Radio: Best Busts

Deploring the usual shoddy summer substitutes, radio this year talked big—good fun and good music. By last week performance no longer had a chance to catch up with promise, and the list of summertime flops even included Norman Corwin, one of the biggest names in radio drama.

CBS had given Corwin the green light for a sustaining summer series. Furthermore, instead of a late-night spot to which such worthy projects are usually relegated, CBS assigned Corwin to the desirable Tuesday 9-9:30 p.m. time. Corwin corrailed a crew of Hollywood professionals (Groucho Marx, Keenan Wynn, Sylvia Sidney, Ronald Colman) and labored mightily on his favorite stock in trade: the supremacy of the common man. But this time all he brought forth were tired platitudes, well-worn dramatic tricks, cacophonic sound effects. Corwin’s Hooper rating dropped to the lowest of all big-time evening shows. For the present, CBS plans to use Corwin only sparingly, on one-shot special assignments.

Most of summer radio’s other hopefuls were drooping on the vines, too. When the high-priced September to May regulars (Jack Benny, Bob Hope, et al) went vacationing, their topflight writers and producers went too. Summer’s second-drawer big names had second-drawer scripts. Some of the resulting bigger busts:

¶ Ray Bolger, gangling, long-faced stage-&-screen comedy dancer, heading an expensive variety show that bogged down mainly because Bolger is better seen than heard.

¶ Victor Borge, Danish-born satirist, whose slow-drawled doubletalk went over fast in U.S. nightclubs, and sounded just slow on the air.

¶ Cinemactor Herbert Marshall, trying to suave up a farfetched, dreary thriller, “The Man Called X.” One of the most expensive of the current whodunits, its script packed the wallop of a powderpuff.

¶ J. C. Flippen, vaudeville veteran, in “Correction, Please,” a quiz that fizzed mainly because it was old hat.

¶ Cinemactress Ann Sothern in Maisie, which comes out breezy on the screen, but got becalmed on the radio.

¶ Cinemactress Mary Astor in The Merry Life of Mary Christmas, a hackneyed comedy series about a chichi female columnist that sounded as soporific as soap opera.

The regulars would soon be back.