Film-adaptation anthology · NBC
Screen Directors Playhouse
January 9, 1949 – September 28, 1951 · 123 broadcasts
Screen Directors Playhouse (NBC, 1949-1951) put a fresh twist on the popular film-to-radio anthology: produced in cooperation with the Screen Directors Guild, every adaptation brought in the movie's own DIRECTOR. Each half hour opened with the director introducing his picture and closed with a friendly chat between the director and the night's stars -- part radio drama, part behind-the-scenes featurette. Better still, the original screen stars very often reprised their roles at the microphone. It began in the grandest possible way, with John Ford and John Wayne presenting "Stagecoach" on January 9, 1949, and went on to range across Hollywood's catalog -- Magnificent Obsession, Spellbound, The Bishop's Wife, Broken Arrow -- with a marquee that reads like a studio roster: Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Charles Boyer, Ray Milland, Joseph Cotten, Lucille Ball, Tallulah Bankhead. Hosted by announcer Jimmy Wallington, the show won a National Council of Teachers of English award and a runner-up Peabody in 1949, and even gave Margaret Truman -- the President's daughter -- her first dramatic role, opposite James Stewart in 1951. The brand later moved to television in the mid-1950s.
Collection status:
120 of 123 held (98% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1949
A stagecoach of mismatched strangers -- among them the outlaw Ringo Kid, a drunken doctor, and a good-hearted outcast -- braves Apache country on the run from Tonto to Lordsburg.
A frazzled ad man juggling a fickle client and a scheming ex-fiancee falls for the very author of the self-help book meant to calm his nerves.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. plays the exiled King Charles II, hiding in Holland among Cromwell's assassins and finding romance while plotting his return to the English throne.
A bickering couple discover their marriage was never legal -- and the war over whether to wed again turns into all-out romantic combat.
A businessman marries his devoted secretary for convenience, never guessing she has quietly loved him all along.
A reckless playboy indirectly causes a good doctor's death, then remakes himself to secretly aid -- and win -- the man's blinded widow.
An Englishman who is the double of a kidnapped king is pressed to impersonate him on the throne, falling for the princess as intrigue swirls around the crown.
A man cursed with the power to foresee the future -- including his own death -- lives out a chronicle of dread in this tale of the supernatural.
In occupied Berlin, an American army captain is caught between a prim visiting congresswoman and a sultry cabaret singer with a Nazi past.
A romance set to music: a bandleader's whirlwind marriage to a small-town girl is tested by the pressures of show business.
On their anniversary a seemingly ideal couple find their marriage suddenly in deadlock, teetering between divorce and reconciliation.
A woman back from wartime service finds the lawyer husband she left behind now wants a divorce -- and she sets out to win him back.
A wisecracking entertainer and a young heiress brave a haunted Cuban castle full of ghosts and zombies to claim her inheritance.
In a wartime orchestra, a pregnant young musician anxiously awaits word from her soldier husband, buoyed by her fellow players and her small, hopeful sister.
Three servicemen return from the war to the same hometown and struggle to rebuild their civilian lives, loves, and dignity.
A war-hero fighter pilot on furlough in New York hides his identity while romancing a magazine photographer during his last carefree days.
A psychology professor who has literally written the book on dominating women meets his match in a sharp-tongued newspaper columnist.
On Christmas Eve a despairing small-town man is shown by his guardian angel how much poorer his town would be had he never been born.
A charming European gigolo stranded on the Mexican border woos an American schoolteacher into marriage just to slip into the States -- then falls in love for real.
A wife's well-meaning meddling in her ad-man husband's work throws his career -- and their marriage -- into comic chaos.
A merry mix of murder and romance: a detective chases a glamorous murder suspect around the world and loses his heart along the way.
After a $200,000 heist, a double-crossing ex-con is marked for death -- and an insurance investigator unravels the betrayal behind it.
A harried city ad-man buys a ramshackle Connecticut farmhouse and is nearly ruined by the runaway cost of making it his dream home.
A magazine crime editor is set to hunt a mystery man in a murder -- only to realize the man everyone is chasing is himself, framed by his own boss.
A band of outlaws fleeing across the desert seizes a ghost town held by an old prospector and his tough granddaughter, and greed soon turns them on each other.
In the Algiers Casbah, dashing jewel-thief Pepe le Moko -- safe only while he never leaves the quarter -- risks everything for the love of a beautiful visitor.
Three ex-flyers in postwar Indochina take a dangerous job hauling a fortune in cash, hiding from one of them that he has only months to live.
A rigid cavalry colonel's contempt for his frontier post and for Cochise's Apaches drives his command toward disaster.
A willful Southern belle's pride costs her the man she loves, until a yellow-fever epidemic offers a chance at redemption.
To stop his wife from divorcing him, a husband feigns insanity -- with his old flame living one floor below only making things worse.
A playwright marries a dedicated lady doctor who insists on keeping her own apartment and identity, straining their unconventional marriage.
A despairing retired professor rents rooms to a young veteran and his pregnant wife, whose warmth and hope give him a reason to keep living.
A small-town telegraph boy delivering wartime messages of joy and grief comes of age and learns what life is all about.
A soft-spoken railroad detective hunts a gang of train robbers and finds his oldest friend being drawn into their crimes.
An ad-man's little white lie about a client sends his wife's loyalty test spinning into a comedy of jealous misunderstandings.
The life of Yankees great Lou Gehrig -- his rise to stardom and his courageous farewell in the face of a fatal illness.
A bumbling senator's diary of his party's dirtiest secrets goes missing, and everyone scrambles to grab it first.
An armored-car robbery built on a double-cross unravels into a tangle of betrayal when the man who planned it is himself set up.
A bored insurance man's fling with a model pulls him into blackmail and violence as a jealous investigator and her ex-con fiance close in.
A beautiful amnesiac cannot recall killing her husband -- and had every reason to -- in this haunting melodrama of buried memory.
A prosecutor takes a lovely shoplifter home for Christmas and falls in love with the very woman he is duty-bound to send to trial.
A poor kid boxes his way to the championship, only to be corrupted by the crooked money men who own his contract.
A brother and sister buy a beautiful clifftop house in Devon and find it haunted -- its secret bound to a troubled young woman.
A mute servant girl in a gloomy mansion becomes the likely next target of a killer preying on afflicted young women.
A manufacturer who shipped faulty airplane parts in wartime -- and let his partner take the blame -- faces a reckoning within his own family.
A crusading reporter reopens an eleven-year-old cop killing and fights to free the man he comes to believe was wrongly convicted.
A charming actress turns out to be a different woman to every man who loves her, to the confusion of her several suitors.
A department-store Santa insists he is the real Kris Kringle, and winds up in a courtroom that must decide whether Santa Claus exists.
An escaped convict and a woman who is secretly dying fall in love aboard an ocean liner, each hiding the truth from the other.
1950
A pollster discovers a town whose opinions perfectly mirror the whole nation -- and moving in to exploit it upends the place he comes to love.
A soldier disfigured and thought dead in the Great War stays away for twenty years, then returns unrecognized to find his wife remarried.
A charming gambler scheming to fleece a war-relief charity has a change of heart when he falls for one of its society volunteers.
A woman who keeps calling off weddings meets the flesh-and-blood double of her imaginary dream man -- who promptly moves in.
Castaways rescued by the brutal, philosophizing Captain Wolf Larsen become prisoners of his cruelty aboard his schooner.
A newlywed husband home from three months in the jungle is stunned to learn his bride wants to begin their marriage strictly platonic.
A flea-circus owner learns of a fortune hidden in one of five antique chairs and races a pack of rivals to find it.
February 24, 1950
Incendiary Blonde
A timid frontier dentist blunders into the West as the unwitting hero of gunslinger Calamity Jane's undercover mission.
A struggling artist meets a mysterious girl who ages years between each encounter, and paints the haunting portrait of a love outside time.
A ruthless young boxer punches his way to the top, trampling everyone who helped him get there.
A reporter finds a dead girl no one will claim and, from the address book she left behind, uncovers the gangsters who ruined her.
Identical twin sisters -- one of them a killer -- confound a murder investigation, since no one can tell which is guilty.
A dashing Irish adventurer wields sword and wit to foil Napoleon's secret plan to invade England.
A mild college professor invents a formula that makes a baseball dodge wood, and secretly becomes a star pitcher.
A stuffy concert pianist unexpectedly inherits an apartment building and falls for one of its lively tenants.
Adventurers and a ruthless police chief clash over hidden diamonds in South Africa's forbidden desert, with revenge and romance in the mix.
The rocky marriage of an ambitious burlesque comic and his loyal wife is tested as fame pulls them apart.
A safecracker roped into babysitting winds up bringing the infant along on a midnight burglary.
A scatterbrained secretary hired as a front for small-time bookies innocently turns their whole operation upside down.
A stranded carnival dancer claws toward respectability in a small town ruled by a corrupt political boss who means to destroy her.
A no-nonsense lady psychiatrist falls, against her better judgment, for a persistent cartoonist she meets on a train.
A city couple's dream of a Connecticut farmhouse turns into a comedy of runaway repairs and rural mishaps.
June 16, 1950
A Star Is Born
A ruthless woman guarding a childhood secret -- an aunt's death and an innocent man's framing -- watches her buried past resurface.
June 30, 1950
Cinderella
A beloved uncle visits his adoring niece, who slowly realizes he may be the Merry Widow strangler the police are hunting.
Survivors of a torpedoed ship, adrift in a single lifeboat, take aboard a man from the U-boat that sank them -- and turn on one another.
A free-spirited lady plumber and a penniless refugee flout stuffy pre-war English society in a gentle romance.
A Boston girl marries a Canadian Mountie and braves the hardship and beauty of life in the far North.
A man remarries after his first wife is declared lost at sea -- on the very day she turns up alive.
A businessman's wife idly tries the casino on a Las Vegas trip and spirals into a ruinous gambling addiction.
A department-store Santa who claims to be the real Kris Kringle is put on trial, and a little girl's faith helps prove his case.
A crusading district attorney who would give his soul to nail a crime boss gets his wish from a smooth stranger named Nick Beal -- the Devil himself.
1951
In Renaissance Italy a low-born schemer serving the ruthless Cesare Borgia is sent to betray a noble house -- and his conscience turns him against his master.
A beautiful, ruthless Edwardian woman will let nothing -- not even murder -- stand between her and the wealthy life she craves.
Two American airmen flying supplies into blockaded Berlin find love and disillusion amid the rubble of the airlift.
A psychiatrist falls for a troubled amnesiac posing as her hospital's new chief, and races to prove him innocent of a murder he cannot remember.
A high-powered woman advertising executive hires a handsome male secretary to pose as her escort, and business soon turns to romance.
A draft-dodging racketeer shoved into the Army schemes to sell military secrets -- until patriotism unexpectedly gets the better of him.
A carefree, wealthy young woman confronting a fatal illness finds love and meaning in the time she has left.
An eccentric artist invites himself into a doctor's household and cheerfully sets about romancing the doctor's wife.
In occupied Berlin an army captain is caught between a prim visiting congresswoman and a cabaret singer with a Nazi past -- a restaging of the 1949 broadcast.
A shop clerk mistaken for the mother of an abandoned baby is drawn, foundling and all, into the life of the store owner's son.
A district attorney falls for a woman who becomes the prime suspect in the very murder he must prosecute.
A bumbling scoutmaster aboard an ocean liner blunders into the hunt for a card-cheating strangler -- Bob Hope chaos ensues.
A young actress and her war-correspondent husband watch their careers pull them to opposite ends of the earth and strain their marriage.
A restless woman abandons small-town life and claws her way up through a crime syndicate to the very top.
A secretary marries her boss on paper for a business maneuver, then finds herself running -- and reshaping -- the whole company.
A gifted, working-class violinist rises under the patronage of a wealthy, unhappily married woman whose love for him turns tragic.
A happily married man wins a fortune on a radio quiz show and discovers the prize brings nothing but trouble.
A young Spanish nobleman fleeing the Inquisition joins Cortez's conquest of the New World in search of fortune and revenge.
A polished magazine photographer clashes with, then falls for, the brash tunnel sandhog she first hires only to prove him beneath her.
An American agent joins the French Foreign Legion in Indochina to hunt a fugitive Nazi war criminal in hiding.
A woman gives up everything to spend her life as the hidden mistress of the banker she loves but can never marry.
A haunted war veteran enters West Point and faces a hazing inquiry that puts the academy's Honor Code itself on trial.
The fastest gun in the West, weary of his reputation, only wants to hang it up -- but every young challenger wants to be the man who beat him.
Hired to escort a young woman to a haunted Cuban castle, a jittery entertainer bumbles through ghosts and zombies to protect her.
A man told he has been fatally poisoned and has only days to live races to solve his own murder before it kills him.
A cautious New York working girl on a bus tour out West loses her heart to an easygoing rodeo cowboy.
A woman bears the child of a soldier who has forgotten their one night together, and years later fate brings them together again.
In a country that has outlawed the Church, the last remaining priest becomes a hunted fugitive walking toward a martyr's end.
A prosecutor takes a lovely shoplifter home for Christmas and falls in love with the woman he is duty-bound to convict.
An RAF pilot who miraculously survives a parachuteless fall must plead before a heavenly court that his new love has earned him the right to live.
A frightened young first-timer is hardened by the brutal world of a women's prison.
Childhood sweethearts divided by class -- the wild Heathcliff and the genteel Cathy -- love and destroy each other on the Yorkshire moors.
A widow moves into a seaside cottage haunted by a gruff sea captain's ghost, and the two fall into an impossible love.
A Broadway star who killed her domineering producer in self-defense wrestles with guilt as an innocent woman falls under suspicion.
A widow enrolls at her daughter's college and scandalously falls for the same professor her daughter admires.
A frontier scout brokers a fragile peace with Apache chief Cochise and marries an Indian woman, in a Western that casts the Apache as heroes.
A celebrated cricketer who is secretly a gentleman jewel-thief plans one last heist while a Scotland Yard man closes in.
A pregnant, abandoned woman assumes a dead bride's identity among wealthy strangers -- until blackmail threatens to expose her.
In wartime London a ballet dancer, told her officer love has been killed, turns to the streets -- and his sudden return brings tragedy.
The Story
Screen Directors Playhouse (NBC, 1949-1951) put a fresh twist on the popular film-to-radio anthology: produced in cooperation with the Screen Directors Guild, every adaptation brought in the movie's own DIRECTOR. Each half hour opened with the director introducing his picture and closed with a friendly chat between the director and the night's stars -- part radio drama, part behind-the-scenes featurette. Better still, the original screen stars very often reprised their roles at the microphone. It began in the grandest possible way, with John Ford and John Wayne presenting "Stagecoach" on January 9, 1949, and went on to range across Hollywood's catalog -- Magnificent Obsession, Spellbound, The Bishop's Wife, Broken Arrow -- with a marquee that reads like a studio roster: Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Charles Boyer, Ray Milland, Joseph Cotten, Lucille Ball, Tallulah Bankhead. Hosted by announcer Jimmy Wallington, the show won a National Council of Teachers of English award and a runner-up Peabody in 1949, and even gave Margaret Truman -- the President's daughter -- her first dramatic role, opposite James Stewart in 1951. The brand later moved to television in the mid-1950s.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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