Radio: Quirt & Flagg Back

This week two of the most durable representatives of the U.S. Marine Corps cropped up again. They are the raucous, riotous, wenching duo, Sergeant Quirt & Captain Flagg, who first appeared in Laurence Stallings’ and Maxwell Anderson’s What Price Glory? This time, in the guise of burly, hard-voiced Edmund Lowe and hulking, grim-visaged Victor McLaglen (who enacted the cinema roles), they appear not in the old story, but in a new radio serial, a brisk, jaunty half-hour show on NBC’s network (Sunday 7:30 p.m. E.S.T.).

To the late great original Quirt & Flagg, William Boyd & Louis Wolheim (“Sez you. Sez me.”), the theme of the new show would seem strange. The old glory-debunking note of What Price Glory? is missing. Sergeant Quirt & Captain Flagg join up again, proceed immediately to get in Dutch by avidly pursuing their general’s wife. Typical dialogue: “Lady, if I was to know every girl who goes riding with me I could make a fortune selling it to Sears, Roebuck as a mailing list.”

Along the same lines as a forthcoming cinema with McLaglen & Lowe, Call Out the Marines, the radio show is written by eagle-beaked, serious-faced John P. Medbury, veteran newspaper humorist and radio gagster. Like most Medbury scripts, this one takes full advantage of his enormous library of humor, which includes everything from the Encyclopedia of Comedy to 10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories. He has written for Burns & Allen, Olsen & Johnson, Fred Astaire.

Medbury’s Quirt & Flagg script is not so yeasty as the famed Anderson-Stallings’ play, although plenty tough for radio. But the show is designed to sell Mennen’s shaving cream, and Author Medbury doesn’t have to worry about feminine outcries, except from bearded ladies.