OTR: Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1949-53)

I probably picked up the interest in old time radio (OTR) from my father. He was never a huge collector of programs, but he occasionally bought albums available of various radio shows, or borrowed them from the library. I recall he was mostly into old radio comedy and Westerns, and pulp-style heroes such as The Shadow. My own tastes in OTR run mostly in the direction of detective series, and one of my current favorites is Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Part of the reason is star Dick Powell (1904-1963) the first, and my favorite, cinematic interpreter of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character in Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet (1944).

Powell's initial stock-in-trade was as a singer. Signed to Warner Bros. in 1932, he debuted in Blessed Event as a singing bandleader, and for twelve years he sang and hoofed in musicals such as 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Flirtation Walk, and On The Avenue, often appearing opposite Ruby Keeler. But he couldn't do the boyish roles he was known for forever, and in 1944 he landed a completely different role in Murder My Sweet, and entered on a new phase in his career as a tough-guy lead in crime and detective features. He also parlayed the new persona into radio, starring in a number of detective series in the forties and fifties.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective debuted on NBC in 1949, and ran until 1953. Sponsored at first by the Rexall drug chain and then by Camel cigarettes, the series' principal producer and writer by Blake Edwards, who was later to create the television series Peter Gunn and the Pink Panther film series. Beginning with a dramatic sting, segueing into a happy-go-lucky whistled rendition of "Leave It To Love" by Henry Russell, the series combined hard-boiled action and intrigue with a light touch of humor. Richard Diamond was a wisecracking shamus who, in typical private-eye fashion, was catnip to the women, handy with a gun, got knocked over the head and roughed up a lot, and narrated the episodes Philip Marlowe-style. He also had a knack for discovering dead bodies and had an adversarial but affectionate relationship with homicide detective Lt. Walt Levinson (Ed Begley), whose stomach always cried out for a bicarb of soda when Diamond was around, and his dim sidekick Sgt. Otis (Wilms Herbert) with whom Diamond frequently traded insults. Diamond's romantic interest was socialite Helen Asher (Virginia Gregg), whose cushy Park Avenue digs were a frequent destination after a tough case, and to whom he frequently sang a song at the conclusion of the show.

Parenthetical comments: other voice talents heard on the show included Alan Reed, who also played Lt. Levinson in some episodes and who is best known to people of my age as the voice of Fred Flintstone. Also heard on Richard Diamond was Jim Backus, best known as the voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo and as Thurston Howell III on television's Gilligan's Island, as well as a frequent comic actor in films. Also, an interesting announcement heard on some of the episodes sponsored by Camel cigarettes informs listeners that smokers pay an over fifty percent tax on the cigarettes they buy -- a whopping eight cents a pack in Federal taxes and three or four cents more in state or local taxes. More interesting than how the price of a pack of smokes has changed over the years is the tone of the announcement, implying that smokers are performing a civic duty when paying taxes on a pack of cigarettes, an attitude that has certainly changed in the decades since this announcement aired.

Dick Powell went on to a third career in movie and television production with his Four Stars production company, and from 1957 to 1960 brought Richard Diamond to television starring David Janssen. Powell passed away in 1963, his stomach cancer rumored to be the result of his work on the Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, which was filmed on Nevada land where nuclear weapons had been tested; many members of the cast and crew of this film (most notably among them John Wayne) contracted cancer later in life.

The internet-based Old Time Radio Researchers group is a collection of volunteers dedicated to documenting and preserving old radio programs, and they occasionally put together "certified" collections of programs, along with any further information available about the programs. The OTRR certified collection of Richard Diamond, Private Detective hosted permanently at the Internet Archive contains, with the exception of a few missing or repeat episodes, the complete run of the series in five .zip files each of which is roughly the size of a CD-ROM, or together will fit on a data DVD. Along with the programs, most of which are high quality 128kb MP3s apparently taken from original transcription recordings, comes a great deal of documentation, including photos, bios, scripts and other information about the series. The collection also has specially-created artwork suitable for burning discs of the programs. Single episodes from the series are also available if you don't have a fast connection or you only wish to sample a few episodes from the series.

Baba Yaga (1973)

After meeting a mysterious woman who calls herself Baba Yaga, fashion photographer Valentina (Isabelle de Funès) begins to experience strange dreams and visions and weird happenings, including the deaths of people whose pictures were snapped by one of her cameras the mysterious woman had handled. Convinced that the woman (Carroll Baker) is a witch who is trying to place Valentina under her control, she tries to convince her skeptical boyfriend Arno (George Eastman) to help her break Baba Yaga's supernatural influence.

The story of a lesbian witch who attempts to psychologically control another woman by cursing a camera and sending a familiar in the form of a doll in revealing fetishwear -- who sometimes assumes human form (Ely Galleani) to do Baba Yaga's bidding -- is also the story of compromises in terms of casting, control over the finished work, and to some degree censorship. Neither Isabelle de Funès nor Carroll Baker were Corrado Farina's first choices for the roles they played, but they did very well -- especially Carroll Baker -- under the circumstances. Corrado Farina's finished cut of the film was subjected to some irreversible (and unauthorized) negative cuts as well, and the film was contracted to a financially troubled distributor who could not promote the film properly, so the film sank at the box office and was Farina's second and last feature.

This Italian thriller was based on the comics character created by Guido Crepax, an artist whose comic strips were a great fascination for director/screenwriter Corrado Farina since they began to be serialized in the magazine Linus in the mid-sixties. Crepax's strips were some of the most sophisticated and challenging works in the medium, using a bold black-and-white style and laid out using the logic of film editing. Full of references to art, literature, psychoanalysis and classic film, they were also graphically sexual and often perverse, thoroughly modern and designed for well-read, broad-minded adults. As a filmmaker, Farina had followed the attempts of the time at films based on comic strips with interest (Mario Bava's Diabolik, Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise, Roger Vadim's Barbarella) but found them less true to their sources than he would have liked, and decided to try his hand at a comics-inspired film more integrated with Crepax's cinema-inspired comics. As he himself admits, he was only partly successful, using sequences of high-contrast still photographs in repetitive patterns in imitiation of Crepax's graphics.

In the dream and nightmare sequences which punctuate the action, the film is a little more successful in conveying the phantasmagoria of the Valentina stories. The comics' attempt at being intellectually well-versed comes off a bit superficial in the film: Valentina's studio-apartment is modishy littered with books by Marx, Mickey Mouse, Sade, Beardsley, and there is an art book open to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon next to the clear lucite telephone, she attends showings of films like The Golem, and the dialogue is littered with sometimes embarrassing attempts at intellectual chatter. This turned out to be the second and final feature film from Corrado Farina, so Baba Yaga remains a one-of-a-kind thriller that is stylish and interesting in spite of the compromises made: intelligent, sexy, creepy, and a suspicion of kinkiness.

Baba Yaga is available as a DVD from Blue Underground, a company specializing in European exploitation films, with an interview with director Corrado Farina, a DVD-ROM feature (a .pdf file showing comparisons between Crepax's comics and stills from the film), and a short film by Farina on Crepax's comics, Freud in Color.

Alley Tramp (1968)

Herschell Gordon Lewis is best remembered as the pioneer of gore and splatter in such grindhouse bloodbaths as Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, and The Gore-Gore Girls. But he started his career making nudies with partner David F. Friedman, and after the two amicably dissolved their partnership, apparently kept his hand in with the occasional skinflick, such as this campy troubled-teen/family drama in which scrubbed, wholesome Marie Barker (Julie Ames), a cute perky teenager in the mid-sixties Patty Duke Show mold, accidentally sees her parents in bed together and turns virtually overnight into a cynical, calculating, sexually voracious little wench. Beginning by seducing her third cousin, Phil (Steve White), she goes on to cut classes for trysts with Phil at local cheap motels and adopting an insolent attitude when confronted about her school attendance. When she catches her mother (Ann Heath) having an affair with a barfly named Herbie, she blackmails her into giving her a blank check for doing what she pleases, with whomever she pleases. It'll come as no surprise that this situation won't last for long.

In classic exploitation fashion, Alley Tramp takes the pseudo-moralizing approach to rationalize all the skin and sin being represented on screen. Marie's "serious case of nymphomania" is explained as the product of parents who are too busy squabbling with each other and pursuing their own selfish interests to take an interest in their daughter. Dad is too busy at the office, where he's having it off with his secretary, and Mom, notwithstanding the witnessed bed scene, is sexually neglected by her husband and seeks solace in booze and extramarital affairs of her own. After a hilarious montage of Dad dandling his secretary on his lap, Mom going with various pick-ups, and Marie in bed with Phil and with various other men who grab her fancy, it all comes down with a bump: an unplanned pregnancy, a botched abortion, a trip to the mental home, and Mom and Dad resolving to come together and make their family a happy one again.

By the time this film was made, this moral pretense was getting a little old-fashioned: exploitation films were losing the tongue-in-cheek lectures in favor of straightforward wallows in sleazy wish-fulfillment. But it works for this film, largely because it matches the acting to a tee: bad, broad, heavy-handed and loud. When Julie Ames does her "I'm not a child anymore, I'm a woman and I'll do as I please" speech, it's in a top-of-her-lungs screech and very obviously read from a script off camera... and priceless. Ann Heath similarly clobbers her role with overwrought gestures and community-theater emoting.

The style of the film only underlines the enthusiastic but unnuanced performances. A pragmatic filmmaker who always realized that his audiences didn't give a damn about stylistic niceties or mise-en-scene, Lewis always reached for the simplest solutions: if you can get the point across in one take, do it in one take. So when Marie goes to her bedroom to change into something sexy for Phil before seducing him, the tripod-mounted camera spends three minutes following her around in roughly moving pans, tilts and zooms as she peels off her clothes, admires herself in the mirror, selects some new clothes, puts them on, and leaves. Similarly, a walk in a very large, scenic park shot on location, until it is time for the outdoor love sequence, when the two collapse behind a bush and -- cut -- fall onto a carpet of artificial turf on a soundstage, shot from overhead with a tree branch and the sound of birds for some continuity and the two are soon engaged in a naked tussle that accidentally turns up the corner of one of the sheets of turf.

Alley Tramp is rich in this kind of bad-film detail, and the results add up to what I think is an accessible and entertaining film experience and one that might serve as an introduction to sixties sexploitation for those who like "cult films" but might not have had too much experience with this particular genre. The nudity is not particularly graphic, and the camp elements give newcomers a handle of sorts to acclimatize themselves to a genre that over the past several years has been coming out on DVD format, often after decades of obscurity. This film comes on a double-feature edition by Something Weird Video along with Over 18... And Ready, a story of the sleazy world of sexploitation pictures, as well as a few appropriate short subjects.