Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Falcon: "The Case of the Gangster's Girl" 3/4/51

A woman wants the Falcon to get her abusive gangster boyfriend sent to the slammer. Soon, a murder gets in the way of the Falcon's scheme.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 Adventures of the Falcon: "The Case of the Carved Hand" 4/8/51

A two-timing broad, a jealous gangster and a henchman that doesn't care for his boss all add up to murder.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Falcon: "The Case of the Unsilent Butler" 3/11/51

The Butler Petroleum Detector is a new invention potentially worth millions. So it's not surprising that several people are willing to lie, cheat or kill to get their hands on it.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Falcon: "Puzzling Pinup" 11/9/50

A murder-suicide leads to a blackmail plot which in turn leads to at least one more murder.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Falcon: "The Invisible Thug" 1/7/51

A guy commits a murder, then hires the Falcon to prove he's innocent.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Falcon: "The Case of the Big Talker" 4/29/51

A mobster forces Mike Waring to help clear him of murder. The mobster is undoubtedly capable of murder--the question is whether he's guilty of this particular one.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Falcon: "The Case of the Jack of Diamonds" 9/7/52

On radio, the Falcon was a private eye named Michael Waring who was occassionally recruited by the government to do some Cold War spying in Europe. Consequently, Waring finds himself in London for this episode, where he becomes involved in a case involving blackmail and murder.

Les Damon does a fine job playing the Falcon, but what makes the episode really work was the supporting characters involved in this particular adventure. This includes the world's most nervous and uncertain blackmailer who is being egged on by a ruthless femme fatale. Well-written and well-acted, these characters helped give what was otherwise a pretty standard whodunit some real personality.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Falcon: “Natural Seven” 2/28/52


Here’s a well-plotted hard-boiled procedural with a pretty good twist at the end.


It starts with a game of craps in a gambling joint. An eager but foolish player asks for permission to bet way over the limit, then fails to make the point. He can’t pay off his bet, which is a situation that generally ticks off gambling joint owners.


From here, the story moves along very quickly, but always logically and clearly. This episode, in fact, is a good example of just how clear and concise radio was as a storytelling medium, providing the scripts, acting and production values are high. We are carried along as the guy in debt tries to rob his boss for the money he needs, later gets beaten up by the gambler’s thug when this doesn’t net him any cash, then becomes a prime suspect when the gambler is murdered. The gambler’s kinda trampy wife and her lover are tossed into the mix as well and it’s soon left up to the Falcon to sort it all out.


Earlier in its run, the Falcon had had a sort of suave British flavor to it. But by the 1950s, it had become more hard-boiled, expertly telling fast-moving crime and spy stories without ever leaving an attentive listener behind.

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Where the heck did Philip Marlowe go?

Raymond Chandler introduced the world to private eye Philip Marlowe in the 1939 novel The Big Sleep. Marlowe is one of the greatest (arguably the greatest) of the hard-boiled private eyes-- a modern day knight errant—a man who once says of himself “I hear voices crying in the night and I go to see what’s the matter.”

Chandler was a master of sparse but descriptive prose and sharp dialogue, dropping Marlowe into complex stories set in a corrupt world. It wasn’t long before movie studios began to take a look at the Marlowe novels.

Oddly, though, the first two movies based on Chandler’s novels dropped Marlowe from the stories. Farewell, My Lovely became a vehicle for a suave British detective, while The High Window was given to another popular hard-boiled P.I.

B-movie detectives were incredibly popular during the 1940s. Characters like the Falcon, Boston Blackie, Michael Shayne, Torchy Blane, the Lone Wolf and Charlie Chan often appeared in two or three films a year. I suppose the popularity of these series during the 1940s meant the writers were always scrambling for enough material and plot ideas to fill this bottomless well.

Anyway, RKO Studios was producing the Falcon series. These movies initially starred George Sanders, Based on a short story by Michael Arlen, the Falcon is an urbane amateur detective who attracts the attention of at least one inevitably jealous woman per movie. He also tends to stumble over murder victims and indulge himself in solving the crime.

The Falcon Takes over (1942) uses the general plot and some of the characters from Farewell, My Lovely. A perpetually confused thug named Moose Malloy is looking for his old girlfriend—a femme fatale named Velma. On top of this, a sleazy rich guy hires the Falcon to help recover some stolen jewels. The two cases inevitably ties together.

The original plot is, of course, simplified for the Falcon film (B-movies typically ran only a few minutes over an hour) and the dark themes involving a good man trying not to drown in an ocean of corruption are dropped. The movie is still a lot of fun, though. Sanders was tailor-made for that particular sort of character; character actor Ward Bond is effectively menacing as Moose; and Hans Conried (another always entertaining character actor) has a small role as the sleazy rich guy.

That same year, Twentieth Century Fox turned to Chandler’s The High Window, changing the title to Time to Die and turning it into a vehicle for Michael Shayne, a private eye created by Brett Halliday in a series of well-written novels. Lloyd Nolan was playing Shayne in the subsequent B-movie series. I have no idea why the scriptwriters turned to Chandler when Halliday seemed to be writing about three zillion Shayne novels each year that were presumably available for adaptation. And I’m afraid I can’t judge the quality of the film. A few of the Shayne films have come out on DVD, but this one hasn’t and I’ve never managed to catch it on television.

Back to RKO: In 1944, Philip Marlowe finally got to appear in a Philip Marlowe story. Farewell, My Lovely was renamed Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell (up till now known as a star of light-weight musicals) proving his hard-boiled chops by giving the iconic Marlowe performance. Moose Malloy was played this time around by Mike Mazurki—who was pretty much the go-to guy for playing brutal thugs and bullies during the B-movie era. The beautifully photographed end result is a classic of film noir.

(By the way, anytime you see Mike Mazurki in a movie or TV show, you are obligated to point at the screen and yell out his name. It’s a tradition. Don’t ask me to explain. Just start doing it.)

So it was worth the wait. Besides, The Falcon Takes Over is a fun B-movie, so it all worked out for the best. Still, the fact that two different studios made Marlowe films in the same year without Marlowe in them is a fact worth noting. It doesn’t actually mean anything, but it’s worth noting all the same.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Falcon: “Worried Wife” 4/1/51


The Falcon was a bit generic. The lead character—private eye Michael Waring (aka “The Falcon”)—was a standard hard-boiled detective who was never really given a unique personality of his own.



But all the same, The Falcon is pretty much always fun to listen to. The various actors who played Waring (Les Damon in this episode) managed to give him some bite and the scripts, supporting characters and production values were always solid. (Though there was sometimes an over-reliance on clichéd organ music to punctuate dramatic moments.)


The show therefore becomes a prime example of just how effective a medium for storytelling radio was. The Theater of the Mind could take a generic character in a generic setting and still make it all sound great.


In this episode, a newlywed husband is nearly shot by an old girlfriend. His wife goes to Waring for help before there’s a second murder attempt. But it’s too late—Waring finds the husband dead.


But was it the old girlfriend? Or the wife? Or the guy who owed the victim money? Waring does a nice bit of multi-layered deductive reasoning to finger the killer.



Click HERE to listen or download.

It may be murder, but that doesn't mean there isn't time for a song.

The main reason I enjoy the B-movies of the 1930s, 40s and 50s as much as they do is that they were so good at basic storytelling. In the best of them, the plots moves along quickly and logically. There’s no pretension to them at all—story was everything.




Well, almost everything. The best B-movie series had likeably protagonists (Charlie Chan, Hopalong Cassidy, Andy Hardy, etc.) and they also had a real sense of fun. In mysteries and westerns, this is often emphasized by the inclusion of one or two comic relief characters. But there’s other ways to make sure these short and fast-moving films stay fun from start to finish. Sometimes, they’d manage to throw in a song or two.



Of course, for some B-movies series, this was a natural part of their world. Roy Rogers and the other singing cowboys, for instance, would always pepper their music throughout their films.



But every once in awhile, we’d get a pause in the middle of a murder investigation to hear a tune.




I just watched The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943), with Tom Conway playing the suave detective and ladies man. Conway is typically good in the role and the mystery (involving a couple of murders at a conservative girls’ college) is well-constructed. And, of course, the setting gives an excuse to show an even higher number of pretty girls than is usual in a Falcon film. We normally get three or four. This time we get dozens.




But we also get some music. The girls are putting on a talent show. Even with dead bodies turning up, the show must go on. And so the movie pauses a couple of times to toss in a song or two. And they’re pretty good songs as well.




I suppose one reason for this was that the main plot didn’t quite fill up the usual B-movie running time of about 64 minutes, so they needed the filler. But even so, the inclusion of the songs is fit into the story and only adds to the sense of good fun that fairly drips from the movie.




It reminds me of yet another case in which a B-movie murder investigation made way for a song. In Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939), Nancy and her boy friend Ted trail some suspects to a Chinese restaurant. The two obnoxious kids they are forced to bring along order too much food and they haven’t enough money to pay for the meal.





This leads to Nancy and her companions literally singing for their supper. The restaurant has a band. (Chinese musicians in traditional garb, but playing jazz on modern instruments. Go figure.) This band supplies the music as the desperate and unwilling performers improvise songs out of nursery rhymes. They are, of course, a big hit. And the entire scene—silly as it was---is overflowing with pure fun.




Back to The Falcon and the Co-eds—mention should also be made of how charming and delightful were the Three Ughs. The daughters of the school’s grounds-keeper, the three kids dress alike, speak in consecutive sentences (one after the other, finishing up each other’s thoughts) and do a bang-up job with one of the songs. Of course, at one point they insist on helping the Falcon with his investigation. It’s nice to hang out with them for awhile and they’re yet another example of the sense of fun the best of the B-movies exuded.





They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. I swear to heaven, I have no idea why.

B-Movie Detectives: Part 9

By 1941, George Sanders had starred as Simon Templer, aka the Saint, in five movies produced by RKO. These were fun films based on Leslie Charteris' classic "gentleman-adventurer" character, but Charteris eventually pulled the rights to the Saint away from that studio.

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So RKO turned to a short story by Michael Arlen titled "The Gay Falcon" to find another suave gentleman-adventurer that Sanders could play.

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In that story, the main character (who is 0bviously based on the Saint) is actually named Gay Falcon. An unfortunate name from a modern perspective, but of course his first name didn't have the same connotation then as it does now.

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The 1941 movie version does use a few plot elements from that story, but mostly just comes up with an original story. Though Sanders is now playing a guy named Gay Laurence, known as the Falcon from his work catching criminals, he is really a carbon copy of the Saint.

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The Falcon movies, though, are actually a little better written than those in the Saint series. The plots are better constructed and the comic relief (often a stumbling block in such film series) is actually pretty funny.

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After four films, Sanders left the series. Rather than recasting the part, though, the producers opted to do something unusual. In The Falcon's Brother (1942), Gay Laurence is killed off. His brother Tom takes over as the main character. The series continued for 10 more films.

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Ironically, Tom Conway was George Sanders real life brother as well. (Conway would also play the Saint on a 1951 radio series, as well as take a turn as Sherlock Holmes in that medium.)

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Whether the Falcon was played by Sanders or Conway, the appeal of the character was the same. He was an intelligent guy--upper class but never snobbish--who always kept his cool even when he was being framed for murder or was facing down an armed killer. Both Sanders and Conway gave the Falcon class, while the script writers gave him some solid, interesting mysteries to solve.