Mike Ragan – Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! This Thursday, I will be reviewing Darke of the Night, which aired its only episode on the DuMont Network in 1955. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week’s pilot originally aired as a part of the Studio 57 anthology show.

Episode 1.1 “Who’s Been Sitting In My Chair?”

(Dir by David Butler, originally aired on September 10th, 1955)

Johnny Darke (Jack Carson) is the hippest and coolest DJ in all of New York City .… or, at least, he’s as hip and cool as anyone could have been in 1955. All through the night, he spins records and talks to “the ghosts” who are listening. His station manager (Joseph Kearns) tells him that his sponsor doesn’t like it when Johnny talks about ghosts, but no one tells Johnny Darke what to do.

Johnny knows that a woman has been entering his apartment while he’s at the studio, but he doesn’t know why. (What I don’t know is why Johnny doesn’t just lock his door.) Johnny suspects that the woman is Margaret Canady (Jocelyn Brando), who lived in the apartment before Johnny moved in. Margaret’s boyfriend, Vincent Marsh (H.M. Wynant), is on death row for murder, but as Johnny learns about the case, he sees it as a story about two people who love each other as opposed to a woman who fell in love with a killer.

When Vincent breaks out of prison, he steals a guard’s gun and tells the guard that he’s going to use it to kill Margaret. (That was nice of him.) The police come down to the radio station and ask Johnny if he knows where to find Margaret. Johnny says that Margaret is probably at his apartment. After the police leave (and, strangely, do not immediately head over to Johnny’s apartment), Johnny calls his place and Margaret answers the phone. Apparently, Margaret’s not very good at secretly breaking into places.

When Johnny hears Vincent arrive over the phone, he hops over to his microphone and gives a cryptic message to “the ghost in the big brown chair” that the ghost who has just arrived is not in love with her. Then Johnny goes to his apartment and talks Vincent down.

This was a pilot for a series that would have featured Johnny Darke getting involved in the lives of his listeners. Jack Carson is likable as Johnny, which almost makes up for the fact that the story itself makes absolutely no sense. Why doesn’t Johnny just lock up his apartment before he heads to work? The implication is that Margaret is sneaking into the apartment to wait for Vincent to return, but there’s also a scene where it’s revealed that she’s secretly living with the building’s landlady. That scene is never followed up on. As I already mentioned, the biggest plot hole is that the police don’t immediately head over to Johnny’s apartment when they hear that Margaret is there. If they’re so determined to catch Vincent and they know that Vincent is planning on killing Margaret, why does it take them so long to actually go to the apartment? It seems like that should have been their priority.

Interestingly enough, the pilot ends with Jack Carson stepping out of character and offering up some statistics on the value of records purchased in 1957 ($4,000,000 worth) and the number of radio stations in the country. Carson explains that DJs are everywhere and every DJ has a million stories that could be adapted for Darke of the Night. He then brings on two actual DJs, Peter Potter and Al Jarvis. Both Potter and Jarvis endorse the idea of a weekly television series about a DJ.

It’s odd but, in its way, kind of touching. Jack Carson just seems so earnest and sincere about his desire to star as a radio DJ! Unfortunately, it didn’t happen for him. The pilot aired as part of the Studio 57 anthology series and that was that. Carson may not have gotten to play a DJ on a weekly basis, but two years later he co-starred in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. Carson passed away in 1963 at the far too young age of 52, but he’ll live forever wherever classic movies are appreciated.

The frontier town of Pecos, Texas is without a marshal and Martin Conroy (Walter Reed) and his men are taking advantage of the situation by forcing people to sell their land for next to nothing. A railroad’s coming and Conroy is looking to make a killing. When landowner Bailey (John Hamilton) is targeted by Conroy, ranch hands Tim Holt (played by Tim Holt) and Rafferty (Richard Martin) are determined to stop him. Federal marshal Terry Moran is summoned to the town to enforce the law. Everyone is shocked when Moran’s daughter — also named Terry (Linda Douglas) — shows up and declares herself the new marshal. “We don’t need no petticoat marshal!” the townspeople cry.

This is a by-the-book B-western, one of many that Tim Holt and Richard Martin made over the years. In this one, neither Holt not Martin seems to be too invested in the familiar story. (Holt was maybe wondering how he went from The Magnificent Ambersons and Treasure of the Sierra Madre to this.) The only really interesting thing about this one is that the marshal is a woman but the movie doesn’t really do anything with the idea. Tim Holt was the star here and no petticoat marshal was going to upstage him.

The thing that I find interesting about these B-westerns is how often the villain was someone looking to get rich by selling ill-gotten land to the railroad companies. B-westerns always presented the railroads as being both the best and the worst thing about the west. The railroads bring and connect civilization but they also attract villains like Martin Conroy. In the American westerns, it was always made clear that the railroad company was as disgusted by men like Conroy as the townspeople. However, in the spaghetti westerns that would come out in the 60s, it was always clear that the railroad didn’t care how they got their land as long as they got it.

This was Tim Holt’s second-to-last movie as a B-western star. After his career ended in Hollywood, Holt relocated to Oklahoma and eventually became the manager of radio station. He died in 1973.