This is “the one about the rats” that fans of Escape who heard the story when it was first broadcast always had vivid memories of it. Younger collectors who never heard radio drama before often consider this as one of the key plays that lured them into the classic radio hobby. The story was written by George Toudouze in his native French, and then made its first English publication in the January 1937 edition of Esquire.
It is a horrifying tale of three lighthouse keepers who work in a very lonely and desolate place off the coast of French Guyana. A derelict ship comes into view, and the lighthouse keepers realize it has no crew. The ship drifts to shore, hitting a reef. That releases a swarm of gigantic, ravenous rats, all hungry, and heading toward the lighthouse. The three men are trapped!
The first broadcast of the script was on 1949-11-15 on Escape and starred Elliott Reid. That series produced and directed by William N. Robson at that time. The short story was adapted by James Poe. The broadcast received an award for its sound effects from Radio-TV Life. The story was so well-received that it was performed again on 1950-03-17, only four months after the first broadcast. It starred Vincent Price. The final Escape broadcast was on 1953-08-09 with Ben Wright. Of all the stories, plays, surveys of art and architecture Toudouze wrote, it is this striking short story that is remembered most. It may very well be that the radio dramatizations of his story made that so.
Escape went off the air, and Robson had a need to stay within tight budgets on Suspense. Re-using scripts was an important strategy. Knowing that the audience for radio drama had changed so much in its composition, he knew that Suspense was the only place where radio’s classic plays might be heard and appreciated again. Three Skeleton Key is one of the classics that captures the interest of new listeners and delights, once more, those who heard it before. He was able to recruit Vincent Price, generally considered to offer the best of the three performances on Escape, to do it once more. Price loved doing radio, and probably did not need much prodding.
Suspense offered the story up one additional time, also under Robson. The two performances were not always available to collectors, and there was confusion as to which broadcast was which. Keith Scott notes that this 1956 version has an opening line by Price as “Picture this place.” The 1958-10-18 show starts with “Try and picture this place.”
The only surviving recording is an Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) recording, in excellent sound.
In 2016, a short film was presented at some movie festivals, and did quite well, mainly as a test of concept. It does not present the entire story, but is interesting to view it and realize the difficult job they had reproducing the scene that listeners had already created in their minds. https://threeskeletonkeyfilm.com/
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP561111
THE CAST
Vincent Price (Jean), John Dehner (Auguste), Ben Wright (Louie), George Walsh (Narrator)
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