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Command Performance was Hollywood’s gift to the men and women serving overseas during World War II. Produced by the US War Department with 100 percent donated labor and facilites, the show featured appearances by performers as requested by servicemen. Each show featured a star MC, musical acts, comedy, and variety. Today’s episode was produced June 30, 1942. Spencer Tracy serves as host, with appearances by Groucho Mrx, Barbara Stanwyck, Victor Borge, and Mary Lee, among others.
In the fourth in our series of Lux Radio Theater programs, we mov beyond the Cecil B. DeMille years, to the William Keighley era. DeMille left his position as host after nine years, following a dispute with theAmerican Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA). After months of on-air auditions Keighley was named permanent host in November 1945, Keighley was a film director whose credits included; Brother Rat, The Streat With No Name, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Today’s episode of Lux, from November 15, 1948, stars John Garfield and Jane Wyman in Body and Soul.
Today we hear Lux episode 245, Dark Victory. It aired on January 8, 1940. The film version, starring Bette Davis and George Brent, had been released in April 1939, smack dab in the middle of Hollywood’s greatest film year. Lux had presented another version of Dark Victory in April 1938, with Barbara Stanwyck and Melvyn Douglas in the lead roles. But in 1940, it was not the play, but the pairing of Academy Award winners Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis that Cecil B DeMille raved about in his introduction. Davis and Tracy had earned two Oscars apiece by then, having each won acting awards at the most recent Oscar ceremony in 1939. Tracy’s Oscar was his second in a row. Davis had won her first in 1936. In short, Davis and Tracy were at the top of their game, and Lux made the most of their pairing on radio. Davis would go on to be nominated for another Oscar for her performance in <em>Dark Victory</em>. She lost to Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind.
Cary Grant takes Joseph Cotten’s role in this Screen Directors’ Playhouse production of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. The 1950 radio adaptation also features Grant’s third wife, actress Betsy Drake. There are at least three other radio adaptation of Shadow, some featuring a member of the original cast.