Great Scenes from Great Plays — 1948

Walter Hampden plays Rostand's Gascon swordsman-poet -- too ashamed of his nose to speak his own love, so he lends his words to a handsomer man. It was the last time Hampden ever performed the role.

Jane Cowl in Emlyn Williams' play: an English schoolmistress in a poor Welsh mining village stakes everything on one illiterate teenage collier with a mind worth saving.

Basil Rathbone and Beatrice Straight in Rudolf Besier's drama of the invalid poet Elizabeth Barrett, a father who forbids his children to marry, and the suitor named Browning.

Celeste Holm and Walter Abel in the 1934 Broadway play. A Long Island socialite who has never taken anything seriously meets the brain specialist who must tell her the truth.

Boris Karloff is Mr. Brink -- Death himself -- stuck up an apple tree by an old man's wish, and unable to come down until he is let down. The Army liked it enough to rebroadcast it to the troops.

Joan Caulfield and her sister Betty as sisters, in Alcott's household of four girls keeping Christmas in genteel poverty while their father serves as a Union Army chaplain.

Brian Aherne in Dickens' novel of London and Paris in the years of the Revolution.

Gene Tierney and Richard Waring in Pinero's play: a disfigured ex-soldier hides from his old life in an ancient Sussex cottage, where he and a plain woman begin to see each other differently.

Gertrude Lawrence and Dennis King in Barrie's comedy. A Scottish family catches a penniless student breaking in to read their books, and offers to pay for his education -- if he will marry their plain daughter.

Raymond Massey in Benet's tale of a New Hampshire farmer who signs away his soul for seven good years, and hires the finest orator in America to argue the case when the note falls due.

Fay Bainter in Barrie's one-act from the British home front of the First World War.

Henry Fonda returns to the role he played for John Ford nine years earlier: the self-taught Illinois storekeeper who takes a battered law book in trade for groceries and ends up hanging out a shingle in Springfield.

The one program of the run that was not a play. The Presiding Bishop, Henry Knox Sherrill, reads the story of the Nativity, with Gladys Swarthout and Lawrence Tibbett as guests. It is the one broadcast of the twenty-two we do not hold.

Peggy Wood and Otto Kruger in the 1923 play that made Philip Barry's name.