Sam Spade: Caper Over My Dead Body (EP4083)
The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio| Daily Mystery Dramas
Adam Graham
4.4 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Original Radio Broadcast Date: November 17, 1950
Originated from Hollywood
Starred Stephen Dunne as Sam Spade, Lurene Tuttle as Effie
Watch Howard Duff on the Ed Wynn Show from January 1950.
Watch Howard Duff in Season 2 of Celebrity Bowling from 1974 (Episode 18)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the great |
| 0:29.9 | detectives of old-time radio. From Boise, Idaho, this is your host, Adam Graham. If you have |
| 0:38.0 | a comment, email it to me. Box13 at greatdetectives.net. Follow us on Twitter at Radio Detectives and check |
| 0:47.7 | us out on Instagram. Instagram.com slash great detectives. If you are enjoying this podcast, |
| 0:55.0 | please follow us using your favorite podcast software. Today's program is brought to you |
| 1:00.5 | in part by the financial support of our listeners. You can support the show on a one-time basis at |
| 1:06.1 | support.greatdetectives.net and you can also become one of our ongoing Patreon supporters for |
| 1:12.7 | as little as $2 per month. Just go to patreon.greatdetectives.net. Going to bring you today's episode |
| 1:20.8 | of Sam Spade in just a bit, but when we left you last Monday, Sam Spade had been cancelled, |
| 1:28.0 | and Howard Duff was bounced. However, NBC was inundated with letters calling for Sam Spade to |
| 1:38.2 | remain on the air. Several people, according to Martin Graham's book, wrote in and said that |
| 1:45.9 | even if Jack Benny, the biggest name in radio at the time were on at the same time, |
| 1:54.4 | they would listen to Howard Duff. So this led NBC to take the logical step and bring Sam Spade back |
| 2:03.3 | without Howard Duff. In many ways, this is a puzzling decision for us looking back at this |
| 2:11.5 | 73 years later. But the fact is that the political calculations that had led NBC to cancel Sam Spade in |
| 2:20.0 | the first place hadn't gone away. But the continuing interest in the series, if they did it without |
| 2:26.7 | Howard Duff, they could have a hit program and they could avoid the bad publicity and all the issues |
| 2:36.2 | with Duff having been mentioned in red channels. It wasn't the craziest thing that NBC would try |
| 2:43.5 | over the years. It was really struggling to keep a radio drama on NBC alive, and there were so |
| 2:51.4 | many failed experiments of entertaining programs that didn't find an audience. Whether you're talking |
| 2:59.4 | about Neural Wolf, Rocky Fortune, Crimin Peter Chambers, Easy Money, that this I think could seem worth |
| 3:07.9 | trying. Duff, for his part, said that he was disappointed in Spear 4, going ahead with the series |
... |
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