The 80th Anniversary of ‘The Shadow!’
By Gary “Digital” Williams
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow Knows!”
In the days before the mass use of the television, people received their news, sports and entertainment through the radio. Today, that section of recorded lore is known as OTR or “Old Time Radio.” This week, one of the shows that people first think of when they think of OTR celebrates an anniversary.
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the first recording of a character known as “The Shadow.” The character was originally developed as a character for Street and Smith Publications to help gain more popularity for their Detective Story magazines. The publishers of the magazine created a show that would adapt the magazine’s stories for radio and they felt they needed a sinister narrator to host the show. Thus on July 31, 1930 – 80 years ago this week—James LaCurto voiced the character of The Shadow for the very first time on radio on “Detective Story Hour.”
As years passed, the Shadow character became more popular than the actual stories and so a magician-turned-writer named Walter Gibson to flesh out the Shadow character. In the pulp or print version, the Shadow is an adventurer named Kent Allard, who adopts a number of identities to help him in his work. One of those identities was a “wealthy young man-about-town named Lamont Cranston. That name would stick with the Shadow for all eternity.
On radio, The Shadow remained a narrative force for Detective Story Hour, which was renamed “The Shadow” program in 1931. Also, The Shadow was weirdly used to narrate a program called “Love Story.” The Shadow as a narrator would spawn copycat programs on radio like “The Mysterious Traveler” and “The Whistler” where the star of the show would be a narrator over the anthology series. These radio series were also the ancestors of classic TV shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and One Step Beyond. Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, once said that The Shadow was one of his inspirations for his most famous character.
In 1937, Gibson dropped The Shadow as a narrator and made him the star of his own show as a crime fighter. On September 26, of that year, The Shadow premiered on the Mutual Broadcasting System with a 22-year-old future legend named Orson Welles starring as Lamont Cranston, the alter ego that would remain with the Shadow for the duration of the series. Welles could not get The Shadow’s now-famous “Who Knows” speech down right so an actor named Frank Readick, who had taken over the narrative role from LaCurto, would say it and help make the show an immediate success.
The Shadow was a perfect character for radio because he had the ability to “cloud men’s minds so they could not see him.” Therefore, he was invisible and his sinister voice would frighten evildoers.
Another popular character in the series was “Cranston’s friend and companion – the lovely Margo Lane.” Lane was Cranston’s Girl Friday and the only person who knew Cranston’s secret identity. A relatively minor character in print, Lane became a major role in the radio series as she would routinely be kidnapped by the episode’s criminal or madman, only to have The Shadow get her out of trouble.
The originator of the Margo Lane role on radio was Agnes Moorehead, who TV viewers would later know as Endora in “Bewitched.” Moorehead would become a well-known actress on radio, originating such roles as Lara, Superman’s mother in the early days of the Superman radio series and Mrs. Elbert Stevenson, the invalid old lady in an episode of a radio anthology series called “Suspense.” The episode was called “Sorry, Wrong Number” and Moorehead performed that show seven times on “Suspense.”
The show would come on with a very popular theme song – Opus 31 from the classical composition called Le Rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel) by Camille Saent-Saens – a sinister-sounding song that set the mood of the show perfectly.
Welles, Moorehead and Readick only stayed with The Shadow series for one year before moving on to even greater radio triumphs as members of Welles’s Mercury Theater of The Air on CBS. In 1938, Welles, with Readick playing the key role of reporter Carl Phillips, created one of the first true masterpieces of radio – his adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” – the show that panicked a nation on October 30 of that year.
Bill Johnstone would take over the role of Lamont Cranston for five years with actresses Margot Stevenson (who the role of Margo Lane was originally named for), Marjorie Anderson and Grace Matthews playing the role of Margo. Johnstone was a very suave-sounding Cranston who would play a long-standing role on the TV soap opera “As the World Turns.” Other actors who portrayed the role were John Archer and Steve Courtleigh.
But the actor who would voice the Shadow was Bret Morrison, a very debonair actor who would embody the character of the Shadow in two separate runs over a 10-year period. When performing the role, Morrison would dress up in the Shadow’s role with a slouch hat and cape, like the character was portrayed in print.
The Shadow would remain on radio until December 26, 1954. During that time frame, the Shadow would appear in comics and in the movies. Forty years after the last radio show, The Shadow would be the subject of a big-budget movie starring Alec Baldwin as Cranston and Penelope Ann Miller as Margo.
The Shadow is fondly remembered as one of the true legendary shows of Old Time Radio. There are many websites that play Shadow episodes such as www.radiospirits.com and www.mysteryshows.com. Fans around the world can hear the Shadow’s famous closing line:
“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay! The Shadow knows!”