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Action (aka Action Theater) was a planned 1945 NBC radio anthology series of action-adventure tales. However, the series went no further than the first audition drama, although an announcement on the show reveals an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Victory" (with Nancy Kelly and Roger Pryor) was scheduled, along with stories by Ernest Hemingway and Jack London.
Radio broadcasting in the United States has been used since the early 1920s to distribute news and entertainment to a national audience. It was the first electronic "mass medium" technology, and its introduction, along with the subsequent development of sound movies, ended the print monopoly of mass media. During radio's "Golden Age" it had a major cultural and financial impact on the country. However, the rise of television broadcasting in the 1950s relegated radio to a secondary status, as much of its programming and audience shifted to the new "sight joined with sound" service.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe.
Nancy Kelly was an American actress. A child actress and model, she was a repertory cast member of CBS Radio's The March of Time and became a movie leading lady in the late 1930s, while still in her teens. She made 36 movies between 1926 and 1977, including portraying Tyrone Power's love interest in the classic Jesse James (1939), which also featured Henry Fonda, and playing opposite Spencer Tracy in Stanley and Livingstone later that same year. She had her greatest success in a character role, the distraught mother in The Bad Seed, receiving a Tony Award for the 1955 stage production and an Academy Award nomination for the 1956 film adaptation.
Performing before a live studio audience, Jane Wyatt and Robert Lowery starred in the pilot program, "High Explosive", with a supporting cast of Ralph Sanford and Tom Holland. It was adapted by writer-director Maxwell Shane (1905-1983) from Paramount's High Explosive (1943), a film scripted by Shane and Howard J. Green from a story by Joseph Hoffman.
Jane Waddington Wyatt was an American actress. She starred in a number of Hollywood films, but is likely best known for her role as the housewife and mother Margaret Anderson on the CBS and NBC television comedy series, Father Knows Best, and as Amanda Grayson, the human mother of Spock on the science-fiction television series Star Trek. Wyatt was a three-time Emmy Award-winner.
Robert Lowery was an American motion picture, television, and stage actor who appeared in more than seventy films.
Maxwell Shane was an American movie and television director, screenwriter, and producer.
Produced by Irvin Atkins for Radio Creators, "High Explosive" aired January 15, 1945, with music by Gregory Stone. It was introduced by host William Gargan and announcer Art Baker with a commentary by Shane in the middle of the show. Best known in the 1940s for his Big Town screenplays and radio scripts, Shane later scripted City Across the River, the 1949 film of Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes, and he was a writer-producer for TV's Thriller (1960-62).
William Dennis Gargan was an American film, television and radio actor. He was the 5th recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967, and nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor in 1941 for his roll as Joe in 'They Knew What They Wanted'.
Art Baker was an American film, television and radio actor.
Big Town is a popular long-running radio drama series which was later adapted to both film and television and a comic book published by DC Comics.
