Breaking Walls

In Breaking Walls episode 131 we spotlight Orson Welles’ time as The Shadow in 1937-38. —————————— Highlights: • Orson Welles’ on The March of Time and The Columbia Workshop • The Shadow as Narrator • Les Misérables • WOR and Network Radio In The Fall of 1937 • The Shadow Launches With Orson Welles • Jeanette Nolan and The Temple Bells of Neban • Early Reviews • Agnes Moorehead and The Three Ghost...

In the fall of 1938 as Orson Welles was launching The Mercury Theater of The Air, radio character actor Bill Johnstone became The Shadow. Johnstone held the role until March 21st, 1943, when Brett Morison took over. Morison had the title role for most of the rest of the radio run. The Shadow would air until December 26th, 1954. We’re going to stop here. I’ve covered Welles from his birth through P...

In late June 1938, Orson Welles was approached by CBS. He was offered a one-hour, network sustained time slot on Mondays at 9PM. William Paley’s concept: A Mercury Theater of the air for a nine-week trial run. Unlike Welles and Houseman’s theater productions which had several weeks of rehearsal, the show would begin in just two, on July 11th. Houseman was nervous. He’d never done radio. Welles wou...

The success of The Shadow was shared by Blue Coal. Billboard reported that twelve months after the premiere their sales were up nearly eleven percent. Blue Coal was selling for as much as two dollars per ton more than their competitors. In February of 1938 Orson Welles opined that “radio’s future big-wigs will be college graduates.” By then more than ninety colleges offered courses in radio speech...

Orson Welles opened in Julius Caesar on November 11th, 1937. He also made time to perform in guest appearances elsewhere on radio with Tallulah Bankhead and Cedric Hardwicke. Thursday, November 25th, 1937 was Thanksgiving Day. The New York Daily News headline spoke of Consolidated Edison finally getting on board with F.D.R.’s new deal program. November 28th’s episode of The Shadow was called “The...

On Halloween 1937, Benito Mussolini removed Italy’s foreign minister to France due to strained relations between the two countries over Italy's participation in the Spanish Civil War. Adolph Hitler gave the Order of the German Eagle to the Japanese emperor’s son, while Chinese forces abandoned its defense of the Sihang Warehouse. Sunday was Halloween and at 5:30PM eastern, The Shadow took to the a...

The September 29th, 1937 issue of Variety said “that melodramatic and at times astonishing crime fighter, “The Shadow,” returns to the ether to probably find a rather sizable slice of listeners waiting for him. In this series the sponsor will benefit from having a program aimed right at the vulnerability of the audience it seeks. Orson Welles, a young and good actor still riding a crest of recogni...

On the October 24th, 1937 episode of The Shadow called “The Temple Bells of Neban,” Lamont meets an Indian woman and drug smuggler named Sadi Bel-Adda. She knows The Shadow’s true identity. She’s the niece of the man who trained Lamont, and capable of using the same powers. This cast featured Ray Collins as Commissioner Weston with Carl Frank as Jerry Gleason and Everett Sloane playing bit parts....

In the fall of 1937, Orson Welles was busy readying for a Mercury Theater broadway production of Julius Caesar. The agency Ruthrauff and Ryan approached Welles about the possibility of starring in a weekly radio series. His signing was announced in The New York Times on August 29th, 1937. Welles’ contract allowed him to miss rehearsals and readings. He was paid seventy-five dollars per week, or ro...

The voice at the top of this clip is that of former WOR chief engineer Jack Poppele. The station went online on February 22nd, 1922. In 1934, WOR became one of the flagship stations of the Mutual Broadcasting System. The next March, Poppele was chiefly responsible for the creation of radio’s first directional antenna just as WOR increased its power to fifty-thousand watts. In December of 1936, Don...

By late spring in 1937, the Federal Theater Project was under intense scrutiny for staging what some felt were too many left-leaning labor plays. In Washington, there were rumors funds would be cut. At the same time, Welles and John Houseman were rehearsing a production of The Cradle Will Rock. The play took place in "Steeltown, USA.” It followed the efforts of Larry Foreman to unionize the town's...

In 1930 publisher Street and Smith decided to try radio with hopes of boosting pulp sales. Each week a drama would be adapted from an upcoming issue of Detective Story Magazine. They added a mysterious host, called The Shadow, and left the link to the magazine somewhat tenuous. The show premiered over CBS on July 31st, 1930. Ken Roberts soon became the announcer. It wasn’t long before people were...

In the spring of 1935, nineteen year-old Orson Welles was living in New York, appearing on stage in Katharine Cornell’s stock company and workin on CBS’ American School of the Air and The March of Time. The next year, Welles was on the debut episode of CBS’s Columbia Workshop. The program’s creator Irving Reiss recognized Orson’s talent, while Welles studied the creative risks The Workshop took. H...

In Breaking Walls episode 130 we head to the summer of 1947 to get to the bottom of NBC’s Philip Marlowe caper. —————————— Highlights: • Who was Raymond Chandler? • Who is Philip Marlowe? • Van Heflin, Movie Star • Radio Ratings in the Spring of 1947 • Marlowe Launches with Red Wind • Initial Reviews • The King in Yellow • The Celebrated Life and Tragic Death of Jeff Chandler • Marlowe Leaves NBC,...

Well, that brings our episode on The Adventures of Philip Marlowe to a close. We’re not leaving the genre though, just going back ten years in time to 1937. Next time on Breaking Walls we spotlight Orson Welles’ one season as star of The Shadow and find out how the legendary radio show came to air.

Raymond Chandler wrote three more Philip Marlowe novels: The Little Sister in 1949, The Long Goodbye in 1953, and Playback in 1958. He became a dual citizen of the U.S. and Great Britain. His wife, Cissy died in 1954. In 1955, he attempted suicide. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains. They sat for fifty-seven years in a storage locker at Cypress View Mausoleum....

In September, Bob Hope reclaimed his Tuesday night time slot and NBC’s Philip Marlowe radio adventures were over. 1947 was a good year for Van Heflin. Green Dolphin Street hit theaters in November. It co-starred Lana Turner and was that year’s biggest MGM hit. On Thanksgiving he guest-starred on an episode of Radio Reader’s Digest called “Why Keep Your Heart In Cold Storage?” It was well-received,...

The August 8th episode of Philip Marlowe was called “Robin and The Hood.” Jeff Chandler guest-starred playing a dual role. Born Ira Grossel in Brooklyn, New York on December 15th, 1918, he acted in high school with classmate Susan Hayward. Chandler went to the Feagin School of Dramatic Art and had a stint with a theater troupe. He served in the Pacific, finishing World War II as a Lieutenant. Afte...

On July 8th, 1947, NBC broadcast an adaptation of “The King In Yellow,” originally published in Dime Detective Magazine in March of 1938. It’s a seedy saga of a hot trumpet player whose boorish behavior gets him killed. Among those featured in this episode were Gerald Mohr, Gloria Blondell, Bill Johnstone, Willard Waterman, and Howard McNear. By the late 1940s many of Chicago’s radio stars had mig...

The June 17th, 1947 edition of Billboard Magazine reviewed the first Marlowe episode. It was noted that similar shows were expected to pull a rating of 7.5. The magazine stated that “Milton Geiger's adaptation adhered to Red Wind's language almost to the letter, and captured most of the colorful, almost poetic flavor. “On the debit side was the enormity of the job of breaking down Chandler's compl...

The Adventures of Philip Marlowe debuted on NBC with “Red Wind” on June 17th, 1947. The 1938 short story is set on one of those evenings when the hot, dry Santa Ana wind gusts through Los Angeles, turning the mood sour. The program aired live at 10PM on the east coast, with a second broadcast done at 9PM for the west. The script was adapted by Milton Geiger. Jim Fonda directed. Wendell Niles annou...

By the middle of 1947, nearly eleven million babies had been born in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Young parents were staying home with their children. Homes with radios jumped six percent, car radios twenty-nine percent. Over the next year, radio would have its largest audience in history. The four major networks added one-hundred forty-seven affiliates. Network revenue topped two-hundr...

Van Heflin was born on December 13th, 1908 in Walters, Oklahoma. The son of a dentist, he began his acting career on Broadway in the late 1920s. Between 1928 and 1936 he appeared in. Mr. Moneypenny, The Bride of Torozko, The Night Remembers, Mid-West, and End of Summer. That year Heflin signed with RKO and made his film debut opposite Katherine Hepburn in A Woman Rebels. He spent the next five yea...

Philip Marlowe, born in Santa Rosa, California, is six feet tall and weighs one-hundred ninety pounds. He has dark wavy hair. In Chandler’s first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, set in 1936, he’s thirty-three. Marlowe had two years of college and was an investigator for the LA District Attorney. He was fired for insubordination.  His office is in the Cahuenga Building on Hollywood Boulevard near Iva...

La Jolla, California. 1947. We’re at 6005 Camino de la Costa at the home of Raymond Chandler. It’s been three years since the fifty-nine year-old wrote a full length novel. Instead he’s worked on two screen plays. Chandler co-adapted Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder, and penned The Blue Dahlia. Both earned him Academy Award nominations. Looking for more income, his agent has negotiated a deal fo...