Podcast #6 - 02/12/13

006. It's Great to Be a Radio Maniac Audio Drama Review Podcast #6(21.14)

02/12/13 Eugene Onegin (BBC) 1.23-8.07, The House on Mulberry Hill (19 Nocturne Boulevard) 8.08-14.48, Frontier Gentleman, “Rosebud Creek” (CBS) 14.49-20.51

Frontier Gentleman: Rosebud Creek

Okay, I confess:  I love Frontier Gentleman.  It’s by no means perfect—as this episode, “Rosebud Creek,” makes obvious, 1958 is still a far cry from 2013 in terms of racism and representing Native Americans in an accurate light—but it’s a great ongoing story and far better (dare I say it?) than any other radio Western (except perhaps Gunsmoke, of which I’ve only heard one, admittedly excellent, episode). 

Broadcast quite early in Frontier Gentleman’s admittedly truncated run, “Rosebud Creek” comes from 23 February 1958 and sees our intrepid hero, Englishman and reporter for the London Times, J.B. Kendall journeying to Yellowstone and the mouth of Rosebud Creek.  Kendall is caught between the dogmatic pragmatism of Lieutenant Snow—“they’ve sent Custer and the Seventh:  they’ll finish the Sioux”—and Captain Thomas, who thinks Custer is a bad soldier and out for personal gain. Thomas is “not West Point.  Resents anyone who is.” We know that Thomas is in the right, but one feels curiously ambiguous about the situation, as Thomas’ words deterring Custer would surely grant posterity even more in the way of Native American massacres. 

Frontier Gentleman’s relatively enlightened approach would be interesting at the Battle of Little Bighorn, but the creators’ sideswipe expectation and have Kendall go with Snow to try to move some civilians out of harm’s way.  “What about the civilians?”  “It’s their look-out.  Don’t risk the lives of your men.”  Although we are slowly getting notions of Kendall’s character teased out, I love when this episode references his service in India.  Certainly the fact that he was part of an imperialist government there does not make him enlightened, but it does make a change from white American exceptionalism.  He draws a parallel between the Rosebud Creek situation and a massacre a superior officer in India led him into. 

Snow takes Kendall, four men, and a Crow Scout named Six Toes, who disappointingly is a stereotype, complete with staggering language.  The seven men run into trouble in their attempt to liberate the civilians.  Action sequences in this story are conveyed by a combination of Kendall’s “article,” which is an absolutely inspired narrative device, music (which is quite fine, far better than the organ grinding I’ve heard during I Love a Mystery and Against the Storm), and SFX.  During an ambush by “renegade Indians,” only Kendall and Six Toes make it to the cabins, where the only person still alive is Amelia Mitchell.

Amelia Mitchell!  What a great character.  She wouldn’t be out of place in a Zoe-like role in Firefly.  She’s been defending her cabin with her Winchester and is not without prejudice in her trying situation.  “He’s an Indian,” she says of Six Toes.  “He’s not coming in.”  Kendall manages to convince her to give them shelter and asks if she’s been defending the place on her own.  “I know how to shoot.”  “Couldn’t be better.”  Aw, I love Kendall.  In their dire straits, Amelia and Kendall share things about themselves they probably wouldn’t otherwise.  Amelia intimates that the renegades tried to smoke the other civilians out of the cabins by setting them on fire, including killing her son.  “I hope he died before the fire.”     She had harboured hopes that he would have gone on to a good education at somewhere like Cambridge, which is where Kendall went (so he says).  

Intriguingly, Amelia confesses that she’s never been married.  She was a schoolteacher who met a man but it sounds like they only had a one-night stand.  In a world of uncomplicated Westerns where womenfolk are either stainless townsfolk or whores with hearts of gold, Amelia is neither.  And Kendall has been no angel either; when he came back from India, the woman with whom he shared an intimate relationship “married someone else.”  “It’s funny, you and me—you and I—talking like this,” says Amelia.  Before things can go further, they hear the agonized cries of Snow as he is tortured by the renegades, presumably being scalped.  Oh dear.  “There’s nothing we can do,” says Kendall.

Kendall determines (as he is the patriarchal hero and has obvious precedence over a Crow Indian and a woman, oy vey) that he and Six Toes should silently and swiftly, under cover of darkness, take out the renegades so all three can make their escape before morning and the cabin is set alight.  “I am a Crow,” says Six Toes.  “I am not afraid of noise.  I know what Cheyenne do.  Of that I am afraid.”  I have to confess that from this point on, the audiopositioning becomes a bit confusing.  I can’t picture clearly in my mind where Six Toes and Kendall are spatially, so my attention wanders a bit.  Six Toes offers the truly horrid observation, “You make good Indian.”  Interestingly, like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Kendall and Six Toes gets out of this bloodbath alive—but not so poor Amelia Mitchell.  Amelia was played by the well-known actress Jeannette Nolan.     

More OTR

My third episode of Frontier Gentleman continued in an enjoyable and amusing vein, though less action-packed than the previous two.  In this one, Kendall wanders into a saloon and immediately makes the acquaintance of good-natured Wall-Eye Smith, a “cowpuncher” who attaches “son of a gun” to everything he says, like a sufferer from Tourettes.  The saloon is called, in Kendall’s words, the “sanguinary” Jug of Blood.  Inside, Kendall drinks some beer (no doubt of very inferior quality to that he might have had in London, though alcohol as an index of class doesn’t function quite the same here!) and unwittingly picks a fight with a young gunslinger.  The gunslinger accidentally shoots himself and gives himself up for dead.  “There ain’t no doctor ‘round here.”  The multi-talented Kendall next attempts a surgery in very primitive conditions.  He has the reluctant help of Wall-Eye and two of the saloon girls, though all they actually do is staunch bleeding and pray.

More OTR

I tried to give famous radio soap Backstage Wife a chance, but even a short episode from 1945 was too much for me.  “The caveman locked his house with a stone” was the immortal line from this particular episode! 

I also tried to give Bobby Benson and the B Bar B Riders a chance, given it was one of the longest-running of the children’s serials (and I always wondered how a kid could own and run a ranch).  I think the episode I heard, “The Ghost Rustlers,” was from early in the second run of the series, 1952, as it gave quite a long (2 minute!) introduction to Bobby, who had been adopted as a baby by a ranch owner.  His pals were cool-headed Tex Mason, the (inevitably) Irish cowhand called Irish, and a Native American sidekick named Harka (?!), as well as Windy Wales[1] (who didn’t appear in this story).  To my surprise, Bobby Benson was conceived by an immigrant Brit, Herbert Rice.  I’m not sure if the Bobby in this story was played by Ivan Cury or Herbert’s nephew Clive, but I suspect the latter, given there was something not quite right about Bobby’s accent (Clive was British).  I expect this was all fairly interesting stuff to (boys) in the early ‘50s, but for me personally, one episode was enough.  

Finally,  I tried out Calling All Detectives which was simplistic in the extreme and oozed commercial sponsors!      

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[1] I thought this character was named Wendy and was a woman.  No wonder they were putting “him” in charge of the ranch!

Gunsmoke

Gunsmoke is both the last of the radio Westerns and considered the most adult.  It ran for almost 10 years on CBS and then migrated to TV, surviving until the very last breath of US radio drama into the early 1960s. US Marshall Matt Dillon doesn’t sing to Dale Evans like Gene Autry and wouldn’t be caught dead in rhinestones.  He’s a great character, and I’ll definitely listen to more Gunsmoke.   

Gunsmoke’s first episode is from exactly 60 years ago today.  The announcer introduces Matt Dillon as “a US Marshall and gunsmoke.”  What struck me immediately was Dillon’s sarcasm and cynicism, and yet his dedication to upholding the true spirit of the law.  The writing is also crisp and concise, with a great deal of humor.  The episode begins as Dillon is dictating a “wanted” poster to a telegrapher; in Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1870s, Dillon is investigating a crime pinned on a guileless  farmer.   “I kill nobody—not since Gettysburg!” the man protests.  Dillon has to prevent half the town from lynching the man in the cells, while at the same time trying to babysit a kid with a desire for guns and fame.  The kid is very interested in the number of men Dillon has killed in his job.  “You don’t keep score, kid, you try to forget.” 

Unfortunately, Dillon is next suspected of crime; “you had him killed so you could get to her.”  Her, in this case, is an old flame of Dillon’s who is very much aware of the gossip surrounding her.  She begs Dillon to convict someone, anyone, to get the blame off her.  “Please, Matt, I have to live here.”  Although Dillon is sympathetic to his old flame’s pleas, he is not the kind of chivalrous cowboy who is going to fall to bits because a female swooned.  “I’ve sworn to uphold the law and I’ve killed men to do it.  . . . I ask you to be sensible and listen to reason.”

By the end of the story, Dillon has released that it was actually the kid who was responsible for the murders, the kid who we realize will, in about 8 years, become Billy the Kid, as his mother is Catherine Antrim, who has come looking for him.  “In my line, there’s nothing humorous about death,” but this a wonderfully knowing way to end the first episode.  

Matt Dillon is played by William Conrad.

Frontier Gentleman (1-3)

With the discovery of the wonderful archive.org, I finally get to listen to long-gone radio serials that I’ve so far only read about in books about Old Time Radio.  One of the Westerns that appealed to me (and which I will continue to listen to) was Frontier Gentleman, one of the last gasp of radio Westerns in 1958.  It only lasted about a year, but the premise intrigued, and some fairly decent writing sold me.  Frontier Gentleman is about J.B. Kendall, a correspondent for the Times (out of London) who has gone to the West to write about life there.  The situation is fraught with humor, but Kendall is a man of hidden talents:  an 1870s Renaissance man, and not, as it turns out, a ponce.  Like all radio cowboys, he deplores violence and uses it only as a last resort; his wits, charm, and ingenuity count for a lot, especially considering, like the Second Doctor, his adversaries tend to underestimate him.  The first episode saw Kendall arrive in a Montana town that had banned guns.  He eventually realized this was because the town’s sheriff was actually a baddie and that the whole place was under the thumb of the Shelton Brothers.  Kendall was amusing to listen to as he bumbled (politely) through the saloon, and everyone assumed he couldn’t use a gun.  However, as later episodes are hinting, he’s been in the British Army, so he’s not at all helpless.  Unfortunately, the end of the first episode saw Kendall waiting for his advance money so he could continue onward.  Like most of his chivalrous counterparts, he has a soft (and entirely chaste) spot for women in trouble.  

Episode three, broadcast on Feb. 9^th, 1958, opened, as they all do, with a trumpet theme from the young Jerry Goldsmith, and I was impressed with the cinematic quality of the music in Frontier Gentleman.  The narrator informs us that, though he came to this country as a reporter, “as a man with a gun, [Kendall] becomes part of the West.”   This episode concerns the town of Rosebud and problems with Indians not staying on their reservations.  I was surprised at how even-handedly this episode handled the Apaches (“those Indians don’t trust white men no more”), for they are actually kept out of the action proper—therefore, no war dances, no scalping, no terrible dialogue (as this is post-Broken Arrow, I guess it’s to be expected).  At Rosebud, Kendall makes the acquaintance of a kindly matron—“it’s always nice to meet a gentleman”—and a fellow journalist, who are given a scoop when a half-Apache scout offers to take Kendall and his friend to the reservation for an exclusive.  The other journalist is apprehensive.  “Suppose he wants to take your scalp?”  “Well, that would be awkward.”  

Eventually they agree to go out into the hills.  When the other journalist offers Kendall a drink, the English gentlemen says, “Sleep for me” (like all good radio cowboys).  It’s also in this story that Kendall says he was a captain in a cavalry regiment in India.  “The tribesmen do much worse [than scalp] in India.”   Unfortunately, the other journalist’s suspicions are correct regarding the double-cross, and even Kendall’s two guns in a shoulder holster are not adequate.  The nefarious scout, however, has an amusing sense of humor, making him more than a dime-a-dozen villain. 

Kendall is played with great verve by John Dehner, and the serial is written and directed by Antony Ellis.  I’ll definitely listen to some more.