The United States Steel Hour

Rod Serling's The Rack, a production of The United States Steel Hour on April 12, 1955, was later published in this 1957 Bantam paperback.
Other names	Theater Guild on the Air
Genre	Anthology drama
Running time	1 hour
Country	United States
Languages	English
Home station	ABC (09/09/45-06/05/49) NBC (09/11/49-06/07/53)
TV adaptations	The United States Steel Hour (1953-1963)
Hosts	Lawrence Langner, Roger Pryor
Starring	Broadway and Hollywood actors
Writers	Robert Anderson, Erik Barnouw, Robert Cenedella, Jeffrey Dell, Robert Fresnell Jr., George Lowther, Peter Lyon, Arthur Miller, Kenyon Nicholson, William S. Rainey, Norman Rosten, Stanley Young
Directors	Homer Fickett
Producers	George Kondolf, Carol Irwin
Exec. producers	Armina Marshall, George Lowther
Air dates	September 9, 1945 to June 7, 1953
No. of episodes	315
Audio format	Monaural sound

The United States Steel Hour is an anthology series which brought hour-long dramas to television from 1953 to 1963. The television series and the radio program that preceded it were both sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation.

[edit] Radio

The series originated on radio in the 1940s as Theatre Guild on the Air. Organized in 1919 to improve the quality of American theater, the Theatre Guild first experimented with radio productions in Theatre Guild Dramas, a CBS series which ran from December 6, 1943 to February 29, 1944.

Actress-playwright Armina Marshall (1895-1991), a co-administrator of the Theatre Guild, headed the Guild's newly created Radio Department, and in 1945, Theatre Guild on the Air embarked on its ambitious plan to bring Broadway theater to radio with leading actors in major productions. It premiered September 9, 1945, on ABC with Burgess Meredith, Henry Daniell and Cecil Humphreys in Wings Over Europe, a play by Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne which the Theatre Guild had staged on Broadway in 1928-29.^[1]

Within a year the series drew some 10 to 12 million listeners each week. Presenting both classic and contemporary plays, the program was broadcast for eight years before it became a television series

Playwrights adapted to radio ranged from Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde to Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams with numerous Broadway and Hollywood actors in the casts, including Ingrid Bergman, Ronald Colman, Bette Davis, Rex Harrison, Helen Hayes, Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Agnes Moorehead and Basil Rathbone. The radio series was broadcast until June 7, 1953, when the United States Steel Corporation decided to move its show to television.

[edit] Television

The television version aired from 1953 to 1955 on ABC, and from 1955 to 1963 on CBS. Like its radio predecessor it was a live dramatic anthology series. During its first season on television the program was alternated bi-weekly with The Motorola Television Hour. By 1963, the year it went off the air, it was the last surviving live anthology series from the Golden Age of Television. It was still on the air during President John F. Kennedy's famous April 11, 1962 confrontation with steel companies over the hefty raising of their prices. The show featured a range of television acting talent as its episodes explored a wide variety of contemporary social issues, from the mundane to the controversial.

Notable guest actors included Martin Balsam, Tallulah Bankhead, James Dean, Keir Dullea, Andy Griffith, Rex Harrison, Celeste Holm, Sally Ann Howes, Jack Klugman, Peter Lorre, Walter Matthau, Paul Newman, George Peppard, Albert Salmi and Johnny Washbrook, in his first ever screen role as Johnny Sullivan in "The Roads Home".

Episodes were contributed by many notable writers, including Ira Levin, Richard Maibaum and Rod Serling. The program also telecast one-hour musical versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The United States Steel Hour telecast The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on November 20, 1957 with a cast starring Jimmy Boyd, Earle Hyman, Basil Rathbone, Jack Carson and Florence Henderson. Boyd had previously played Huckleberry in the earlier telecast of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

[edit] Controversy

Serling was not regarded as a controversial scriptwriter until he contributed to the United States Steel Hour, as he recalled in his collection Patterns (1957):

In the television seasons of 1952 and 1953, almost every television play I sold to the major networks was “non-controversial.” This is to say that in terms of their themes they were socially inoffensive, and dealt with no current human problem in which battle lines might be drawn. After the production of Patterns, when my things were considerably easier to sell, in a mad and impetuous moment I had the temerity to tackle a theme that was definitely two-sided in its implications. I think this story is worth repeating.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a musical production for The United States Steel Hour on November 20, 1957 with (l to r) Jimmy Boyd, Basil Rathbone, Jack Carson.

The script was called Noon on Doomsday. It was produced by the Theatre Guild on the United States Steel Hour in April 1956. The play, in its original form, followed very closely the Till case in Mississippi, where a young Negro boy was kidnapped and killed by two white men who went to trial and were exonerated on both counts. The righteous and continuing wrath of the Northern press opened no eyes and touched no consciences in the little town in Mississippi where the two men were tried. It was like a cold wind that made them huddle together for protection against an outside force. which they could equate with an adversary. It struck me at the time that the entire trial and its aftermath was simply “They’re bastards, but they’re our bastards.” So I wrote a play in which my antagonist was not just a killer but a regional idea. It was the story of a little town banding together to protect its own against outside condemnation. At no point in the conception of my story was there a black-white issue. The victim was an old Jew who ran a pawnshop. The killer was a neurotic malcontent who lashed out at something or someone who might be materially and physically the scapegoat for his own unhappy, purposeless, miserable existence. Philosophically I felt that I was on sound ground. I felt that I was dealing with a sociological phenomenon--the need of human beings to have a scapegoat to rationalize their own shortcomings.

Noon on Doomsday finally went on the air several months later, but in a welter of publicity that came from some 15,000 letters and wires from White Citizens Councils and the like protesting the production of the play. In news stories, the play had been erroneously described as “The story of the Till case.” At one point earlier, during an interview on the Coast, I told a reporter from one of the news services the story of Noon on Doomsday. He said, “Sounds like the Till case.” I shrugged it off, answering, “If the shoe fits...” This is all it took. From that moment on Noon on Doomsday was the dramatization of the Till case. And no matter how the Theatre Guild or the agency representing U.S. Steel denied it, the impression persisted. The offices of the Theatre Guild, on West 53rd Street in New York City, took on all the aspects of a football field ten seconds after the final whistle blew.^[2]

[edit] Awards

The series won Emmys in 1954 for Best Dramatic Program and Best New Program. The following year it won an Emmy for Best Dramatic Series, and Alex Segal was nominated for Best Direction. It received seven Emmy nominations in 1956, one in 1959 and one in 1961, In 1962 it was nominated for a science fiction Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Listen to

• Theater Guild on the Air in The Internet Archive's Old-Time Radio Collection

[edit] External links

• Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Logs: Theater Guild on the Air
• The United States Steel Hour at the Internet Movie Database
• The United States Steel Hour at TV.com
• "Writing for Television" by Rod Serling