fine radio play, presented by the Studio One,  features outstanding performances by Elissa Landi, and Alan Baxter.

In this story from the tempestuous 1920s when politics was more a matter of bullets than ballots, we bring you the tale of Ned Beaumont, a character that has been favorably compared to Sam Spade and The Thin Man. When his boss, a corrupt politician, is accused of murder, he begins to search for the real killer, avoiding amorous advances from his boss’ fiancee and attacks from gangsters along the way.

This classic Dashiell Hammett detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. The story was made into a movie in 1935 and again in 1942 (plus one in USSR/Estonia in 1985).

***** Tune in every Sunday evening for a full hour of seriously entertaining radio and the very best from the golden era of high drama right here on 20th Century Radio!

Listen Live 24/7! Catch our full lineup of drama, suspense, comedy, westerns, detective stories, science fiction and more. Click here!

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Before I even saw the caption, this had to be from “Dial M for Murder.” Great shot!

Alfred Hitchcock promo shot for ‘Dial M for Murder’, 1954

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Sunday Spectacular: Arabesque

Tonight at 8pm (Pacific), tune in for a special presentation of Studio One's 1948 broadcast starring the immensely talented, screen and radio legend, Marlene Dietrich in Arabesque. Director Fletcher Markel provides the introduction. “Mr. Geoffrey Household’s new novel, Arabesque, is a middle eastern web, with strands running to Beirut, a Lebanese mountain village, Jerusalem, Cairo, and other way points in the wayward wartime year of 1941.” The story reflects the tensions between French and British, Arab and Jew, and the manipulations of British security during Word War II. Tune in tonight for a full hour of the seductive Marlene Dietrich in one of her very finest performances, right here on 20th Century Radio.

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Sunday Spectacular: The African Queen

Set your clock for 8:00 pm (Pacific) tonight to catch Humphrey Bogart and Greer Garson in The African Queen – a very entertaining salute to the human spirit! Lux Radio Theater, 1952.

This is the story of Rose Sayer, the willful and proper British Methodist missionary, and Charlie Allnut, rough-and-ready Canadian boat captain. The setting is 1914 German East Africa at the beginning of World War I. News reaches them that Britain and Germany are at war. Charlie helps Rose escape and she enlists him (very reluctantly) to sink a German gunboat along the way.

This funny, adventurous and inspirational story was penned in 1935 by C.S. Forester (1899-1966), who wrote many successful stories about naval warfare, including the popular Horatio Hornblower series.

Don’t miss this classic! Listen Live 24/7.