 Marlene Dietrich | |
| Genre | Foreign intrigue/adventure |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| Syndicates | American Broadcasting Company |
| Starring | Marlene Dietrich Ken Lynch Arnold Moss |
| Directed by | Marx Leebe |
| Produced by | Leonard Blair |
| Original release | January 6, 1952 – December 28, 1952 |
Cafe Istanbul is an old-time radio foreign intrigue and adventure program in the United States. It was broadcast on ABC January 6, 1952 - December 28, 1952. [1]
Mademoiselle Madou was the singer in Cafe Istanbul, a cabaret located somewhere in the Far East. Patrons of the cafe included "spies, criminals and the Secret Police," and Madou became involved with some of them in each episode. [2]
Jack O'Brian, a reviewer for International News Service, wrote in his radio-television column that the program, "which fills the air with a flavor mixed generously of throaty innuendo, sinister and exotic citizens of foreign extraction, is a fairly unbelievable mishmash but we have no complaints much on that score." [3] He concluded that it was an "earful of sultry fun." [3]
Marlene Dietrich played Mademoiselle Madou, a role that was "created specifically for" her. [4] Dietrich was apparently the power behind the show. In the book Dietrich Icon, Gerd Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardins wrote, "A radio executive told Colliers: 'The radio show is her package. She got the idea for it — based on the role she played in The Blue Angel — and she hires the actors and writers with her own money." [5] They also cited an article in Time that described Dietrich as sitting up until 3 a.m. "pecking out 17 pages of script revisions for the first show." [5]
Ken Lynch played Christopher Gard, "an American young man of mysterious connections, who holds a unique place in the affections of Mlle. Madou". [6] Arnold Moss played police Colonel Raul Felki, who didn't know "whether to make love to Madou or throw her in jail." [6] Marx Leebe was the director, and Leonard Blair was the producer. Bernard Green provided the music. [6]
Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German and American actress and singer whose career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s.
Mary Jane "Mae" West was an American actress, singer, comedian, screenwriter, and playwright whose career spanned over seven decades. Considered a sex symbol, she was known for her breezy sexual independence and her lighthearted bawdy double entendres, often delivered in a husky contralto voice. She was active in vaudeville and on stage in New York City before moving to Los Angeles to begin a career in the film industry.
June Foray was an American voice actress. She was best known as the voice of such animated characters as Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale, Nell Fenwick, Lucifer from Disney's Cinderella, Cindy Lou Who, Jokey Smurf, Granny from the Warner Bros. cartoons directed by Friz Freleng, Grammi Gummi from Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears series, and Magica De Spell, among many others.
Robin Ophelia Quivers is an American radio personality, author, and actress, best known for being the long-running co-host of The Howard Stern Show.
Betty Crocker is a brand and fictional character used in advertising campaigns for food and recipes. The character was originally created by the Washburn-Crosby Company in 1921 following a contest in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1954, General Mills introduced the red spoon logo with her signature, placing it on Gold Medal flour, Bisquick, and cake-mix packages. A portrait of Betty Crocker, first commissioned in 1936 and revised several times since, appears on printed advertisements and product packaging.
Beatrice Benaderet was an American actress and comedienne. Born in New York City and raised in San Francisco, she began performing in Bay Area theatre and radio before embarking on a Hollywood career that spanned over three decades. Benaderet first specialized in voice-over work in the golden age of radio, appearing on numerous programs while working with comedians of the era such as Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Lucille Ball. Her expertise in dialect and characterization led to her becoming Warner Bros.' leading voice of female characters in their animated cartoons of the early 1940s through the mid-1950s.
Our Miss Brooks is an American sitcom starring Eve Arden as a sardonic high-school English teacher. It began as a radio show broadcast on CBS from 1948 to 1957. When the show was adapted to television (1952–56), it became one of the medium's earliest hits. In 1956, the sitcom was adapted for the big screen in the film of the same name.
Billy Wilder (1906–2002) was an Austrian filmmaker. Wilder initially pursued a career in journalism after being inspired by an American newsreel. He worked for the Austrian magazine Die Bühne and the newspaper Die Stunde in Vienna, and later for the German newspapers Berliner Nachtausgabe, and Berliner Börsen-Courier in Berlin. His first screenplay was for the German silent thriller The Daredevil Reporter (1929). Wilder fled to Paris in 1933 after the rise of the Nazi Party, where he co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay of French drama Mauvaise Graine (1934). In the same year, Wilder left France on board the RMS Aquitania to work in Hollywood despite having little knowledge of English.
Frances Rappaport Horwich was an American educator, television personality and television executive. As Miss Frances, she was the host of the children's television program Ding Dong School, seen weekday mornings on the NBC network in the 1950s and nationally syndicated between 1959 and 1965.
Ilona Massey was a Hungarian-American film, stage and radio performer.
The year 1952 saw a number of significant happenings in radio broadcasting history.
Ding Dong School, billed as "the nursery school of the air", is a half-hour children's TV show which began on WNBQ-TV in Chicago, Illinois a few months before its four-year run on NBC. It is the earliest known preschool series to be produced in the United States, predating Romper Room by a year.
An Evening With Marlene Dietrich is a concert-format television special, starring Marlene Dietrich, first broadcast in 1973.
Nancy Gates was an American film and television actress.
Sandra Jacqueline Denton, better known by her stage name Pepa or Pep, is a Jamaican-American rapper, best known for her work as a member of the female rap trio Salt-N-Pepa. Denton starred in The Salt-N-Pepa Show, a reality TV series focusing on reforming the group which aired on the VH1 network in 2008. Since January 2016, Denton has appeared as a supporting cast member on the music reality television show Growing Up Hip Hop which airs on We TV.
"The Boys in the Back Room" is a song written by Frank Loesser, set to music by Frederick Hollaender and performed by Marlene Dietrich in the film Destry Rides Again (1939). It is often referred to as "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have". Her winking performance was a parody of her vampish roles in earlier films such as The Blue Angel (1930) and Blonde Venus (1932). The song became a standard part of her repertoire, second only to "Lili Marlene". She also sang a German version called "Gib doch den Männern am Stammtisch ihr Gift".
Kenneth E. Lynch was an American radio, film, and television actor with more than 180 credits to his name. He was generally known for portraying law enforcement officers and detectives. He may have been best known for his starring role as "the Lieutenant" on Dumont detective series The Plainclothesman (1949–1954), on which his face was never seen, and for his co-starring role as Sergeant Grover on McCloud.
His Greatest Bluff is a 1927 German silent comedy film directed by Henrik Galeen and Harry Piel and starring Piel, Toni Tetzlaff and Lotte Lorring. Its title is sometimes translated as His Biggest Bluff. Today, the film is best known for the early role it offered to Marlene Dietrich who was only cast after great effort by her agents. The film was shot at the Grunewald Studios, located in Western Berlin, during January and February 1927. It premiered on 12 May 1927 at the Alhambra-Palast in Berlin.
Time for Love is an old-time radio adventure drama in the United States. It was broadcast on CBS January 15, 1953 - May 27, 1954.
Judith Cary Waller was an American broadcasting pioneer. Despite the fact that she knew nothing about radio at the time, she became the first station manager of Chicago radio station WMAQ when it went on the air in 1922. She was one of the first female radio station managers in the United States, along with Eleanor Poehler of WLAG and WCCO in Minneapolis, and Bertha Brainard of WJZ in New York. During her tenure as station manager, Waller was responsible for obtaining broadcast rights for Chicago Cubs home games for WMAQ and for hiring Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll as Amos 'n' Andy after they left WGN radio over syndication rights. Waller tried to interest the CBS radio network in the program with no success. NBC brought the program to its Blue Network three years before its purchase of WMAQ in 1931.
