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Academy Award Theater - Brief Encounter (11-20-46) Jul 20, 2008

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Academy Award Theater - The list of films and actors on Academy Award Theater is very impressive. Bette Davis begins the series in Jezebel, with Ginger Rogers following in Kitty Foyle, and then Paul Muni in The Life of Louis Pasteur. The Informer had to have Victor Mclaglen, and the Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet (this movie was his first major motion picutre role) plus Mary Astor for the hat trick. Suspicion starred Cary Grant with Ann Todd doing the Joan Fontaine role, Ronald Coleman in Lost Horizon, and Joan Fontaine and John Lund were in Portrait of Jenny. How Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were done is something to hear! THIS EPISODE: Brief Encounter (1946) is director David Lean's brilliantly-crafted, classic British masterpiece. It is one of the greatest romantic tearjerkers/weepers of all time, with a very downbeat ending. Lean's film is a simple but realistically-honest, unsentimental, self-told social melodrama of the quiet desperation involved in an illicit, extra-marital love affair between two married, middle-class individuals over seven weekly meetings, mostly against the backdrop of a railway station. The romantic couple includes a wife/mother looking for escape from her humdrum life and sterile marriage, and a dashing doctor. tale of The screenplay was adapted and based on playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act (half-hour) stage play Still Life. It was expanded from five short scenes in a train station (the refreshment tea room of Milford Junction Station) to include action in other settings (the married woman's house, the apartment of the married man's friend, restaurants, parks, train compartments, shops, a car, a boating lake and at the cinema), although the film still maintains chaste minimalism.

The Untouchables - The Troubleshooter Eliot Ness (10-12-61) Jul 18, 2008

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The Untouchables is the name of a television series that ran from 1959 to 1963 on the American Broadcasting Company. Based on the memoir of the same name by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, it fictionalized the experiences of Eliot Ness, a real-life Prohibition Agent, as he fought crime in Chicago in the 1930s with the help of a special team of agents handpicked for their courage & incorruptibility, nicknamed the Untouchables. It was remade into a 1987 film by Brian De Palma also called The Untouchables, with a script by David Mamet. The stories often revolved around Ness' enmity with the criminal empire of Chicago mob boss Al Capone, and many focused on crimes related to Prohibition. The show starred Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and Neville Brand as Al Capone, and was narrated by Walter Winchell. The show drew harsh criticism from some Italian-Americans including Frank Sinatra[1], who felt it promoted negative stereotypes of them as mobsters and gangsters. The Capone family sued the show for $1,000,000 for its unauthorized use of Al Capone's likeness for profit. This Episode: The Troubleshooter adapted for radio aired originally October 12, 1961 starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness with guest star Peter Falk, who went on to do Columbo. In the summer of 1934, a new gambling device was sweeping the nation: the punchboards. Even though they were nickel-and-dime games, it added up, they made more money than the numbers racket. After Ness and his men smash some of the punchboard manufacturing sites, the 5 members running the punchboards hold a meet at a building by the freight yards.

The Ford Theater - A Farewell To Arms (06-24-49) Jul 17, 2008

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The FORD THEATER, sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, presented hour long dramas first on NBC for one only season. The series moved to CBS for its second and last season. There were 39 NBC and 39 CBS hour- long shows (not verified). The show initially received an unfavorable review from the New York Times for poor script adaptation but was still highly rated for the actors' performance and overall production. The show was supposed to feature only original scripts but had to forgo that plan due to lack of quality material. The first season on NBC used radio actors under the direction of George Zachary. Martin Gabel announced the first show but was soon replaced by Kenneth Banghart. The second season, on CBS, used Hollywood screen actors in the lead roles, supported by radio actors. Fletcher Markle, who previously produced CBS's STUDIO ONE series, was the producer for the second season. Although a short series, it still has some of radio's best dramas.

THIS EPISODE: A Farewell To Arms - Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during World War I. At the beginning of the novel, the war is winding down with the onset of winter, and Henry arranges to tour Italy. The following spring, upon his return to the front, Henry meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse's aide at the nearby British hospital and the love interest of his friend Rinaldi. Rinaldi, however, quickly fades from the picture as Catherine and Henry become involved in an elaborate game of seduction. Grieving the recent death of her fiancé, Catherine longs for love so deeply that she will settle for the illusion of it. Her passion, even though pretended, wakens a desire for emotional interaction in Henry, whom the war has left coolly detached and numb. When Henry is wounded on the battlefield, he is brought to a hospital in Milan to recover. Several doctors recommend that he stay in bed for six months and then undergo a necessary operation on his knee. Unable to accept such a long period of recovery, Henry finds a bold, garrulous surgeon named Dr. Valentini who agrees to operate immediately. Henry learns happily that Catherine has been transferred to Milan and begins his recuperation under her care.

Barry Craig Confidential Investigator - Death Of A Private Eye (1-02-52) Jun 21, 2008

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Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator is one of the few detective radio series that had separate versions of it broadcast from both coasts. Even the spelling changed over the years. It was first "Barry Crane" and then "Barrie Craig". NBC produced it in New York from 1951 to 1954 and then moved it to Hollywood where it aired from 1954 to 1955. It attracted only occasional sponsors so it was usually a sustainer.William Gargan, who also played the better known television (and radio) detective Martin Kane, was the voice of New York eye BARRY CRAIG while Ralph Bell portrayed his associate, Lt. Travis Rogers. Craig's office was on Madison Avenue and his adventures were fairly standard PI fare. He worked alone, solved cases efficiently, and feared no man. As the promos went, he was "your man when you can't go to the cops. Confidentiality a speciality."Like Sam Spade, Craig narrated his stories, in addition to being the leading character in this 30 minute show. Nearly sixty episodes are in trading circulation today. THIS EPISODE: January 2, 1952. NBC network. "Death Of A Private Eye". Sustaining. Not auditioned. "(Barry) is hired to help a man pay a visit, but discovers instead that (the) visitor has a visitor first, death!" William Gargan, Himan Brown (director), Don Pardo (announcer), Louis Vittes (writer), Fran Carlon. 28:27

Amos & Andy - Kingfish's Tourist Service (11-22-53) - Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod Jun 09, 2008

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Amos 'n' Andy was a situation comedy popular in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s. The show began as one of the first radio comedy serials, written and voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and originating from station WMAQ in Chicago, Illinois. After the series was first broadcast in 1928, it grew in popularity and became a huge influence on the radio serials that followed.Amos 'n' Andy creators Gosden and Correll were white actors familiar with minstrel traditions. They met in Durham, North Carolina in 1920, and by the fall of 1925, they were performing nightly song-and-patter routines on the Chicago Tribune's station WGN. Since the Tribune syndicated Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps, which had successfully introduced the concept of daily continuity, WGN executive Ben McCanna thought the notion of a serialized drama could also work on radio.

Barry Craig Confidential Investigator "Cupie Doll" (2-13-52) - Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod Jun 05, 2008

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The NBC University Theater "The Light That Failed" (2-12-50) - Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod Jun 05, 2008

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The NBC University Theater - dramatic anthology Offered novels, with programs for college credit. Broadcast History : July 30th, 1948 - February 14th, 1951 NBC. Mostly 60 minutes. Mostly aired on Sundays, with occasional weeknight airings. Announcer : Don Stanley Music : Albert Harris, Henry Russell Director : Andrew C. Love Writers : Claris A. Ross, Ernest Kinoy, George Lefferts, Jack C. Wilson Sound Effects : Bob Holmes, Rod Sutton.THIS EPISODE:February 12, 1950. NBC network. "The Light That Failed". Sustaining. A painter, interested only in money, loses his sight after his masterpiece has been defaced. The closing credits have been deleted. Alec Harford, Crauford Kent, Dan O'Herlihy, Earl Keen, Eileen Erskine, Eric Snowden, George Lefferts (writer), Henry Outland (Outland?--intermission commentator), John Ramsay Hill, Marlene Ames, Queenie Leonard, Rudyard Kipling (author), Tom Dylan, Tudor Owen. 56:28.

Ford Theater "Of Human Bondage" (10-29-48) - Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod Jun 04, 2008

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Father Knows Best "A Spooky Cemetary" (10-26-50) - Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod Jun 04, 2008

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Father Knows Best, a family comedy of the 1950s, is perhaps more important for what it has come to represent than for what it actually was. In essence, the series was one of a slew of middle-class family sitcoms in which moms were moms, kids were kids, and fathers knew best. Today, many critics view it, at best, as high camp fun, and, at worst, as part of what critic David Marc once labeled the "Aryan melodramas" of the 1950s and 1960s.

Adventures Of Horatio Hornblower "The Mutiny On The Flame" (10-24-52) - Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod Jun 03, 2008

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The Adventures Of Horatio Hornblower - Broadcast 1952; Transcribed in England for the BBC; aired in U.S. on CBS, then again on ABC in 1954 and Mutual in 1957. Starring Michael Redgrave as Horatio Hornblower. a captain in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic era. The radio series was based on twelve Horatio Hornblower novels written by C.S. Forester. These novels were, and still are, well liked due to their realistic tone and historical accuracy in telling the tales of Naval life in the late 1700s through the mid 1800s. C.S. Forester was well known for his novels about military and naval life, including such fine titles as The African Queen, The Gun, The Barbary Pirates, and The General.

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