Wichita Exotica            

There were radio shows that suited Kathleen 
Hite's sensibility and talent, and others that did not. 
As shocking and blasphemous as it may sound, 
radio Gunsmoke was somewhere in the middle 
(Hite's best work in Gunsmoke was on tv, in the b&w hour era). 
Hite bloomed in the shows Rogers of the Gazette
and Fort Laramie, where she was left to her own devices 
(or rather, everyone left town and left the shows to Hite's devices). 
Not that throwing the remainder of a show on Hite's lap necessarily 
worked every time--the return of Philip Marlowe 
died by misadventure, stuck in a dead end of an alley 
fitting for this radio incarnation who was more gum than shoe. 
Kathleen Hite's participation in Escape was more toward 
the end than the end itself. She wrote four episodes 
that might be described as... dreadful. 
(Okay, an Escapist would spell it dread-full.) 

It is a dangerous dare and deed to demean Escape in any way. 
People have been murdered in radio conventions 
for careless comments made toward this hallowed show, 
considered by many to be one of radio's best. 
It is revered as great adventure and great drama, 
done with great realism. All this greatness 
should be obvious to you from the overwrought 
music packed with foreboding and threatened terror. 
(In the pop culture world, when a pop culture show makes use 
of pseudo-classical pop culture, e.g. pap pop from the past 
like "Night on Bald Mountain" on Escape 
or "The William Tell Overture" on The Lone Ranger, 
it earns a significant amount of air cred.) 
As one of Escape's claims to greatness, its fanatics point 
to the fact that it made voice versions of many literary classics. 
Of course, the covering of a classic does not a mountain pass make, 
and each of these episodes must meet Rudyardian muster, 
just as every 'article' which supposedly made Playboy a 'literary magazine' 
ought to be weighed in the balance with each breast. 
Escape did produce some memorable episodes, 
but Escapees conveniently overlook that the majority 
fell into thriller territory, like exotic versions of the short stories 
from The Alfred Hitchcock Magazine, crossed with horror comic books. 
It is precisely this quality that makes the episodes boringly alike 
and humdrum, despite the very fact that each was supposed 
to take place in a uniquely strange foreign locale. 
Just how many times can you have the week's episode debark 
from a Heart of Darkness-like beginning? 

Irony of ironies and coincidence of coincidences, 
Kathleen Hite's "A Good Thing" starts out with a hotel scene 
that pre-echoes the Martin Sheen hotel scene 
in Apocalypse Now twenty-six years later(!). 
Your assessment of the rest of the episode will depend 
on whether you are an Escape devotee or not. 
This is almost an anti-Hite episode, in the sense 
that there is ultimately no sense or meaning, just... horror. 
Not "the horror, the horror," but just the kiddie kind of horror, 
the type that emanates from balloons and ghoulish faces 
in comic books. 

So why exactly should the Gunsmoke fan check out Escape? 
Because just about everyone connected with radio Gunsmoke 
worked previously on this CBS show. 
Would Gunsmoke have been any good, 
had its producer, technicians, writers, and actors 
not sharpened their pickaxes on this lode of... uh, horrific material? 
Would Dodge be so perfectly peopled, and the gunsmoke as sharp, 
had it not been for this pile of pyrite and pirates? 
In a word, no. 

Another reason for being 'obliged' in a shucks way to Escape, 
is that it confirms the inexhaustible and ever-recharging power 
of the fictional West to interest us. 
How can a show set in a different exotic locale every week 
be so boring, 
and a show set in the same western town every week 
be so riveting? 


April 7, 2006 


Copyright © 2006-2011 E. A. Villafranca, Jr.  
All Rights Reserved