Dangerously Yours
Romance Up Front, Adventure in the Background
Dangerously Yours debuted on CBS on July 2, 1944, with a clear sense of what it was — and what it wasn't. The show's own on-air billing said it plainly: "a half hour of romance and adventure brought to you at this time each Sunday by the Vick Chemical Company." Notice the order of those words. Romance came first, and that was intentional. The action and adventure — pirates, conquistadors, spies — were the backdrop. The emotional dynamics between the characters were the point. That made Dangerously Yours something different from the crime and spy dramas that filled prime time. It was Sunday at 2 o'clock, aimed squarely at the daytime audience, and it was shaped accordingly.
The first episode, "The Highwayman," dramatized the Alfred Noyes poem. A week later came "The Pirate of Orleans," a swashbuckling tale. By August the show was staging the conquest of the Aztec Empire in "Cortez the Conquistador," and in early October, "Windward Passage" featured Captain Henry Morgan capturing Lady Judith Lacy, with the conflict resolved — characteristically — through a marriage proposal. The historical and exotic settings shifted week to week, but the romantic center held throughout.
The Title Change and What It Opened Up
After sixteen episodes, the show was retitled Matinee Theater starting October 22, 1944, and ran under that name through April 8, 1945, adding roughly twenty-two more episodes. The renaming wasn't cosmetic. It was done explicitly "with a view towards presenting a greater range of stories." Once the show wasn't called Dangerously Yours, it didn't have to be pirate tales and espionage narratives anymore.
What followed was an anthology of literary and biographical adaptations. Victor Jory was paired with different female guest stars each week for dramatizations of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Random Harvest, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, among others. Biographical subjects included a Stephen Foster story called "Beautiful Dreamer" and a telling of the Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning romance. Not every adaptation landed — one critic noted that the Rebecca episode softened the story to the point of giving it a happy ending, draining the Hitchcock-associated source of its tension — but the range was genuine. The show had become something closer to a Sunday afternoon prestige anthology than the adventure serial it started as.
Victor Jory and a Supporting Cast Worth Knowing
The whole run rested on Victor Jory, born November 23, 1902, in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, to American parents. By the time he took the Dangerously Yours role in the summer of 1944, he had an established film career built largely on villains. He had played Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), Jonas Wilkerson in Gone with the Wind (1939), and Lamont Cranston in the 1940 Columbia serial The Shadow. He'd appeared in seven Hopalong Cassidy films between 1941 and 1943, nearly always as the heavy. His Broadway work went back to 1930, including Tonight or Never opposite Gloria Swanson and What Every Woman Knows supporting Helen Hayes.
That background — stage-trained, physically imposing, experienced in both romance and menace — made him well-suited to anchor a show that needed a lead who could carry a swashbuckling adventure one week and a literary love story the next. After the radio run, Jory narrated Tubby the Tuba for children in 1946, a recording later inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2005. From 1959 to 1961 he starred in the 78-episode syndicated television drama Manhunt, playing Detective Lieutenant Howard Finucane. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and died February 12, 1982, in Santa Monica.
The supporting cast drew on New York radio regulars. Martin Gabel, who served as the "Voice of Adventure" on the program, had come out of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre — he played Cassius in the company's modern-dress Julius Caesar in 1937 and Professor Van Helsing in the Mercury Theatre on the Air's premiere episode. He would later win a Tony Award in 1961 for Big Fish, Little Fish and become widely known as a panelist on What's My Line? alongside his wife Arlene Francis. Jackson Beck, another supporting player, was simultaneously narrating The Adventures of Superman on radio and voicing Bluto in the Popeye theatrical shorts during the same period he appeared on Dangerously Yours. Gertrude Warner rounded out the core New York ensemble.
Vick Chemical and What Survived
The Vick Chemical Company sponsored both runs — the Dangerously Yours phase and the Matinee Theater phase — promoting Vicks VapoRub and Vicks nose drops to the Sunday afternoon audience. Each episode of the original run closed with the announcer teasing the following week's story, a small structural touch that gave the anthology some continuity.
The episode count is a little fuzzy. Sixteen broadcasts went out under the Dangerously Yours title in 1944, with eleven of those available to collectors today. The Matinee Theater run has been certified complete as of June 2007, fitting on a single CD. Across both titles, the combined run comes to somewhere around thirty-eight broadcasts — a modest total for a program that quietly tried to do something thoughtful with the Sunday afternoon hour.