Dixie Gilian
My road trip to Indiana and back provided me with another forty hours of Old Time Radio listening pleasure. Add the forty for my previous trip and all those working hours spent with my portable CD player plugged into my head, and I’d say I’ve become a quasi-authority on the subject.
Here (6 MB, playing time about thirty minutes) is my first radio show post. “Dixie Gilian” from the Pat Novak for Hire series starring Jack Webb. Some shows have good dialogue, others superior sound effects, most have implausible story lines. For me, this one has the best dialogue. I’ve listened to it six times and I’m still not bored. I might cut my own CD: a song from Devils and Dust, Dixie Gilian, another song, Dixie again, you can see where I’m going.
A few snippets from the show.
“…down here a lot of people figure it’s better to be a fat guy in a graveyard than a thin guy in a stew, that way you can be sure of a tight fit.”
“She sauntered in moving slowly like a hundred and eighteen pounds of warm smoke.”
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“Good evening”
“Yeah, thanks for knocking.”
“I don’t think you mind me coming in without warning.”
“No, I get the cabbage smell from next door the same way.”
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“When you are finished you’ve been in a lot of tight spots, like a piece of bubble gum in a set of dentures. ”
“Like trying to find a grain of rice in a Shanghai suburb.”
“When I walked in, I knew someone was on the floor. Either that, or they varnished the floor with bourbon.”
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“He couldn’t be moving around with a (bullet) hole in his back.”
“Oh, I don’t know Hellman, you’ve been doing it with one in your head. Don’t sell the guy short.”
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“They fished Hellman out of an oil slick a little while later. It was the first time his hair looked good.”
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“The door was open, wasn’t it?”
“So are a lot of graves, but I’ve never been tempted.”
Those quotes are great. They sound a lot like Garrison Kiellor’s lines in “Guy Noir, Private Eye”. And there’re probably good reasons for the similarity.
Boy I sure missed NPR on my recent long drive on Italy’s A4 (Como to Bolzano and back). I thought there’d be good music on Italian radio, given Rossini, Vivaldi & co., but there was zilch. However there was good wine, great mountains and pretty good weather (and that’s a story to be told when I get a minute).
BTW, thanks for the MC book, Mike I was stuck with a Robert Ludlum on my 9 hr flight home yesterday. Wish those burros were faster.
Comment by rakkity — June 17, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Welcome back!
But let me thank you for “Total Control.” It is not much less of everything that Connelly used to be: suspenseful, bloody, riveting, bloody, head scratching (in a whodunit way), bloodyÖ .
But what a crazy edition; IÃve never seen so many mistakes. Whole words left out here, there, and everywhere.
Comment by michael — June 17, 2005 @ 6:01 pm