Dangerously Yours
July 2, 1944 – October 15, 1944 · 18 broadcasts
For sixteen Sundays in 1944, CBS handed an afternoon half-hour to one man and let him play the whole romantic-adventure canon. Dangerously Yours starred Victor Jory -- the screen villain of Gone with the Wind, cast wholly against type as a leading man -- in a weekly dramatization drawn from famous fiction, poetry and history: Alfred Noyes's ballad The Highwayman, Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, a James Oliver Curwood tale of the Mounties, a story of Edgar Allan Poe. Gertrude Warner was most often the leading lady, Jean Holloway did the adapting, Richard Sanville directed and Mark Warnow conducted the orchestra (Arnold Johnson wrote the theme), all for the sponsor, the Vick Chemical Company. The show was billed as romance in the older sense -- fanciful, adventurous, given to wanderlust -- rather than boy-meets-girl. Listeners liked Jory more than they liked the narrow 'dangerous living' brief, and wrote in asking for a wider range of stories. So on 22 October 1944 CBS broadened the format and renamed the programme Matinee Theater, keeping the same star, cast, crew, sponsor and Sunday-afternoon slot. Sixteen half-hours went out between 2 July and 15 October 1944; eleven survive, along with two evaluation auditions the sponsor recorded before the run.
Episode Spine
1944
For sixteen Sundays in 1944, CBS handed an afternoon half-hour to one man and let him play the whole romantic-adventure canon. Dangerously Yours starred Victor Jory -- the screen villain of Gone with the Wind, cast wholly against type as a leading man -- in a weekly dramatization drawn from famous fiction, poetry and history: Alfred Noyes's ballad The Highwayman, Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, a James Oliver Curwood tale of the Mounties, a story of Edgar Allan Poe. Gertrude Warner was most often the leading lady, Jean Holloway did the adapting, Richard Sanville directed and Mark Warnow conducted the orchestra (Arnold Johnson wrote the theme), all for the sponsor, the Vick Chemical Company. The show was billed as romance in the older sense -- fanciful, adventurous, given to wanderlust -- rather than boy-meets-girl. Listeners liked Jory more than they liked the narrow 'dangerous living' brief, and wrote in asking for a wider range of stories. So on 22 October 1944 CBS broadened the format and renamed the programme Matinee Theater, keeping the same star, cast, crew, sponsor and Sunday-afternoon slot. Sixteen half-hours went out between 2 July and 15 October 1944; eleven survive, along with two evaluation auditions the sponsor recorded before the run.