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. |
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| Other names | Theater Guild on the Air |
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| 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.
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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, Basil Rathbone and Mary Sinclair. Even John Gielgud was heard, in his famous role of Hamlet, in an expanded 90-minute broadcast with Dorothy McGuire as Ophelia.[2]Fredric March was also heard in his only performance as Cyrano de Bergerac, a role he played neither onstage or onscreen.[3] The series even featured a rarity - the only radio broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's flop musical, Allegro.[4] The radio series was broadcast until June 7, 1953, when the United States Steel Corporation decided to move its show to 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 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, Suzanne Storrs, Albert Salmi, and Johnny Washbrook. Washbrook played Johnny Sullivan in The Roads Home in his first-ever screen role. Griffith made his onscreen debut in the show's production of No Time For Sergeants, and would reprise the lead role in the 1958 big screen adaptation. In 1956-57, Read Morgan made his television debut on the Steel Hour as a young boxer named Joey in two episodes entitled "Sideshow". Child actor Darryl Richard, later of The Donna Reed Show, also made his acting debut on the Steel Hour as Tony in the episode "The Bogey Man," which aired January 18, 1955.[5]. In 1960 Johnny Carson starred with Anne Francis in the presentation Queen of the Orange Bowl.
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.
Rod 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):
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).
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