Harry Heuser

28th Jan 200925th Jan 2024

“Here is your forfeit”: It’s Hopkins’s Night As Colbert Goes Private

“Our guest stars might well have been tailored for the celebrated parts of Peter and Ellie,” host Orson Welles remarked as he raised the curtain on the Campbell Playhouse production of “It Happened One Night,” heard on this day, 28 January, in 1940. Quite a bold bit of barking, that. After all, the pants once worn by bare-chested Clark Gable were handed down to William Powell, who was debonair rather than brawny. “Mr. William Powell surely needs no alteration at all,” Welles insisted, even though the material required considerable trimming. Meanwhile, the part of Ellie, the “spoiled and spirited heiress” whom Peter cuts down to size until he suits her, was inherited by Miriam Hopkins. It had “certainly never been more faultlessly imagined than tonight,” Welles declared. Indeed, as I was reminded by Andre Soares’s interview with biographer Allan Ellenberger on Alternative Film Guide, Hopkins numbered among the leading ladies who had turned down the role and, no doubt, came to regret it, given the critical and commercial success of It Happened, which earned Claudette Colbert an Academy Award.

Now, Welles was prone to hyperboles; but, in light of Colbert’s memorable performance, his claim that the part had “never been more faultlessly imagined”—in a radio adaptation, no less—sounds rather spurious. As it turns out, raspy-voiced Hopkins (whom last I saw in a BFI screening of Becky Sharp) does not give the spirited performance one might expect from the seasoned comedienne. Her timing is off, her emoting out of character, all of which conspires, along with the imposed acceleration of the script, to render disingenuous what is meant to be her character’s transformation from brat to bride; and while Powell, a few fluffed lines notwithstanding, does quite well as the cocky Peter Grant (it was “Warne” when those pants were worn by Gable), the only “spirited” performance is delivered by Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the lively score.

In short, there is little to justify Welles’s introductory boast. Was the Wunderkind getting back at Colbert for standing him up two months earlier, when Madeleine Carroll filled her place in “The Garden of Allah”? What’s more, Colbert appeared to have passed on the chance to reprise her Oscar-winning role for Campbell Playhouse, something she had previously done, opposite Gable in one of his rare radio engagements, for a Lux Radio Theater reworking of the old “Night Bus” story.

That same night, 28 January 1940, Colbert was heard instead on a Screen Guild broadcast in a production of “Private Worlds,” in a role for which she had received her second Academy Award nomination. During the curtain call, Colbert was obliged to “pay a forfeit” after incorrectly replying “The Jazz Singer” to the question “What was the first full-length all-talking picture to come out of Hollywood?” For this, she was ordered to recite a tongue twister; but it wasn’t much of a forfeit, compared to the sense of loss both Colbert and Hopkins must have felt whenever they misjudged the business by rejecting important roles or by risking their careers making questionable choices.

In The Smiling Lieutenant, the two had played rivals who ended their fight over the same man by comparing the state of their undies; now, Hopkins seemed to be rummaging in Colbert’s drawers for the parts she could have had but was not likely to be offered again. Well, however you want to spin it, radio sure was the place for makeshift redressing, for castoffs and knock-offs, for quick alterations and hasty refittings. It catered to the desire of actors and audiences alike to rewrite or at any rate tweak Hollywood history. Go ahead, try it on for size.

27th Jan 200917th Nov 2023

The Sound of Second-Hand Clapping: In Town To-Night

I enjoy spending time by myself. It’s a good thing I do, considering that I am pretty much on my own in my enthusiasm for old and largely obscure radio programs, especially those that I only get to hear about. Listening, like reading, is a solitary experience; to share your thoughts about what went on in your head can be as difficult and frustrating as it is to put into words the visions and voices of a dream. Besides, unless you are talking to somebody who gets paid to listen, your dreams and reveries are rarely as stimulating to others as they are to yourself. This isn’t exactly a dream, much less one come true—but it’s a jolly good facsimile thereof.

A few weeks ago, I walked into a second-hand bookstore in Hampstead, London. Second hands down, a used bookshop is the place to be initiated into worlds you cannot experience firsthand, no matter how deep you dig or vigorously you claw. The volume I had my dusty hands on was a signed copy of In Town To-Night, a truly forgotten book promising, as the subtitle has it, “The Story of the Popular BBC Feature Told from Within.” In other words, a close-up of something quite out of reach.

The compendium was published in 1935, at a time when dramatics had not yet come to the fore on American radio. According to a 1938 study by William Albig, a researcher who compiled data to establish the percentages of airtime devoted to various types of programs on nine American radio stations between 1925 to 1935, dramatic broadcasts (including plays, sketches, and serials) were not a significant aspect of programming, even though they had increased considerably in frequency during that period, namely from 0.13% in February 1922 to 8.85% in July 1934. Radio plays were even less frequently heard on the BBC; nor were there any signs of change. Dramatic programs constituted 2.14% of the BBC’s offerings in February 1925, as compared to 2.04% in July 1934.

So, what kind of program was In Town To-Night? “[A]s every one knows,” the blurb on the dust jacket reads, it is what the BBC called a “feature,” a highly inclusive term for a series of broadcasts produced or written by the same team or featuring the same host. While rather more formulaic, Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight came to mind, as did many of the hour-long variety programs broadcast in the US during the mid- to late 1930s.

In Town To-Night prided itself on being a program of many voices. Whatever the sound produced by such friction may be, it was on this feature that chimney-sweeps were heard

rubb[ing] shoulders with film-stars, and cat’s-meat merchants with peers of the realm. Poets, down and outs, playwrights, pearly kings and queens, and interesting people from all parts of the world have been gathered within its framework.

J. C. Cannell, the author of the book, was a talent scout for the Saturday night feature, which, at the time of publication, was in its third season; his role was to ensure a “queer medley” of personalities,

chosen with haste, though with care. A mixed lot, picked as though from a lucky dip, surprising because listeners did not know beforehand whom they would hear, and nearly always, I think, delightful for some reason or other.

Heard on this rehearsed and scripted variety program were many familiar voices from Broadway, Hollywood, and the West End; among them Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Merle Oberon, Ethel Barrymore, Paul Muni, Johnny Weissmuller, Vivien Leigh, Polly Moran, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Ida Lupino was interviewed by her actor-father Stanley; and Hermione Gingold was heard in conversation with her dresser.

Jimmy Walker, formerly Mayor of New York City, was featured, as were movie director James Whale, author Algernon Blackwood, and Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, who was “anxious to talk about his constant search for interesting screen personalities.”

Cab Calloway performed, as did Leonard Hawke, the first man ever to sing on a BBC program, along with assorted groups of Welsh miners and Swiss yodelers. Wilhelm Grosz, composer of “Isle of Capri,” played a medley of Strauss waltzes he had discovered in a bookshop in Venice.

The greater attractions, though, were the real folks and the curious ones telling their stories, many of which are retold in Cannell’s illustrated account. As the program found its voice, the stars made way for the stories of everyday—or not so everyday—folk, their struggles and successes. There was Pan The Ming, for instance, who stopped by while touring the world on foot (apart from brief intervals on his bicycle); there was a singing laundryman, a woman detective, a one-armed parachutist, as well as “one hundred grandfathers from the Upper Holloway Baptist Grandfathers’ Club”; Molly Moore, a knocker-up from Limehouse; Mrs. Wheelabread, “The Chocolate Lady” from Kensington Gardens, and Jack Morgan, “The Boy with the Large Ears.”

And then there was a visit from Clayton “Peg” Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who inspired listeners with his philosophy when he urged them to “forget” their “self-pity and go right ahead and do as other men do.”

In Town To-Night sounds like a program to stay in for—not just for the stories, which Cannell can recount, but for the voices that he cannot. Say, what is the sound of second-hand clapping?

22nd Jan 200910th Aug 2024

Biggest Announcement Ever

No, I am not referring to today’s publication of the Academy’s chosen nominees for this year’s Oscars; nor am I going to circulate information about some future event of alleged significance. The kind of announcement of which I speak was made seventy years ago, to the day, back when announcing was both a business and an art. Whether they served as barkers or featured as sidekicks, whether they peddled toilet soap or introduced those nine out of ten stars who condescended to claim they used it, announcers heard on network radio were respected and highly-paid professionals. Celebrities in their own right, they had come to prominence in the 1920s, well before they had many big names to drop.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, NBC’s Chicago headquarters even ran an announcer school. According to the 16 April 1938 issue of Radio Guide, the school offered classes in “pronunciation, writing and reading script, speaking extemporaneously, reading three-minute announcements in town and four minutes, and other tests designed to simulate an announcer’s actual experience.”

About those actual experiences: as I perused the radio listings for Sunday, 22 January 1939 (which, along with hundreds of such published broadcast schedules, have been made available at this invaluable site), I became rather wistful about the printed announcements of so many fine or worthwhile programs I may never get to hear. Claudette Colbert’s visit with Charlie McCarthy, for instance, or Jane Cowl’s performance in an adaptation of Schiller’s Maria Stuart. And how about Mayor La Guardia in a “Two-Way Transoceanic Talk” with the Lord Mayor of London—from a police car no less!

Rather than getting carried away in an ode to faded echoes, I studied the listings to verify the broadcast dates for some of the recordings that are in my library. Of Carole Lombard’s Presidential prediction and Cary Grant’s singing in The Circle presided over by Ronald Colman I have found occasion to write previously; but the really big announcement was made on a March of Dimes spectacular (shared here), an announcement even greater than the cast assembled in the fight against infantile paralysis.

And what a cast! It isn’t often that you get to hear Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Rudy Vallee, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Frances Langford, Bob Burns, and Fanny Brice in a single broadcast, and find them joined to boot by film stars Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power, recording artist Maxine Sullivan and tenor Frank Parker, as well as teenaged Mickey Rooney performing one of his own compositions, “Have a Heart.”

Not that what they had to say or sing was all drivel, either. Eddie Cantor, who was an outspoken anti-fascist when it was not yet de rigueur or prudent to be one, had the best line of the evening when, commenting on the popularity of swing music, he remarked:

A lot of people say that maybe these children shouldn’t be worshipping at the shrine of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as a father and as a citizen, I’d much prefer to have these children hailing band leaders than heil-ing bund leaders.

Still, what, above all, distinguishes this March of Dimes broadcast from any such extravaganzas is its opening announcement:

The thirty-seven voices to which you are now listening represent the combined personnel of announcers employed by Mutual, Columbia, and National Broadcasting Networks in Hollywood. Tonight, we speak as one voice, a voice which reflects the sentiment of an entire nation when it says: infantile paralysis must go.

On the air, nothing could bespeak radio’s commitment to a cause more forcefully. I wonder whether the NBC announcer school prepared its students for choric recitals.

Related recording
The Circle (22 January 1939)

21st Jan 20093rd Sep 2024

Filling in the Blanks

I’ve had quite a few “silent nights” here at broadcastellan lately (to use an old broadcasting term); and yet, I have been preparing all along for the weeks and months to come, those dark and cheerless days of mid-winter when keeping up with the out-of-date can be a real comfort. Not that the conditions here in our cottage have been altogether favorable to such pursuits, given that we had to deal with a number of blackouts and five days without heating oil, during which the “room temperature” (a phrase stricken from my active vocabulary henceforth) dropped below 40F. Not even a swig of brandy to warm me. I have given up swigging for whatever duration I deem fit after imbibing rather too copiously during the New Year’s Eve celebrations down in Bristol.

Those are not the blanks (let alone the ones in my short-term memory) that I intend to fill here. The gaps in question are in my iTunes library, which currently contains some 17500 files ranging from the recent BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm to World War I recordings. The vast majority of these files are American radio programs. They are readily gathered these days; but the work involved in cataloguing them for ready retrieval can be problematic and time consuming. For now, I am not lacking time; at least not until our long planned and much delayed move into town, real estate crisis be damned. Anyway . . .

For the past few weeks, I have been filling in each of the fields as shown above, verifying dates, checking the names of performers, comparing the sound quality of duplicate files, and researching the source materials for adaptations. It took a while to arrive at a convenient system. When I started the project anew (after the crash of an earlier Mac), I made the mistake of entering the date after the title of the broadcast (entries in lower case denoting descriptive ones).

As a result, I could not readily listen to a serial in the order in which its chapters were presented. I would have been at a loss to follow and follow up today’s installment of Chandu the Magician (1949), as if having missing out on the chance of getting my hands on Chandu’s “Assyrian money-changer” by sending in a White King toilet soap box top sixty years ago were not difficult enough to bear.

The effort should pay off, though, as it allows me to select more carefully the programs worth my time. On this day, 21 January, the highlights, to me, are the second part of “Freedom Road” (1945), a dramatization of Howard Fast’s historical novel about the post-Civil War era (currently in my online library); Norman Corwin’s examination of life in post-World War II Britain on the previously discussed One World Flight (1947), a documentary featuring an introduction by Fiorello La Guardia and a brief commentary by author-playwright-broadcaster J. B. Priestley pop-psychologizing the causes of human conflict; and the aforementioned debut of The Fat Man (1946). Not that I’d turn a deaf ear to Ingrid Bergman in Anna Christie as produced by the Ford Theater (1949) or to the Campbell Playhouse presentation of A. J. Cronin’s Citadel (1940).

And then there is another address by Father Coughlin (1940), about whose Shrine a fellow web-journalist sporting Canary Feathers in his cap had much to say recently in his personal reminiscence.

Listing, though, is to me almost always less satisfying than listening; it is also far less difficult and engaging. Listening often results in research, in comparing adaptation to source, in reading up on the performers, or in finding contemporary reviews. About the 21 January 1946 premiere of I Deal in Crime, for instance, broadcast critic Jack Gould complained that it “creeps along at a snail’s pace” and that Ted Hediger’s monologue-crowded narrative style was “not helped” by William Gargan’s “rather lackadaisical” delivery.

While he did not have instant access to thousands of such programs, Gould nevertheless noted the sameness of such nominal thrillers and their “stock situations.” To him, Paul Whiteman’s Forever Tops was the “real lift” of the evening’s new offerings on ABC, a reference that compels me to find a recording of that broadcast . . . .

In this way I spend many an hour before once again sending another missive into the niche of space I, as keeper of past broadcasts, have grandiloquently styled broadcastellan.

20th Jan 200912th Aug 2024

(In)au(gu)ral History: Presidential Addresses, Past and Present

“We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning—signifying renewal, as well as change.” With these words, John F. Kennedy opened his inaugural address on this day, 20 January, in 1961. Twenty years earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt embarked upon his third term as US President by insisting that democracy was “not dying,” whatever the apparent threats upon it or the wavering trust in its vigor. He urged his fellow citizens to “pause” and “take stock,” to “recall what [their] place in history has been, and to rediscover what [they] are and what [they] may be.” Not to do so, he cautioned, would mean to “risk the real peril of inaction.”

Granted, as Harry S. Truman remarked in 1949, “[e]ach period of [US] history has had its special challenges.” Yet somehow, as I listened to these past auguries and reappraisals, they began to echo and respond to each other as well as to the fears, doubts and hopes of our present day. I do not mean to imply that such reverberations betray a certain hollowness in their ready replication or applicability; rather, they begin to sound familiar in unexpected ways.

Outside the context of its time—though not within the vacuum of ahistoricity in which no political speech can ring true or otherwise—passages from FDR’s 1941 address, for instance, brought to mind those terrifying—and terrifyingly uncertain—early days of the 21st century, particularly the repercussions the so-called war on terror has had for US politics and the way the Republic and all it stands for came to be perceived beyond its borders:

The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide.

But we Americans know that this is not true.

Eight years ago, when the life of this Republic seemed frozen by a fatalistic terror, we proved that this is not true. We were in the midst of shock—but we acted. We acted quickly, boldly, decisively.

These later years have been living years—fruitful years for the people of this democracy. For they have brought to us greater security and, I hope, a better understanding that life’s ideals are to be measured in other than material things.

No doubt, Roosevelt was being somewhat self-congratulatory. Could a Republican successor to George W. Bush have made such a claim and been believed when suggesting that acting “quickly, boldly, decisively” back in 2001 has brought “greater security” or that the years have been “fruitful” ones for a democracy in which freedoms are being curtailed and surrendered in the dubious act of preserving them?

That “ideals are to be measured in other than material things” is an echo of the sentiments Roosevelt shared in his first inaugural address (4 March 1933), in which he told a Depression-stricken audience that the

[r]ecognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and [that]there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

The lesson, which each generation must learn anew, is, for the most part, not absorbed voluntarily; but this time around the “ideals” have been threatened along with those “material things” many find themselves divested of, partially as a result of failed policy and unchecked opportunism. It is this confidence in “ideals” as “truths” that the present administration is called upon to strengthen, so that the words of FDR, anno 1941, may once again ring true, namely that

[m[ost vital to our present and our future is this experience of a democracy which successfully survived crisis at home; put away many evil things; built new structures on enduring lines; and, through it all, maintained the fact of its democracy.

19th Jan 200910th Jan 2024

"Ain’t dat sumpin’?"

“Don’t gimme no back talk, now. Do what I tell yo’ to do. I is de president o’ dis comp’ny.” That’s what Andy told his pal Amos when the blackface comedy team of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll was first heard on network radio back in 1929. The Presidency in question was that of the Fresh Air Taxi Company of America, Incorpulated; and its fictitious head was thick, black, and halfway in the clouds. Millions of Americans followed the adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy on their wireless sets each weekday, laughed at their then celebrated brand of English and their audacity to believe that, given their perceived and actual limitations of ethnicity, intellect, and education, they could succeed in their enterprise:

Yo’ see, Amos, no matteh whut bizness you is in, de business is gotta have a head man to tell ‘em whut to do and when to do it. So dat’s de way ‘tis wid us. I strains my brain an’ figgehs out whut you gotta do. Yo’ see de brain work is de most reportant thing.

They certainly were no role models, which is what made Amos ‘n’ Andy such a popular and commercial success: Andy Brown and Amos Jones did not inspire blacks to achieve nor cause whites to perspire at the thought that they might. The status quo was never at stake.

On the eve of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, as Arthur Frank Wertheim reminds us in Radio Comedy, Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish all expressed their confidence (or the confidence of their financially secure creators) that “ev’rything goin’ be alright pretty quick” with Depression-stricken America. To which Amos added, “Tonight ‘fore I go to bed I’se gonna pray dat Mr. Roosevelt will even do more fo’ de country dan he’s promised to do.”

Amos and Andy never dared to pray for a black President. They were, after all, not the children of a utopian imagination. They were dreamed up before Martin Luther King Jr. had and expressed the dream “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

That dream, long deferred, is looking more like a reality today – the day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States – than ever before. Now, that really is “sumpin’”!

12th Jan 200910th Jan 2024

" . . . within the limits": Radio and the Code

“Will radio writing always be in demand? What will television do to radio writing? Why should anyone learn a new technique in writing when some unexpected development might wipe out the demand for this sort of work almost overnight? Is radio broadcasting basically sound? Will it endure and develop?” Such is the battery of questions with which readers eager for pointers on How to Write for Radio were being confronted upon opening one of the earliest books on the subject. The co-author of this 1931 manual, Katharine Seymour, was an accomplished radio playwright whose work was heard on prestigious programs such as Cavalcade of America. On this day, 12 January 1941, Seymour talked to announcer Graham McNamee about her experience entering the broadcasting business in the mid-1920s, back when it bore little resemblance to the confident, respected, and efficient medium it had become by the late 1930s, by which time Seymour had co-written another book on Practical Radio Writing.

Many such how-to guides followed throughout the 1940s, a testament to the vastness of the industry, its demand for written words and for talent familiar with the codes and regulations to which they were expected to adhere. In the 1920s, when Seymour tried to promote herself from typist to writer, she was told by her boss at WEAF, New York, that “no radio station will ever need more than one script writer,” to which shortsighted remark McNamee, himself one of the old-timers, responded with a resounding “Wow!”

The days of largely unchecked improvisation were over. Being obliged to keep their word, broadcasters had learned that the spoken word needed to become copy (that is, text) and that every dramatic dialogue had to be played by the book the FCC would otherwise throw at them.

One of the latest addition to my library, Albert R. Crews’s Professional Radio Writing (1946), acquainted readers with what was known as the NAB code. As the author, then production director at NBC, explained, the code was a measure of self-censorship undertaken by the National Association of Broadcasters and adopted on 11 July 1939 to outline the “handling of children’s programming, controversial public issues, educational programming, news, [and] religious broadcasts,” as well as to set down the “acceptable length of commercial copy and its content.”

In keeping with this code, the National Broadcasting Company developed its own guidelines for “continuity acceptance,” “continuity” being anything read on the air. Anyone learning how to write radio drama with the view of hearing it produced had to keep in mind, for instance, that “[w]hite slavery, sex perversion or the implication of it may not be treated in NBC programs” and that the “fact of marriage must never be used for the introduction of scenes of passion excessive or lustful in character, or which are clearly unessential to the plot development.”

In the treatment of crime, the “use of horrifying sound effects as such” was “forbidden.” According to the code, no character was to “be depicted in death agonies,” nor could the “death of any character be presented in any manner shocking to the sensibilities of the public.” The very “mention of intoxicants” had to “be held to a minimum” and “suggestive dialogue and double meaning” was “never [to] be used.”

Responding to the hullaballoo over CBS’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast, NBC also stipulated that

[f]ictional events shall not be presented in the form of authentic news announcements. Likewise, no program or commercial announcement will be allowed to be presented as a news broadcast using sound effects and terminology associated with news broadcasts. For example, the use of the word “Flash!” is reserved for the announcement of special news bulletins exclusively, and may not be used for any other purpose except in rare cases where by reason of the manner in which it is used no possible confusion may result.

Was it any wonder that, as Crews put it, there had been a “tendency on the part of many outstanding writers in [the US] to scoff at radio as a possible medium for their talents”? Such talent-repelling strictures notwithstanding, he found it “heartening” to note just

how many writers of importance radio has itself created. There are dozens of highly skilled dramatic writers who are, for the most part, completely unknown to the public, but who each day do distinguished work in their field. The anonymity of such writers is no measure of their skill or their success.

It is with the efforts of those mostly unheard of and almost entirely forgotten writers that I shall continue to concern myself in this journal; writers who skillfully interpreted the code and somehow managed to subvert it, or who at least found leeway for play “within the limits” set down for them; writers whose works, to take up one of Seymour’s questions, have endured in recordings even if American radio drama, as an art, has largely ceased to develop further.

Having lost their purpose as instruction manuals for an essentially defunct business, books like Professional Radio Writing nonetheless instruct us how to read the plays that went on the air, to account for their limitations and appreciate their qualities.

11th Jan 2009

Osage: No County for Old Men

“Life is very long.” That’s the opening line of August: Osage County, which isn’t exactly short, either. Nor is it short on family crisis, on anxiety, guilt, anger . . . and laughs. Pulitzer Prize or not, it’s honest-to-goodness melodrama, homemade (which is best). No wonder it is roping in the crowds. The British, too. Even those who’d expect a play set in Oklahoma to feature dancing cowboys and a rousing rendition of “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’” I’m one of those folks; and I still went. Couldn’t have had a better ride if I’d been in the surrey with the fringe on top, neither. On account of that nasty eye infection, I missed out on catching the ride on Broadway; but I sure was glad to catch up with it here, with most of the original cast in the house. And what a house!

Not the Lyttleton Theatre, which is just fine; the Weston’s house, I mean, which is somewhere out there in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Inside, it’s hotter than a blazing summer afternoon on a tin roof, with or without the cat. But crazy old Violet Weston ain’t one for pussyfooting around. Her husband, Bev, is the one who sets us up with that opening line; he’s saying it to the new help he’s hired to take care of Vi (“She’s the Indian who lives in my attic,” Vi later tells the assembled family). To care for her, and that old dark house, is “getting in the of [his] drinking.” Or so he says.

Bev’s a former literature teacher and an even more former poet. That’s why he’s quoting T. S. Eliot, “who bothered to write [that line] down.” I was a little worried about that line. I thought, if he is going on quoting people, I might want to look things up. And who’d stop the play for me! Or try to remember that one name or line or word and then get lose the plot. It’s not a modernist drama, fortunately; and we soon come to realize why Bev’s saying it, and what it means. For Bev, “very long” means too long. He’s had enough of life, of life with Vi, whose mouth is so foul she’s got mouth cancer, and whose mood can be even fouler, no matter how many of those over-prescribed pills she swallows (“Try to get ‘em away from me and I’ll eat you alive”).

Well, Bev is not exactly dry, either; but he’s sober enough to plan and make his exit. Soon after making arrangements with the new help he’s taking himself out of the family picture . . . which is when the fun begins. There’s Vi’s tacky sister Mattie Fae (“Feel it. Sweat is just dripping down my back”); her husband, Charlie (“I don’t want to feel your back”); their bumbling, “complicated” son (“Honey, you have to be smart to be complicated,” Mattie Fae disagrees); Vi and Bev’s three middle-aged daughters, a pot-smoking fourteen-year-old granddaughter (“Look at her boobs,” Mattie Fae exclaims—and she is not the only one taking notice, as one of Vi’s daughters finds out when her fiancé starts “goofin’” with her; and then there’s Vi’s louse of a son-in-law, who likes them younger as well (“You’re a good, decent, funny, wonderful woman, and I love you,” the louse tells his soon-to-be ex-wife, “but you’re a pain in the ass”). Just wait until they all sit down for dinner.

If this sounds like last Thanksgiving to you, you might be squirming in your seat; but, for the rest of us, it comes as a relief to witness a family even more dysfunctional than our own. You couldn’t possibly cram more melodrama into a single play without making it, say, Polyester. But that would be Baltimore.

10th Jan 200916th Jul 2024

Get Out! Tintin Is Eighty?

When a good friend of mine told me earlier this week that comic strip reporter Tintin had been “outed” by a fellow journalist, I was not the least bit surprised. The Tinky Winky controversy of the late-1990s came to mind, in which Jerry Falwell—discard his soul!—denounced the handbag-clutching purple creature of Teletubbies fame as being a “gay role model” for television’s newest and youngest target audience, the toddler. As if, with parents plonking them down in front of the box at that age, those poor impressionables did not have enough worries about their future already.

Now, Matthew Parris, who purports to know the Belgian reporter more intimately than anyone except Snowy, had no such agenda; that is, he did not equate “gay” with “dangerous.” Still, I would not be so presumptuous as to drag the perennially adolescent Tintin, who turns 80 today, into what some assume to be a camp (well, it can be camp, as I demonstrated here). Instead, I did a little outing myself by dragging the above sculpture, my most recent addition to a small collection of Tintin memorabilia, onto our patio, whereupon I took in the animated Secret of the Unicorn, based on the strip rumored to be the source for Steven Spielberg’s Tintin project now in pre-production.

I don’t suppose that the gossip about Hergé’s boy will in any way affect the box-office chances of the film and its intended sequels, about the success of which there has been so much doubt already that it was slow in receiving the green light. After all, if one source is to be believed, Tintin enthusiasm in the US and Britain amounts to “little more than a cult.” However unfortunate the phrase in this overstatement, nothing sinister or questionable other than doubt about the figure’s bankability is implied. Still, the boy reporter, who has a somewhat shady past in propagandist cartoons and only gradually matured into the open-minded, worldly youth he became in his Tibetan adventure (the stage version of which I discussed here), has had his share of detractors.

Warning labels other than “Caution: content may damage your kid’s chances to turn out straight” have been attached to Tintin’s exploits in the Congo (as mentioned here), and his tendencies have been denounced as right-wing. A globetrotting reporter who is racist, fascist, and gay? A rather incongruous picture; but then, the Tintin of 1929 is not the same young man who cleared the gypsies accused of having stolen the Castafiore emerald in 1963.

When first I encountered Tintin, no such thoughts occurred to me. Still, in part for reasons made plain by Mr. Parris, I was intrigued by the cub reporter and his freedom to travel around the world, unencumbered by homework, filial duties, or anxieties about puberty. He was as exciting and comforting in this respect as Pippi Longstocking, only neater and more mature.

As an adventure-starved, working-class latchkey kid unsure and downright scared about his own sexuality, I was only too eager to relate to an independent teenager whose parents are never seen or talked about, who does not appear to have girls on his mind, whose closest human pal is a hunk of a sea captain, and who is devoted to a fluffy pet dog named Snowy. I guess that makes me whatever Mr. Parris just labeled him.

When I now add another label in honor of Tintin’s birthday, realizing just how often the lad has found his way into this journal, it simply reads . . . Tintin.

9th Jan 20092nd Aug 2024

Best in Show: Dean Spanley as Out-of-Homebody Experience

My records show that I watched some 250 films in 2008. They range from silent one-reelers to noisy epics, from British wartime propaganda to Third Reich comedy, from the obscure Lottery Man (1916), which I enjoyed, to the biggest blockbuster of the year (The Dark Knight), which I did not. For all this variety, the majority of the titles on my list (continued to the right of this journal entry) are Hollywood films of the studio era, many of them from the 1930s and 1940s. Conventional as I am in this, I concur with those who hold 1939 to be Hollywood’s best vintage.

Later decades, the present one excepted, are poorly represented in my annual account. There are two films from the 1990s (one of them a television movie about the inclusion of which the pedant in me had a long debate with myself); a lone film from the 1980s (the tonally misjudged if beautifully languid A Handful of Dust, based on one of my favorite novels of the 1930s); and less than a handful of 1970s pictures, two of them by one of the greatest directors of Hollywood’s golden age, Alfred Hitchcock. There is to me no surprise in these statistics; they are an adequate reflection of my cinematic tastes and predilections. Prejudices, you might say.

What distorts the picture are my travels. They broaden to the extent that, against the pertinacity I cannot bring myself to pass off as better judgment, something like Hulk (sat through in New York), The Day the Earth Stood Still (endured in London), or Midnight Meat Train (suffered in Riga) slips in. Still, if it weren’t for those bouts of wanderlust, I probably would not have had the pleasure of catching Guy Maddin’s hypnotic My Winnipeg, featuring noir dame Ann Savage, who passed away on Christmas day last year; nor would I have seen Tarsem Singh’s stunningly surreal The Fall or Toa Fraser’s quietly quirky Dean Spanley, a film I caught at the Little Theatre in Bath, England (pictured above).

Dean Spanley is based on a 1936 novella by Lord Dunsany, which has been republished with Alan Sharp’s screenplay and commentary. It is more accurate to say that the film is inspired by My Talks with Dean Spanley, a casual, witty discourse on reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Inspired it certainly is.

As the title slyly suggests, the heart, soul and center of these talks is a clergyman who, in a former life, was what an intoxicated person afflicted with temporary dyslexia might call a “Spanley.” Without resorting to puns as crude as mine, the narrative plays with the idea that a man who wears a dog collar might have been barking at the moon before he learned to preach; that a clergyman may have had a past existence entirely at odds with his preachings about the afterlife; and that, in order to arrive at the secret of a dull, reserved, and abstemious man, one must drink him under the table to get him to reminisce about a time when he belonged there:

It was [the] remark about the woods and the night, and the eager way in which he spoke of the smells and the sounds, that first made me sure that the Dean was speaking from knowledge, and that he really had known another life in a strangely different body. Why these words made me sure I cannot say; I can only say that it is oddly often the case that some quite trivial remark in a man’s conversation will suddenly make you sure that he knows what he is talking about. A man will be talking perhaps about pictures, and all at once he will make you feel that Raphael, for instance, is real to him, and that he is not merely making conversation. In the same way I felt, I can hardly say why, that the woods were real to the Dean, and the work of a dog no less to him than an avocation.

The film much expands on the original material without evaporating any of its charm. Distilling its essence, screenwriter Alan Sharp turns the talks with the Dean (wonderfully portrayed by Sam Neill) into a story of self-discovery and healing in which the clergyman’s secret, arrived at by way of methodically yet unscrupulously administered Tokay, into the key to the troubled relationship of the narrator (Jeremy Northam) with his cantankerous father (played by Peter O’Toole). Rather than exploiting it strictly for laughs, Toa Fraser’s sensitive treatment of Lord Dunsany’s novella is a rare and winning—and so rarely winning—combination of wit and sentiment.

Yes, travel broadens. Coming back home, you might even look differently at your own dog as he gives you that “and-where-have-you-been look of mingled joy and reproach . . .