oing back to the Eighties for this feature film which will hit screens...well, one day soon.
However with or without me The Saint Weekend blasts off.
There'll be several further posts this evening as The Archive goes Saint crazy.
The line up includes:
The Digital Publication of The Saint Settles a Score by Keith Chapman, a comic strip which has not seen publication in a number of decades. We've dusted it down and hope you enjoy it. This will be posted this Sunday evening. We'll also have a few words from Keith himself.
An interview with Ian Dickerson of The Saint Club - this guy is a massive Saint buff and had the honour of counting Leslie Charteris as a personal friend.
A look at all The Saint big screen movies (well the English language ones, actually.)
A full episode of OLD TIME RADIO SAINT - The Previewed Murder starring Vincent Price
News on that new TV series
A look at an issue of The Saint Magazine from 1967
A comparison of the 1969 and 1979 Saint annuals
A look at the first season of Roger Moore's Saint
Book reviews
An appreciation by John Sinclair
But to kick off proceedings we hand you over to Cullen Gallagher, film critic, for a review of a recent live recreation of one of those old time radio Saints that he attended in a premier New York book store.
So over to you Cullen:
On the first Saturday of every month, New York City’s great mystery bookstore Partners and Crime converts its backroom into an old-fashioned radio studio for W-WOW! Radio Mystery Hour. A long-standing tradition at the bookstore, W-W
OW consists of local actors (some of whom even work for the bookstore) who perform vintage radio scripts just as they would have on the air originally, complete with commercials, live music and sound effects. For the start of this season, the group performed two shows, the first of which was an episode from The Saint called “The Alive Dead Husband,” which originally aired January 7, 1951.
This story finds Simon Templar (here played by Greg Oliver Bodine) with an odd case, indeed. At the start, Claire Gordon (played by Rebecca Roe) comes to his office to confess the murder of her husband. Moments after the she leaves, the husband (played by Bob Rutan) shows up demanding to know why his wife was there. Of course he doesn’t believe Templar – until he steps out of the door and is promptly shot dead. But by whom? Templar visits the wife – now a widow – only she doesn’t remember confessing at all, and has an alibi when the murder occurred. A most tricky case. But luckily Templar has his Brooklyn cabbie sidekick Louie (played by Alan Dolderer) to help out and provide comic relief.
As always, W-WOW performed marvelously, transporting its audience back half a century ago, back to when everyone sat around the radio listening anxiously to hear the latest adventure of The Saint. If you happen to be in New York City, definitely drop by Partners and Crime to check out one of W-WOW’s shows, and pick up a couple books while you are waiting. Visit their website at www.crimepays.com for more info.
3 comments:
Cullen, Was there any indication of the authorship of the radio script? As with the comics and the later TV series, ghost writers are often said to have been involved. For instance, King of the Beggars, which appears in Call for the Saint, is said to have been adapted from the script by Henry Kuttner for a radio episode broadcast by the NBC on 17 March 1945. Another writer sometimes mentioned as a ghost of the period was Cleve Cartmill. I also heard it claimed, by British crime writer Nigel Morland in the 1960s, that he ghosted Saint material as far back as back in the 1930s, and that one of the novelettes that eventually ended up in Follow the Saint was his work.
Louis Vittes wrote that episode.
As for Saintly ghosts well I do tackle that subject--at great length--in my biog of Leslie. And the answers are probably not what you're expecting...
Ian
Ohhhh, top secret location eh? Interesting.
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