Old Time Radio

Retrospective (1936 – early 1950s)

Best known for his airing of “War of the Worlds”, Orson Welles made numerous appearances on a variety of different shows during his magnificent radio career. He was truly a creative genius in radio, before he went on to Hollywood.

Between 1936 and 1941, Orson Welles was involved in more than a hundred radio drama productions as writer, actor and director. From this and his films, he is considered one of the outstanding figures in American creative arts. He continued on radio through the early 1950s.

Radio was the golden key to his rise to fame. In September of 1937, Welles became the initially uncredited lead in the popular radio series, The Shadow. .  Writer Walter E. Gibson had created the character for the pulps; it grew into nationwide popularity due to it’s fine adaptation to radio. From the first, Welles did the scripts with no rehearsal which, along with his wonderful voice and acting, gave the overtly melodramatic scripts an intelligence and urgency that was very different from other adventures on the radio dial.

While doing radio shows during the day, Welles and John Houseman worked nights producing a dramatic scene in New York City - The Mercury Theater. The work was excellently received but some shows were so was politically charged that attempted governmental control was rumored. It seemed that Welle’s outsider genius status was already effecting his radio prestige.
In spite of that, Welles was offered a slot on network radio for his fine creative radio theatre in 1938. Each week they would do a full hour of quality drama, with Pabst Beer sponsoring the show. The Mercury Theater embraced thrillers such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, and the classics of literature such as Pickwick Papers and Tale of Two Cities. The notoriety of War of the Worlds got Campbell Soups interested, and so the new Campbell Playhousecontinued where The Mercury Theater left off, with the same great actors and quality treatments of dramatic classic and original radio material, some written by Welles himself.  The Shadow lead was later handed to veteran radio actor, Bill Johnstone
Orson continued to be a famous radio star post-Mercury Theater, and made many appearances on almost all the major radio shows of the time, as well as continuing his dramatic work on such shows as Norman Corwin‘s prestigious Columbia Theater Workshop and Suspense.

Later in Welles career after the creation of his great role in the film The Third Man, he was offered the Lime character in a radio series based on the movie. The Adventures of Harry Lime, it was called, but it continued to be known to the public as The Third Man. Produced in 1951 – 52, and then transcribed for America, of course it featured the atmospheric music of Anton Karas. Welles is able to make Harry Lime suave yet duplicitous while always working some scam or other for a hasty profit. Lovers of noir and the hard boiled school will admire the show’s subtle European variations on the themes of crime and (escape from) punishment.

During that same period, Orson found time to do another UK production, The Black Museum. This was Scotland Yard’s “mausoleum of murder,” a “repository of crime.” As narrator, Welles walked through the echoing museum, picking an common object and relating its criminal past.

The legendary Orson Welles was a phenomenon in the radio and cinema worlds, but his individual genius and auteurism were inherently counter-establishment. While remaining a famous personality, he lived to see his creative clout slowly diminish, until he was known for doing American TV commercials.

That he lives on in these truly magnificent radio works would seem to prove that “he who laughs last, laughs best”.