Fri 22 Apr 2011
PRIME TIME SUSPECTS: Part 2.1, by Tise Vahimagi — Evolution of the TV Genre (US).
Posted by Steve under Columns , TV mysteries[7] Comments
by TISE VAHIMAGI
Part 2.1: Evolution of the TV Genre (US)
This section might be called The Slicks and The Pulps. It seems that Radio and Cinema have always been at the heart of American entertainment. Well, at least since the late 1920s.
In the beginning, there were four major US radio networks. Two were owned by NBC (which started broadcasting in 1926), one by CBS (from 1928), and one by MBS (Mutual Broadcasting System; from 1934). Between them, they accounted for an enormous national force.
When it comes to Old Time Radio (OTR), I am a mere novice. My own copy of John Dunning’s wonderful On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press, N.Y., 1998) is almost in well-thumbed shreds. But I am still on the nursery-slopes here. I very much enjoy listening to OTR programmes rather than collecting them (whereas my ever-growing DVD collection of Cinema and TV is virtually forcing me out of my home!).
US radio dramatics were in their turn influenced by the exciting era of the Pulp magazines, roughly from about the mid 1920s to the early 1950s. (I imagine that Steve, a true Pulp magazine aficionado, would probably have more to say on the subject.)
Hollywood, in its early Sound decades, was influenced (to a small degree) by the Pulps; just witness the glorious output of the serial studios like Universal, Columbia (whose 1938 The Spider’s Web remains surely the best serial ever), and Republic.
Although the more high-class studios (like MGM and Paramount) acquired pre-publishing rights to produce film versions of contemporary “best sellers,” the published works of genre authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain were also scooped up.
It is perhaps through filming these genre works that the Hollywood studios and their filmmakers happened upon the 1940s film style of Film Noir (as termed by French film critics after WWII).
The first stage, the “experimental,” saw NBC transmit the very first Sherlock Holmes on the small-screen, The Three Garridebs, on 27 November 1937 (with Luis Hector as Holmes and William Podmore as Watson).
On 17 May 1938, NBC (or rather RCA-NBC) showed The Mysterious Mummy Case, written and directed by Thomas Hutchinson. The 25-minute programme, about some mysterious deaths related to an evil-spreading mummy case, served as an experiment in engineering as an ally of dramatic narrative.
At the end of 1941, NBC produced Blind Alley, featuring a gang of crooks taking over a psychiatry professor’s household. The TV version was based on James Warwick’s 1938 Broadway play, which was filmed by Columbia in 1939 and then remade as The Dark Past in 1948.
Closing-down the early “experimental” period was The Item of the Scarlet Ace (NBC, 1941), adapted from the Blue Network radio series The Bishop and the Gargoyle. Crimebuster-and-sidekick, Richard Gordon (as the Bishop) and Ken Lynch (the Gargoyle), continued their radio roles.
The documentary aspect came with, for example, Bureau of Missing Persons (DuMont, 1943), which demonstrated the activities of the NYC Police Department’s Missing Persons unit. A later example may be the intriguingly-titled Rackets Are My Racket (DuMont, 1948), designed to expose real-life frauds and confidence games.
On the border between the actual and sheer drama was DuMont’s The Woman Who Was Acquitted (June 1944). The story deals with a psychological exploration into the guilt of an acquitted murderess who had confessed her crime while in a cataleptic trance.
Crime Quiz (DuMont, 1944) was one of the earliest viewer-participation shows in which the studio audience/home viewer had to solve a routine whodunit. Armchair Detective (not to be confused with the British radio and TV series created by Ernest Dudley) was a 1948-49 CBS series which presented two whodunits within its half-hour and invited the audience to guess the solution.
You Be the Jury (KLAC-TV, 1949) followed a similar path, this time from the viewpoint of a murder trial. Likewise TV Detective (NBC, 1949), with the camera acting as a private detective; much like the police detective drama The Plainclothesman (DuMont, 1949-54). Your Witness (KECA-TV, 1949) was perhaps the last of the audience-participation shows.
Appearing around the same time as each other, in October 1945, were two similar crime-buster shows. Diary of Death (CBS) was a TV version of the popular radio series Casey, Crime Photographer (CBS Radio), a 30-minute murder mystery written for the small-screen by Lela Swift (from the radio play by Chuck Holden).
Photocrime (CBS) started off on local station WCBW in an attempt to dramatize the photo journalism stories appearing in the general-interest Look magazine, before the series was networked by ABC in 1949. For the network series, incidentally, Chuck Webster played police Inspector Hannibal Cobb.
January 1946 started off with the CBS dramatization of Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number, directed by John Houseman (assisted by Nick Ray), and starring young Mildred Natwick as the seemingly neurotic one.
One of the pleasures awaiting the genre fan in 1946 was the full-length TV play (some 100 minutes) of Mr. and Mrs. North (NBC, May), adapted from the Broadway production, which in turn was based on the Frances and Richard Lockridge The New Yorker magazine series. According to contemporary reviews, the TV version was awash with “whodunit qualities.” Maxine Stewart was the zany Pam North and John McQuade was the more shrewd Jerry North.
US Radio, as a primary source in the early days, served up the NBC Radio suspense anthology Lights Out. In 1946 (June to August), NBC produced four TV Lights Out specials, all under producer Fred Coe.
They involved (for the first time on TV) the effects, for example, of the camera itself as the murderer and then, later, the full use of the television split-screen process. The regular TV series ran on NBC from 1949 to 1952. Inspired later perhaps by radio’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries was Mr. Black (ABC, 1949), a ghostly mystery series supervised by the satanic title character.
In November 1946, CBS produced Brief Pause for Murder, about a radio announcer obsessed with a plot to strangle his wife. The story was taken from the long-running 1942-55 CBS Radio series The Whistler.
Another TV example was Lucky Night (WBKB Chicago, June 1948), featuring some atmospheric shots (stormy night, waves dashing against shore) at times pre-dating 1960-62’s Thriller. The script (by Russell Hughes) was lifted directly from The Whistler radio show. Incidentally, the drama was intended to act as a pilot for a TV suspense series to be called Boomerang (produced by MCA).
The ongoing series’ format was slowly but surely beginning to creep into the TV production process.
The industrious DuMont produced the half-hour Trouble, Inc. (July 1949), a whodunit pilot starring Earl Hammond and Carol Hill as an adventurous couple who team up in Trouble, Inc., an outfit that will do “anything, anywhere, anytime.”
Another pilot project from DuMont came in the form of Hands of Murder (August 1949). Featuring Steve Eliot and Charlotte Keane, the story told of a desperate factory worker who was driven to murder his violent loan shark. It was presented as a part of DuMont’s Program Playhouse (June-September 1949). From the latter Playhouse, a little earlier, had come an early version of a based-on-the-files-of drama called Federal Agent (June 1949).
From now on it was the series (and in some ways, the anthology) that commanded the genre.
Frank Wood – Private Detective (WBKB Chicago) was a short-run 1947 series starring Joe Bellucci as the title sleuth. The Public Prosecutor (1947) became Crawford Mystery Theatre (DuMont, 1951) and appeared to be a combination of crime drama and quiz. Syndicated series Mystery Is My Hobby (1949) starred Glenn Langan as a police detective.
Barney Blake, Police Reporter (NBC, 1948), it seemed, was under the thumb of sponsor Lucky Strike cigarettes (The American Tobacco Company). It was of course a live series in which our hero, a Front Page style newspaperman (played by Gene O’Donnell), solved each week’s whodunit mystery between ad breaks of marching cigarettes.
Frederic Ziv had acquired the rights to the Boston Blackie property and produced a syndicated version starring an unlikely Robert Middleton in 1948. The more familiar series featuring Kent Taylor as Blackie was syndicated from 1951.
The intriguing crime, mystery and suspense drama Chicagoland Television Mystery Players first appeared over WGN-TV (Chicago) in September 1948. It continued to feature Gordon Urquhart as the crime-busting hero when it was shown via DuMont in 1949-50, retitled Chicagoland Mystery Players.
The next instalment here will look at the genre’s Adventurers, their often Foreign Settings, and Cold War Espionage. The turbulent period 1951 to 1956. Series will range from China Smith to The Man Called X.
Note: The introduction to this series of columns by Tise Vahimagi on TV mysteries and crime shows may be found here, followed by:
Part 1: Basic Characteristics (A Swift Overview)
Part 2.0: Evolution of the TV Genre (UK)
April 22nd, 2011 at 3:48 am
I thought I knew a little bit about early crime drama on US television. Turns out I didn’t know anything.
I especially didn’t know very much about the programming on the DuMont network and how early it started. I think I’ve just moved from the kindergarten to middle school, all in one giant step.
As for the connection between Old Time Radio and the Pulp Magazines, there’s an entire article in itself, starting with The Shadow (one of the two most famous of all old radio series, the other being The Lone Ranger).
April 22nd, 2011 at 2:29 pm
I have been impressed by the amount of details given in both parts of this look at early TV.
Today we fail to realize how important radio was before TV. Much like today with TV vs movies. Radio was the most popular form of entertainment during that era
It is often hard for any researcher to find exact details since so many programs no longer exist beyond the period’s media coverage. Much of radio was regional, with TV this played an even larger part of its early history. Dumont started with one station, New York’s W2XWV and went network when it added its second station in 1946. This made Dumont the second TV network after NBC and before CBS and ABC.
For more about the history of Dumont, visit this link: http://www.dumonthistory.tv/index.html
Did pulps influence radio? I like to think pulp, radio, and movies ran parallel, each influencing the others. The Shadow was first the host of a radio series called DETECTIVE STORY HOUR. The character became popular enough for Street & Smith to develop the character for a pulp series. Years later the pulp series had grown popular enough to get its own radio series. The pulp and radio series ran different paths with the radio series having The Shadow as Lamont Cranston while The Shadow kept the real identity of The Shadow a secret. The movies used a little from both.
While TV was still in its experimental stage, often with no more than a dozen people able to receive the TV signal, programs were still being done. It is wonderful to read such a detailed record of the mysteries of that period.
April 22nd, 2011 at 2:41 pm
I’ve been doing some random checking of some of these early TV shows on IMDB, and many of them aren’t even there, or if they are, they come with a bare minimum amount of detail.
I haven’t done any looking up of Dumont yet, but I know I will, and sooner rather than later.
April 22nd, 2011 at 4:09 pm
I wonder why Suspense wasn’t mentioned here. It started on radio and then lasted from 1949-1954 on CBS. I’ve been watching those on DVD, but some of the more famous episodes weren’t included in the DVD set. “Cabin-13” by John Dickson Carr and “The Hands of Mr Ottermole” by Thomas Burke were two I was hoping to watch. No luck. Maybe the kinescopes were lost or in bad shape. In fact, many of those that are included are from poor quality kinescopes. Still I’m happy to see anything from this very early time in TV history when it seemed that the shows were more like theater put on film. Also the perils of live TV are fun to see: an actor walking in front of the camera when exiting a scene was a common problem.
April 22nd, 2011 at 9:45 pm
Kinescopes did not exist until 1947 and RCA (which co-owned NBC) was playing with TV programs since 1926. Even the FCC did not exist until the early 1930’s. By the time CBS turned to TV, NBC had a huge lead over CBS as far as TV was concerned. NBC was so big it was finally forced (by FCC and Supreme Court) to sell off the Blue Network that eventually became ABC.
Most TV programs during the 30s were done for and by one station. NBC was the only one that saw the benefit of have a group of stations showing the same program.
During 1946-48 when it was basically NBC vs Dumont for Network TV, Dumont did a great deal of experimental programming but lack the number of stations NBC had. So few people ever saw them. CBS did TV programs but waited until 1948 to form a TV network with its own schedule (as did ABC).
The CBS program SORRY, WRONG NUMBER Tise mentions may have been based on one of SUSPENSE’s most famous radio episodes.
The most accepted resource for TV programs from 1946 through today is the book, THE COMPLETE DIRECTORY TO PRIME TIME NETWORK TV SHOWS by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh. But even they never attempted to list the many TV programs that existed since TV began (they also wisely avoided the countless syndicated TV series or TV series for a single station). Tise is a very brave researcher.
J F
I can’t speak for Tise but I think this was about the pre-network period. Hopefully, the black and white Network era (before NBC added color to NBC’s programs) will be next and SUSPENSE will be mentioned there. By the way the radio version of SUSPENSE was one of the last OTR series to die, as it lasted until 1962. The radio series started with Alfred Hitchcock and featured the best talent of film and radio. Many then and today consider SUSPENSE the best radio series ever made.
June 2nd, 2011 at 9:19 pm
This is my error. Tise sent me the following by regular email, not as a comment, and while still in my recuperation period, I failed to get it posted here.
Better late than never, I suppose:
“Yes, I will be doing something on the 1949-54 CBS anthology SUSPENSE in a future part, perhaps to be called something like Theatre of Crime, in which I’ll be taking a look at all the genre-related TV anthology series (alongside ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS/HOUR, GEORGE SANDERS MYSTERY THEATRE, THE WEB, PANIC! and most of the others). The TV anthology series, too, contributed greatly to the TV Crime & Mystery as well as having a strong influence on the story-telling style of future genre series.”
July 3rd, 2011 at 2:34 pm
[…] 1: Basic Characteristics (A Swift Overview) Part 2.0: Evolution of the TV Genre (UK) Part 2.1: Evolution of the TV Genre (US) Part 3.0: Cold War Adventurers (The First Spy Cycle) Part 3.1: […]