Old detective movies

OLD DETECTIVE MOVIES

If you have not discovered the various series of detectives movies made in the period of roughly 1935-1955, you are missing a piece of excellent entertainment – which is quite inexpensive these days, relatively speaking. If you don’t want your kids watching modern day TV, these are a great alternative.

Boston Blackie
The Falcon
The Saint
Mr. Moto
Charlie Chan
Philo Vance
Bulldog Drummond
Torchy Blaine
Mr. Wong
The Thin Man
Michael Shayne
And others less notable, but still very entertaining.
And of course, the epitome of them all – the incomparable Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

Many of these were later radio shows, and in a few cases also early television series, and there were other great detective radio shows that were never made into movies.

Computers have given people the illusion that they do not have to plan ahead - about anything.

Radio shows without sponsors

One interesting thing that you will occasionally find in old radio shows are those that were run without sponsors - public service announcements where the commercials would have been. These were shows that had not been sold (yet) to sponsors, but that the networks thought were air-worthy, so they took a chance.

Speak Southern, and get ahead

I have noticed that people from the rural South will often use an exaggerated accent when dealing with people from the North. There probably is a good reason for this. Yankees often assume that people with an exaggerated Southern accent are less intelligent than they really are; and when someone things you are less intelligent than you are, you immediately have an advantge over that person.

Boston Blackie and Dangerous Assignment on TV

The wife and I have have a few old television series that were also old radio series. Cases in point are Boston Blackie and Dangerous Assignment. It is interesting how often the episodes that were heard on radio later on were used almost vertabim on TV.

One part of Pomp and Circumstance by Edward Elgar gets played ad nauseum at graduations, so that most people think of it only as a hide-bound, somewhat boring, piece of music. If you listen to the entire piece, however, you will discover that is an interesting number and deserves a better fate than it has had.

If any of you want to get started as Old Radio Show fans, just let us know. They are great fun.