Escape
The Show CBS Never Quite Supported
Escape ran on CBS from July 7, 1947 to September 25, 1954 — seven years during which the network shifted it to at least 18 different timeslots, dropped it from the schedule for weeks at a stretch, gave it almost no commercial backing, and generally treated it as a secondary concern. For most of its run it was sustaining, meaning unsponsored; the only commercial backer it ever had was Richfield Oil Company, which came aboard from April to August 1950. The show even went dark for more than a year between August 1951 and October 1952. And yet Escape is now widely considered radio's greatest series of high adventure.
The audition was produced on March 21, 1947, four months before the show finally made it to air — and that audition itself was a rebroadcast of a pilot first heard on February 28 under the title "Out of This World: Dead of Night." Once Escape did premiere, it arrived as a summer replacement filling half of the hour normally held by The Lux Radio Theatre, and it never found a stable home after that. It turned up at some point on every night of the week, filling holes when CBS needed a program, disappearing again when something more commercially promising took the slot. Suspense, the crime-and-mystery show it was often compared to, had sponsors, consistent timeslots, and network prestige. Escape had almost none of that. What it had was a small group of serious, talented people who knew what they were doing, and the freedom that comes with being mostly ignored.
That freedom may have mattered more than anything. The people remaining in Hollywood radio by the late 1940s were, by and large, its most committed artists. They weren't there for the money — there wasn't much. They were there because they loved the medium. And they saw something in Escape that was worth doing well.
What It Sounded Like
Every episode opened the same way, though the specific words shifted over the years. In the late 1940s, the opening put three topical questions to the listener — things like "Worried about the United Nations?... Anxious about those bills piling up?... Want to get away from it all?" The third question was always the bridge. The other two rotated weekly, often tied to current events or the season. On November 5, 1947 — the day after an off-year election — the opening asked: "Did you lose an election bet yesterday?... Feel a bad cold coming on?... Want to get away from it all?"
By the 1950s the opening had settled into something more consistent. William Conrad or Paul Frees would deliver it in mostly the same words each time: "Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of... romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you... ESCAPE!" Roy Rowan then delivered a second tagline: "Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half-hour of high adventure!" Conrad and Frees alternated as the opening voice throughout the series, with Lou Krugman also taking a turn. All three appeared in leading and supporting roles as well, not just as announcers.
Behind that voice came Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," played with full orchestra. The treatment was fiery, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Cy Feuer, Leith Stevens, and Wilbur Hatch led the orchestras; organists Ivan Ditmars, Del Castillo, and Eddie Dunstedter handled music for the episodes that used smaller backing. Sound effects fell to David Light and Carl Schaele in the early years, and later to Bill Gould and Cliff Thorsness, whose work became some of the most technically inventive in radio.
Radio Life magazine, reviewing the show in August 1947, found the title a bit misleading — not because the show was less than advertised, but because it was more: "these stories all possess many times the reality that most radio writing conveys." The word "escape" suggested fantasy or distraction. What listeners actually got was something grittier.
The Stories and What Made Them Work
Escape opened its run with adaptations of short story classics — Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," Joseph Conrad's "Typhoon." This was a deliberate departure from the radio landscape of the time, which was thick with Hollywood film adaptations recycled endlessly. Literary source material gave the series a different texture. The stories were stranger, less polished in the commercial sense, and often more demanding of their audience. Over time the series reached further afield — into Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne du Maurier, and Ray Bradbury. Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven" and Wells's "The Time Machine" turned up alongside du Maurier's "The Birds," which Hitchcock would later film.
The recurring engine of the show was a single dramatic situation: a strong protagonist, alone, facing something that might be impossible, who either rises to conquer it or is conquered by it. Life-or-death scenarios, the supernatural, man against a hostile natural world, war, the Old West — these were Escape's territory. Where Suspense stayed mostly in the realm of crime and mystery, Escape pushed into wilder corners, and leaned harder than its sister program into science fiction and the supernatural.
A handful of individual episodes illustrate what the series was capable of. "The Most Dangerous Game" aired October 1, 1947, with Frees and Hans Conried as hunted and hunter on a remote island — a tight, focused piece that used the format well. "Leiningen vs. the Ants," from January 17, 1948, was noted for both its storytelling and its technical execution; William Conrad took the title role in that first production and reprised it a few months later. "Three Skeleton Key," which aired November 15, 1949, required Gould and Thorsness to run ten turntables simultaneously, layering animal sounds to build the overwhelming noise of swarming rats. That broadcast — directed by William N. Robson and starring Elliott Reid, Conrad, and Harry Bartell — is the one many listeners consider the series' finest half-hour, though Vincent Price's turn in the 1950 remake is the version most associated with the script in popular memory.
"Poison," from July 28, 1950, adapted a Roald Dahl story about a man who believes a deadly snake is coiled on his stomach — a piece that worked as both a survival thriller and, underneath it, a study in intolerance. Jack Webb starred, but Conrad delivered what observers at the time considered the standout performance. "Earth Abides," a two-part adaptation of George Stewart's plague story, aired November 5 and 12, 1950, and carried a weight that didn't fade with time. "Evening Primrose," from November 5, 1947, drew on John Collier's strange tale of a misfit hiding in a department store after hours; almost twenty years later it would be reworked as a television musical with songs by Stephen Sondheim. And "Confession," from December 31, 1947, based on an Algernon Blackwood story, earned a reputation as one of the purest achievements radio drama ever produced.
Some scripts came back more than once. "A Shipment of Mute Fate" was staged four separate times with four different leads — Jack Webb, Harry Bartell, John Lund, and David Ellis. Six other scripts, including "Three Skeleton Key," "Evening Primrose," and "Leiningen Versus the Ants," were each produced three times. Twenty-nine Escape scripts were eventually reused on Suspense.
The People Behind It
William N. Robson was producer-director for the first year, from 1947 to 1948. Norman Macdonnell took over from 1948 to 1949, returned late in 1950 through 1952, and came back again briefly in early 1954. For Macdonnell — a Normandy veteran who had come up at CBS as an assistant director in 1946 — Escape was the assignment that moved him from acting to directing; he later called it a "most prestigious assignment." While running the show he began working with writer John Meston, whose Escape script "Wild Jack Rhett" aired in December 1950. Within two years the Macdonnell–Meston partnership would launch Gunsmoke. Between Macdonnell's stints, Richard Sanville, Morton Fine, David Friedkin, and Antony Ellis all held the chair; Ellis, an actor and adapter, got his first serious directing experience on the series.
The writing and adapting was handled by a rotating group that included Les Crutchfield, John Dunkel, Walter Newman, Irving Ravetch, Gil Doud, David Ellis, John and Gwen Bagni, E. Jack Neuman, Kathleen Hite, William Froug, and Meston himself — the same writers shaping the best work being done in West Coast radio at the time.
The ensemble cast was deep. Elliott Lewis, Jack Webb, Peggy Webber, Frank Lovejoy, Hans Conried, Barton Yarborough, John Dehner, Virginia Gregg, Jeanette Nolan, Joseph Kearns, Lawrence Dobkin, Georgia Ellis, Vic Perrin, Parley Baer, and dozens more moved through the series over its seven years. Harry Bartell alone appeared in at least 56 episodes, and recalled in a 1998 interview: "The scripts were wonderful, many of them were based on Classics that stood the test of time. They offered me, as an actor, parts that I never would have gotten on any other program." Announcers Frank Goss and Roy Rowan handled the broadcast duties.
What Survives
More than 240 episodes of Escape were aired over the course of the series. Nearly all of them survive in at least decent audio quality — a remarkable survival rate for a show that was never a network priority. Some episode titles exist in two distinct versions: recordings with full orchestra are believed to be the East Coast broadcasts, while versions with organ accompaniment are believed to be West Coast repeats performed by the same casts a few days later. This accident of scheduling and geography preserved multiple takes of certain stories, offering an unusual window into how the series was produced and how performances could shift slightly from one broadcast to the next.
There was also a short-lived television counterpart. CBS aired thirteen episodes of a TV Escape from January 5 through March 30, 1950, produced and directed by Wyllis Cooper and narrated by William Conrad, with guest appearances from Kim Stanley, Lee Marvin, Tommy Rettig, and Brian Keith. Like the radio show, it ran unsponsored. Unlike the radio show, it didn't last.
The radio series ended September 25, 1954, not with any particular ceremony. It had never been a marquee program. But the body of work it left behind — produced on a modest budget, scheduled erratically, supported fitfully — turned out to be more durable than most of what surrounded it.