NRR Project: “Gunsmoke: The Cabin” (Dec. 27, 1952)

 

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.