Mercury Month - Week #3



The Old Time Radio Express rolls out of the station tonight with two more shows featuring the talents of members of the Mercury Theatre troupe - George Coulouris and Edgar Barrier.

Coulouris is great in the WWII thriller,
"Watch on the Rhine", with Bette
Davis and Paul Muni.

Coulouris plays the title role in the B-grade detective show, Bulldog Drummond.  Despite the fact that Drummond ran for 8+ years, it is much less remembered nowadays than The Adventures of Sam Spade or The Adventures of Philip Marlowe.  The preservation of the majority of those shows on tape probably has a lot to do with it.

The film noir, "Cornered"
is on DVD and features
Edgar Barrier along with
crooner turned dramatic actor
Dick Powell.

Barrier and his distinctive voice narrate a "documentary" on the Pacific situation during WWII.  It's an interesting bit of radio, but if it's a documentary, then the term is used very loosely.

Enjoy! 

The Adventures of Nero Wolfe and The Strange Dr. Weird

Sydney Greenstreet played Nero Wolfe
for one season on radio.

This week we feature a detective who was, at one point, voted as a finalist for best detective in an ongoing series - Nero Wolfe.  (He ultimately lost to Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot).

The creation of a Noblesville, Indiana author, whose "Some Buried Caesar" Nero Wolfe mystery was named Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library's choice for "One Book, One City", Nero Wolfe was a corpulent, orchid-loving "foodie" who disliked leaving his comfortable, custom-made armchair, even to solve cases.

Wolfe came to radio at least 3 different times, none of which author Rex Stout particularly cared for.  (This was typical of the detective writers of the time.  Others like Hammett and Chandler were only loosely associated with the productions of the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe series, associating their names with the programs for the sake of royalty checks, but otherwise despising the writing and, occasionally, the acting). 

But of the Wolfes to be on the air, Stout most enjoyed the characterization of the star we hear from this week - Sydney Greenstreet. 

Stick around after the Nero Wolfe episode for a nice Strange Dr. Weird mystery called "When Killers Meet".