NRR Project: “Gunsmoke: The Cabin”
Broadcast Dec. 27, 1952
30 min.
This program was perhaps the best in the history of American
network radio. It fully explored the medium’s potentialities, both in terms of
content and sonically. The detailed and grim world of the frontier it created endures
if listened to in the present. The show, a Western, began in 1952 and lasted
well into the Television Age – and transitioned to television itself, in a show
that ran concurrently with the original radio show from 1955 to 1961, then
persisted itself to 1975.
There are many great resources out there on this show. You
can read Charles Tranberg’s essay on it at the National Recording Registry here. The eminent historian John Dunning covers it in his On the Air,
pages 302-306; another comprehensive record is SuzAnne and Gabor Barabas’ Gunsmoke:
A Complete History.
It was the brainchild of director Norman Macdonnell and
writer John Meston. For the first time, the two took a cliché-ridden genre and
revitalized it completely, turning a kids’ subject into one starkly adult. The
show was set in the frontier town of Dodge City, Kansas; there, all manner of
characters and stories could spring to life. There would be violence, insanity,
crime, and all of life’s foibles. But how to anchor the show?
Brilliantly, Meston created Matt Dillon, U.S. Marshal (William
Conrad) – a lawman grim and largely unhumorous, capable of righteous rage and
cold-blooded calculation, as close to an anti-hero as the time would permit. He
is a man with a past and no great concern about his future. He deals justice
with understated intensity. He is perpetually alert, guarded, lonely. Rarely
would an episode go by without Dillon regretfully killing a miscreant, but
there were splashes of mercy from him as well.
Characters were complex; real-sounding people learned hard truths
about themselves in the short space of a half hour. Dillon’s companions were
deputy Chester Proudfoot (Parley Baer), doctor Addams (Howard McNear) and Kitty
Russell (Georgia Ellis). Together they faced up to the killers, the thieves,
the gunfighters, the bankers, the tenderfeet, the loose women, the cavalrymen .
. .It is surprising to see how varied the subject matter could be, within the
solid confines of the outline of the show.
Macdonnell and Meston were aided by the excellent music of Rex
Koury, and the “sound patterns” of the sound effects team consisting of Tom Hanley,
Ray Kemper, and Bill James. Never before had such an artful backdrop of appropriate
sounds been rendered over the air. Listen to it today: you can make out the
burble of a crowded bar, or the prairie at midnight, or people trapped by a
raging storm.
The episode chosen for inclusion here is typical of the series.
It does not feature Chester, Doc, or Kitty – it is a Matt story, and a bloody
one. Dillon, trying to ride home, confronts a deadly blizzard. He finds shelter
inside a house – that turns out to be occupied by two psychotic criminals and
their female hostage. How he extricates himself from his predicament I’ll leave
to you – you can listen in to the episode on any of a number of sites; I prefer
Radio Echoes and the Internet Archive.
The show’s strength was such that the network ran it for an
entire decade, long after most other radio shows had dried up and blown away. Listening
to it is an education in how to write, produce, direct, and perform a radio
show.
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.
