Dan O’Herlihy stars in the famous Rudyard Kipling story about two British rogues who pretend to be kings. The story was adapted by Les Crutchfield and produced on Escape twice before (1947-07-07 and 1948-08-01). It is a good and outlandish story with the old warning of “be careful what you ask for… you might just get it” as a series of dire unintended consequences of their actions soon follow.
Two men decide they want to pursue a life as kings, no matter how small their kingdoms, and manage to do so in a small country named Kafiristan. The story begins after their adventure has ended, with one of the men visiting a newspaper reporter they had known before they began their quest. It has been years since he saw him. The reporter does not recognize this terribly broken man whose clothes indicate a long and arduous journey. He’s prodded to tell the story of what happened since he last saw them. It starts out relatively benign, especially after they find out some of natives are freemasons, just like them! They do, however, have a higher degree of membership, and exert their additional knowledge of Masonic rituals and rules on them. Gradually, the two men allow their success in gaining their royal status go to their heads. It takes a bad turn when one decides to marry a young Kafir girl as his queen. That’s when things take a steep downside.
The very good surviving network recording is a copy of the network feed of the broadcast day. The end of the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar program opens the recording, and the tease for this episode and the network ID can be heard. In some very quiet spots, the recording may seem to have some sounds that seem like some radio station drift. It’s actually “print-through” and is very, very minor. This is the best and fullest sounding recording of this production. Print-through is the unwanted transfer of magnetic signals from one layer of recording tape to another, resulting in pre-echo (before the recorded signal) or post-echo (after the recorded signal). It is typically a storage issue when tapes have not been used or rewound for long periods of time.
After Suspense, the recording includes CBS news analysis with Richard C. Hottelet, sponsored by Delco. Hottelet died in 2014 at 97 years old. He was the last surviving of “Murrow’s Boys,” the CBS journalists who covered World War II under the legendary leadership of Edward R. Murrow.
The program was pre-recorded. No copy of the script cover has been found, which means that the details of rehearsals and recording sessions are not available at this time.
Kafiristan sounds like a fictional place, and sometimes Kipling was accused of making it all up. It was real, but the area of land changed hands so often, had different names over the centuries, and documentation was sparse. Westerners had visited there as missionaries or on geographic expeditions since the 1600s. The area is currently known as the Nuristan Province of Afghanistan.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP590531
THE CAST
DAN O’HERLIHY (Peachy Carnehan), Ben Wright (Daniel Dravot), Jay Novello (Billy Fish, the High Priest), Richard Peel (Kipling, the narrator), Lillian Buyeff (Roxanne), George Walsh (Suspense Narrator)
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