Episode 225 – Dashiell’s Detectives (Suspense & Screen Guild Theatre)

Down These Mean Streets (Old Time Radio Detectives)

Jack Mooney

Arts, Performing Arts, Mystery, Detectives, Old, Radio, Time, Tv & Film, Oldtimeradio

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2017

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In honor of Dashiell Hammett’s birthday, we’re saluting the master of hard boiled mystery with radio adaptations of two of his stories. First, Suspense – “radio’s outstanding theater of thrills” – presents John Payne and Frank McHugh in the small-town murder mystery “Two Sharp Knives” (originally aired on CBS on June 7, 1945). Then, the big screen cast reunites for a radio recreation of The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet star in this version from The Lady Esther Screen Guild Theatre (originally aired on CBS on September 20, 1943).

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Welcome to down these mean streets where today we're saluting one of the greatest
0:26.4	mystery writers of all time, a king in the world of hard-boiled crime stories and
0:32.0	the creator of some of the most celebrated detectives in
0:35.1	fiction, Dacheal Hamet. He was born May 27th 1894 and today we're celebrating him with radio recreations of two of his stories.
0:47.0	Though he only wrote five novels, those books and the dozens of short stories he penned were a tremendous influence on crime fiction through the 20th century,
0:57.0	and Hammett's characters have been adapted time and again for radio and the big and small screens.
1:04.0	His two most famous works may be The Thin Man and the Maltese Falcon.
1:09.0	Both came to the big screen as classic films,
1:12.0	and both were adapted for radio with the continuing
1:15.5	adventures of Nick and Nora Charles and of Private Eyes Sam Spade.
1:21.3	We'll hear a radio version of the Maltese Falcon today, but first we're headed to
1:26.0	Radio's Outstanding Theater of Thrills, Suspense, and its adaptation of two sharp knives, a Hammett short story from 1934.
1:37.0	Suspense presented the story twice, once on December 22nd, 1942, and again on June 7th, 1945.
1:47.0	It's the 1945 broadcast we'll hear today, an episode that stars John Payne and Frank McHugh as the chief and assistant chief of a small town police force.
1:58.0	They're faced with a baffling mystery involving a wanted man, a missing wife, and a suspicious suicide.
2:06.6	It's a great adaptation, one that retains much of Hamlet's dialogue from the original short story.
2:13.0	Wally Mayer, Kathy Lewis, and Wendell Holmes co-star in this episode, produced and directed by William Spear.
2:21.0	Now William Spear would go on to produce and direct the adventures of Sam Spade when that
2:27.1	series came to radio in 1946, but before Spade was a radio detective, he was on the big screen.
2:35.0	The Maltese Falcon was filmed twice before Director John Houston delivered the definitive version and one of the greatest movies of all time in 1941.
2:45.0	Humphrey Bogart starred as Sam Spade with Mary Astor as his calculating client, Bridget O'Shaughnessy.
2:53.6	Peter Lorry was the sniveling and sinister Joel Cairo, and Sydney Green Street in his film debut
	...

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