|
"...On the dark side of the room, you could not see them. Only their eyes. Thousands of points of blank red light, blinking and twinkling like the stars of hell..." |
Although we mainly deal with classic horror films, classic horror actors and classic radio shows were closely intertwined, as in the case of...
By B. A. Peterson (Note: With this article, we welcome a new writer to HORROR-WOOD, B. A. Peterson. In addition to being a great researcher and writer, she is editor of Nocturne, the journal of the Conrad Veidt Society. In addition to German expressionist film, her interests include old time radio, theater, and classic television and movies of the mystery and suspense genres. Among her many favorite actors are Gloria Grahame, Vic Morrow, Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, and Conrad Veidt. She's a believer in a diet of chocolate and Pepsi, but is also a dedicated bicyclist.) Picture Vincent Price. A tall, well-built man with brown, widow-peaked hair framing a long, handsome face, large blue eyes, straight nose, wide, full-lipped mouth. That's his physical appearance. On the radio,
just his voice. By 1950, Missouri born-and-bred Price had conquered Broadway He'd made over thirty movies, from science fiction (The Invisible Man Returns) to historical drama (Hudson's Bay), to film noir (Laura), and displayed his manic comedic talents unforgettably in. But it was on radio and not film that Vincent Price made his memorable horror debut.
Radio was born in the 1920s, boomed in the Thirties, was golden in the Forties, and busted by a monster called television in the late Fifties. While it reigned supreme, the "Theater of the Mind" took listeners into a world made real by their own imaginations, a world of sound rather than sight, a world where the voices of actors and the ingenuity of sound effects artists gave everything plausible, sometimes terrifying life. A terrifying life that brought Vincent Price ever-lasting radio fame one day. It was on an episode of the radio anthology series Escape that Vincent Price first made his indelible mark. "Tired of the every day grind? Ever dreamed of a life of romantic adventure?" Every week would ask the deep, powerful, menacing voice of William Conrad or Paul Frees. "Want to get away from it all? We offer you… ESCAPE!" And a few bars from Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," to set the proper mood. Escape debuted on July 7, 1947, and for seven years featured a "hair-raising, audience-pleasing blend of epic adventure, running the gamut from historical adventure to westerns to science fiction to macabre horror, featuring stories adapted from the works of literary greats," according to radio historian John Dunning. These greats included Edgar Allen Poe, H. Rider Haggard, Daphne Du Maurier and Ray Bradbury. French writer George Toudouze wrote at least nineteen books about the sea, twelve plays, and nine books on art and architecture. But it is because Escape chose to dramatize his short story in Esquire magazine about the fate of a trio of unfortunate lighthouse keepers, called "Three Skeleton Key," that Toudouze's name is known today. The three men worked the light at a lonely lighthouse on a barren rock off the steaming jungle coast of French Guyana. One day a derelict ship, filled to the gunwales with huge, starving rats, crashes on the dangerous rocks and sinks beneath the waves. Its crew of rats don't drown, but head en masse towards the lighthouse and the many varieties of defenseless food within. CBS radio staff writer James Poe adapted the short story for radio. The author of hundreds of original scripts for Escape and other programs, Poe's writing style is unmistakable, with a piling on of adjective upon adjective, menace upon menace. He took Toudouze's story and made it his own. In Toudouze' version, the three men had no personality, no life. On the radio, Jean was the eager and enthusiastic novice, Auguste an egocentric ex-actor and hunchback, Louis stolid and taciturn and yearning for peaceful solitude.
When Three Skeleton Key was first broadcast on November 15, 1949, it presented a few challenges for special effects artist Cliff Thorsness. Hundreds, no thousands, no, millions--an endless number of enormous...rats! What would they sound like, and more importantly, how to make them sound, chittering menacingly behind a thin pane of glass? Eating away the wood of window panes and trapdoors? Being...fed? Although TSK was immensely popular with listeners, it was not an immaculate conception. (Vincent Price wasn't among the cast!) But thanks to hundreds of requests, TSK was reprised only four months later, on March 17, 1950. This time, it was golden. In front of the microphone this time was Vincent Price. Price was as popular on radio as he was in every other medium. In addition to starring in his own series, The Saint, from 1947 on, he had many guest-starring roles on comedy and drama shows as well as several episodes of Escape and Suspense, a similar anthology show, before his ultimate achievement in TSK. Price's voice ran the gamut of emotions as Jean, the new lighthouse keeper who first spots the rat-infested ship sailing inexorably toward the rocks surrounding Three Skeleton Key. From his opening lines, describing the lighthouse and his compatriots with jejune enthusiasm, his voice takes on and maintains an edge of muted terror after the arrival of the rats. "The light drove them mad as she swung slowly and smoothly about. It blinded them in the fierce, stabbing bar of light, moving continually about, ever turning, ever touching, ever moving around and around. And they, twisting and stuttering, eyes flaming when they were struck by the light. The bright light moving and, behind, on the dark side of the room, so close--so close I dared not turn my back but you cannot help turning your back when you're in a room made of glass--on the dark side of the room, you could not see them. Only their eyes. Thousands of points of blank red light, blinking and twinkling like the stars of hell." The fictional terrors that the Grand Guignol put its audiences through were as nothing compared to what lay in store for the three lighthouse keepers, especially for poor Jeff Corey's Louis, who disintegrates from the proud, taciturn headman of the lights to a whimpering baby after one of the rats tears his hand open.
The excellence of the ensemble cast, the sound effects, the rats, all combined to ensure that no one who heard this broadcast of "Three Skeleton Key" would ever forget it. But there were more broadcasts to come. If listeners couldn't get enough of a show, producers knew enough to give it to them again and again. Not simply re-running the same broadcast, but actually re-creating it live. The next time TSK was performed, Ben Wright had the role of Jean. Fans weren't pleased with the absence of Price, and when TSK moved over to Suspense on November 11, 1956, (Escape having gone off the air in 1954) and then for its final bow on October 19, 1958, Price was back in the role that was his alone. Even masterpieces apparently have to be re-mastered in order to accommodate shorter running times and more commercials. For Price's final go-around as Jean, someone had re-written a few things, shortening the opening and giving the supporting cast fewer lines. The sound effects were different and there was more, and more dramatic, music--purists would consider this unnecessary as there was already drama enough! But Price's new rendition was masterful as always. Eight years older had passed since his debut. Instead of a fresh-faced young man, Price gave voice to a Jean who was a weary old salt who'd seen too much horror and gotten used to it. Audiences weren't so weary, but they would never hear a new "Three Skeleton Key" again. Attempts in the past few years to produce new radio drama as a viable coast-to-coast medium have not been successful. But, because of enthusiasts who refuse to let old-time radio molder in the grave, new fans of the medium are discovering it every day. Every major city probably has at least one station that broadcasts old time radio shows. Twenty years after "Three Skeleton Key" first aired, Leonard Maltin appeared on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, to promote his book The Great American Broadcast. He brought along sound clips of various radio shows. One of these was the March 1950 "Three Skeleton Key." Maltin described it, quite accurately, as "one of the most famous in all of radio." That's all. That's the story. Lots of people are bad with titles, and can't remember them a day, let alone a year, or five years later. But no one who heard it would ever forget "the one about the rats." (Bibliography: "Vincent Price--His
Radio Appearances," by Martin Grams, Jr. in Vincent Price,
Midnight Marquee's Actor Series, edited by Gary J. and Susan Svehla, 1998. Thanks, Barbara, for uncovering an
aspect of Vincent Price's career where his masterly menace was far better
"heard" than "seen." Cheers! |
