Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
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A Soundtrack for the Silent Era

Well, I am all ears again. After the visual assault described in the previous post, this constitutes a welcome reining in of the senses. Not that the experience is a tranquil one. I am listening to the sounds of war . . . the Great War. Presented by BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, “The Sounds of Flanders” (available here until 30 November), introduces listeners to a collection of rare phonograph recordings produced for the domestic market in Britain, the “first form of saleable audio propaganda”—patriotic speeches, rousing songs, and soundstaged re-enactments of warfare.

The recordings, which include dramatizations of an air raid on an English coastal town and the attack on the RMS Lusitania made just weeks after the ship’s sinking, were unearthed by broadcast historian Tim Crook, who calls them the earliest surviving example of audio drama produced in Britain.

Not all of it was produced for the local market; apparently, some of these recordings were intended for an American audience in an attempt to rally support for the Great War. It clearly anticipates the shortwave transmissions of World War II, as described in Charles J. Rolo’s 1942 study Radio Goes to War (of which I am fortunate to have added to my library above copy signed by its author). As Rolo put it,

[radio]went to war on five continents shortly after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In eight years it has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. More flexible in use and infinitely stronger in emotional impact than the printed word, as a weapon of war waged psychologically radio has no equal.

According to Rolo, “Nazi tacticians, unhampered by the deadweight of outdated traditions, had taken to heart the lessons of the last war and were elaborating for the future a strategy of war waged psychologically.” As “The Sounds of Flanders” suggests, those strategies may well have originated in the United Kingdom, even though the audio recordings were apparently not made by any branch of the government (a point in need of clarification).

As in the case of the electrophone wirecasts from the London stage during the reign of Queen Victoria (discussed here), those phono-graphic records antecede the first experimentations in broadcast theatricals, which began in the early 1920s.

Programs like “The Sounds of Flanders” help to restore the soundtrack for a generation that today is largely thought of as silent.

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The Slaughter of Beowulf; or, Grendel’s Momma Still Kills Them in Hollywood

Well, I have not quite recovered from the horror that is Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf, whose feats and defeat I witnessed at the local movie house yesterday evening. When I say “horror,” I do not refer to the digital violence that turns the screen’s silver to red; I mean the harm done to poetry. The manuscript of the old-English poem was very nearly destroyed in a fire back in 1731; but it was not spared the fate of being torn to shreds by corporate Hollywood. Visualizing a poem is worse than giving an a cappella number the orchestral treatment. It renders the magic of the spoken word powerless, especially if the poet’s tongue is being digitally removed and substituted by the kind of mouthings you expect to hear in a direct-to-video action flick, circa 1984.

Now, I did not see the 3D version; but this would hardly add dimension to the characters, who, in this kind of digital motion capture animation, remain as expressionless as the Botoxed cast of Desperate Housewives. What is the point of hiring potentially great actors only to replace their bodies with lifeless, charmless animation? Robin Wright Penn’s Queen Wealtheow is a taxidermist’s vision of Bo Derek, while Anthony Hopkins’s King Hrothgar is imbued with the emotive powers of a garden gnome. Apparently, even a man’s age spots are beyond the skills of current CGI designers.  Then again, nobody remembers age spots in Hollywood.

Not that the voice talents could improve matters; at least not in the case of John Malkovich, who proved conclusively that he is unfit for such disembodiment.  You could almost hear the script in the hands you never got to see.  And while an attempt was made to recreate Old English in the laments of Grendel, the spoken word was not given a fighting chance to create an image in the mind’s eye.

The world of Beowulf has to be adapted to remain intelligible; but you are better off with Seamus Heaney as a guide:

In off the moors, down through the mist-bands
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
The bane of the race of men roamed forth,
hunting for a prey in the high hall.
Under the cloud-murk he moved toward it
until it shone above him, a sheer keep
of fortified gold.

The new and improved Beowulf is about as poetic as a Mr. Clean commercial reconceived as a slasher movie (the Grim Sweeper?).  It is both vulgar and prim, showing you severed limbs but stopping short of giving you a glimpse of a man’s part, in a striptease that was tongue-in-cheekier in the coy cover-ups of Austin Powers and the Simpsons Movie.

Beowulf is truly a sorry spectacle, an ersatz best sat out.  Whatever the reasons for the no-shows, it is gratifying that this would-be behemoth has proven so toothless at the box office.  Watching it, I felt as if I had entered a computer game whose object it was to do in rather than do literature and to shout down the curse that, to the perpetrators of such high-infidelities, is the imagination of a reader lost in a line of poetry.

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Felicitous Tintinkering; or, Take Note, Mr. Spielberg

Considering that he inspired the adventures of Indiana Jones, Tintin should do well under Steven Spielberg’s direction. Little is known as yet about the project; and I wonder whether Spielberg, preparing the boy reporter for his first Hollywood outing, is paying attention to the Young Vic production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, which I caught at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff prior to its return to London, where the production will soon reopen in the West End. What an inspired piece of pop culture this dramatization of Tintin in Tibet (1958-59) turned out to be.

I was not prepared to be charmed. I expected something along the lines of the previously reviewed Thirty-Nine Steps (which will soon open on Broadway); but, despite its wit, David Greig and Rufus Norris’s stage version was not so much tongue-in-cheek as it was true to and respectful toward its source without being slavish in its fidelity.

The psychedelic opening sequence had me worried a bit. Although entirely in keeping with Tintin in Tibet, which draws on surrealism to explore the dreams and visions of its central characters, the parading of famous Hergé figures who have no part in the story had something of a routinely choreographed theme park performance. From this costume ball, however, a number of strong characters soon emerged.

Matthew Parish was ideally cast in the title role, conveying both the vigor and vulnerability of our hero, who is driven to the point of madness and despair in his selfless yet lives-endangering quest to find and rescue a friend whom everyone assumes to have perished in a plane crash. Particularly haunting is a scene in which Tintin investigates the crash site and is faced with the ghosts of the dead passengers.

Miltos Yerolemou (previously hidden in the costume of the giant Yeti) was entirely believable as Snowy, the reporter’s four-legged companion. Their friendship, and indeed the very concept of friendship, is at the heart of Tintin in Tibet, a story with whose gentle lesson the creative team behind Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin did not try to tinker. Heartwarming and pulse-quickening, the result is energetic, charming, and altogether absorbing.

Unlike most of today’s Hollywood blockbusters, the stage play suggests as much as it shows, leaving the audience, assisted by ingenious props, to imagine themselves high in the Himalayas, a hidden lamasery, or the cave of a legendary monster. The props, in this case, are not a substitute for the imagination. They are a stimulant. Let’s hope that big screen, big budget special effects won’t do away with this give and take of make-believe . . .

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All Strip, No Blushing

Well, I may be two decades too late, but I shall enter it anyway. The hue and cry about Dick Tracy, or, rather, the outcry about his hue. Should a comic strip, once adapted for the screen, be flickering in shades of gray or flash before you in spanking Technicolor? Are strips quintessentially monochrome, or is their melodrama best played out in red, yellow, and blue? The latter approach was taken by Warren Beatty and the creators of the 1990 Tracy picture, which did fair business at the box office, but had a production design that proved disastrous for merchandizing. Disney stocks fell, as I recall; and I don’t think Madonna was to blame. Was it a mistake to put rouge on the old squarejaw? Was there much darkness in Chester Gould’s creation to begin with?

Sixty years earlier, on this day, 21 November, in 1947, radio listeners tuned in to follow Tracy on the “Case of the Deadly Tip-Off,” a mystery involving the disappearance of Slim Chance, America’s most famous radio commentator. Apart from its intriguing premise, the requisite cliffhanger (the 21st being a Friday), and a punoply of cartoonish names), the radio serial has little comic strip appeal; its voice talents and effects artists seemed particularly listless that day.

Rather than being stultified by such dross, I clapt my eyes on the more promising sounding Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), which stars Boris Karloff opposite 1930s movie serial Tracy Ralph Byrd. It is a follow-up to the 1945 return of Dick Tracy, a somewhat anticlimactic adventure whose cast was headed by the colorless Morgan Conway. It is comic strip week here at broadcastellan, you know. Besides, I am pretty much scraping the bottom of my “100 Movie Pack” of “Mystery Classics,” a DVD set I snatched up on a trip to Gotham earlier this year.

What struck me upon screening this otherwise undistinguished 1945 thriller was its noir lighting and the occasional noirish camera angle. However carelessly inked the script, the thrills were augmented by a chiaroscuro I did not expect from a comic feature. The shadows looked particularly intriguing when cast like doubt upon the face of the ever-suspect Milton Parsons, a ghoul of a supporting player I enjoy reencountering in the darker alleys of popular culture.

Meanwhile, as I am preparing for my next escape to Manhattan, anticipating to have my entertainments curtailed by the current stagehand strike, I noticed that the earlier Dick Tracy serials are now being shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, where, on my previous visit (in June 2007) I took in an episode of Spiderman.

I wonder whether the producers of The Shadow are going to follow in the footsteps of Beatty’s Tracy or model their version on the glossy treatment of the failed 1994 resuscitation of Lamont Cranston (a glimpse of whom, as impersonate by Alec Baldwin, I caught last night on ITV 3). Being no expert in the field, I always considered comic strips to be bright (and was pleased to meet Blondie in such splendid color); but, emerging from the shadow of the darksome Deathridge and the sinister Splitface, it is . . . back to the drawing board.

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Graphic

Well, what do we mean when we say that a story (a book or movie or play) is “graphic”? Do we refer to the mode of depiction or to the matter depicted? Does it describe a work of art that is especially vivid or particularly morbid? These days, the term is both a warning label and a genre marker. It is designed to signify horror, which, distinct from terror, details rather than insinuates violence. When applied to print media, it signals a superior kind of picture story, something set apart from the comic by virtue of its mature themes or adult language (regardless of how immature “adult” language may often be).

The first picture book I came across that warrants the label “graphic” in both respects is Art Spiegelman’s Maus. It is a biographical account of Jewish life in fascist Germany, the horrors of the concentration camps, and a storyteller’s struggle to grapple with such memories as recalled by a close relative.

To depict the Holocaust in drawings of half-human animal figures is a daring project to begin with. It takes on the tradition of the fable and renders concrete what constitutes the dehumanization suffered under totalitarianism. On the one hand, Maus de-Disneyfies the fable, which, for centuries, had served as a coded moral tale not restricted to children or petty lessons in table manners. On the other, more bloody hand, it takes the figures of the fable out of their abstract realm and places them into concrete historical settings.

I was reminded of Spiegelman’s Maus last night when I went to see Die Fälscher (2007), a German film set in a concentration camp. Die Fälscher (translated as The Counterfeiters, tells the story of Jews forced by the Nazis to forge foreign currencies in an attempt to ruin the enemy’s economy and finance the ruinous Wirtschaft at home. For the conscripted Jews, foremost among them a highly talented criminal, it means survival and relative safety as well as an act aiding the system that has isolated, degraded and singled them out for extinction . . .

Like Maus, Die Fälscher deals with the guilt of those who forge a future for themselves in a world that insists on their pastness; it is a graphic story of craftsmanship drawn upon for the art of survival. The pen is mightier then the sword, Bulwer-Lytton famously remarked; its true test, however, lies in countering an army of erasers . . .

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Kaboom! Kerplunk! Ka-ching!

Well, being that I am off to Cardiff on Thursday to see the touring Young Vic production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I thought I’d make this serial and comic strip week here on broadcastellan. “Blistering barnacles” and “Cushion footed quadrupeds”! I am smack in the middle of the “Funny Book War” as staged by Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; and even though my comic treats were generally of not of the superheroic kind (to which this recent portrait attests), comics are very much on my mind.

It so happens that the aforementioned (and by now controversial) boy reporter and his creator are also the subject of the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Tintin’s Guide to Journalism” (available online here until 23 November). In this broadcast, which also features the voice of Tintin creator Hergé, journalist Mark Lawson investigates cases of real-life reporters who were inspired to enter their profession by books like King Ottokar’s Sceptre. In my case, comics simply inspired imitation.

The Germans are said to have papered the way to the comics with the picture books of Wilhelm Busch (Max und Moritz), which is where I started out as well. After graduating from the Katzenjammer Kids inspiring Max und Moritz, I became an avid comic collector, spending virtually all of my Taschengeld (distributed as it was back then in Deutsch Marks) on weeklies like Fix und Foxi.

Sigh! My family could not afford to have me shod there; but I still sneaked into the Salamander shoe stores to browse just long enough to grab my copy of Lurchi, another treat being the stories of Mecki the hedgehog I clipped from the pages of the German radio and television magazine Hörzu. More inclined toward the buzz of Maya the Bee than to the “THWIP!” of Spiderman, my comic book phase ended as I entered my teenage years. Make that my “comic reading phase,” since I kept drawing them. My own creations often mocked those among my pubescent schoolmates who kept up with the exploits of guys like Superman or The Phantom.

It was only after I graduated from the comics that I discovered a connection between cartoon bubbles and comic speech, the kind of connection to which the Americans owe the serial adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy, the kind of affinity that made it possible for New York City Mayor La Guardia to read Little Orphan Annie on the air during the 1945 newspaper strike.

Even though I had very little exposure to radio drama, being the walking TV Guide in my family, I created in the character of Inspektor Bullauge (Inspector Bull’s Eye) a comic for the ear. I made up the story as I played the parts, more interested in the sound effects I could use and record to bring my cardboard creation to life.

Zowie! Despite dedicating an estimated 300,000 words of this journal to popular culture (and radio dramatics in particular), I have never explored here the relationship between onomatopoeia and the equally imaginative world of sound effects . . .

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Amazons and Old Lace: Cranford Televisited

Well, this was one to watch out for. Not that I could have missed the announcements, given that the new five-part television adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford stories is the cover story of this week’s Radio Times. A grand production it is shaping up to be, judging from the first installment, which aired tonight on BBC 1. The television series borrows from several of Gaskell’s works; aside from the Cranford papers (published in serial form between 1851 and 1853), writer Heidi Thomas also draws on incidents from “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions,” the story of a young physician (serialized in 1851) and the novella My Lady Ludlow (serialized in 1858) to create what the Radio Times refers to, using that most horrid and hackneyed of adjectives, a “unique universe.”

Quaint or daring, Gaskell’s world is certainly uncommon in its Cukorian selection of characters. “In the first place,” we are told, “Cranford is in possession of the Amazons.” As is often the case, the version-maker of the current series chose to forgo the contrivance of voice-over narration, at a considerable loss of clever prose. That said (and however much there is left unsaid), the opening line is soon rendered visible to the televisitors of this fabled community, which, albeit, not entirely devoid of male bodies, is dominated by formidable females. Foremost among them are Judy Dench and Eileen Atkins as the sisters Jenkyns (pictured), ably supported by Imelda Staunton, Julia Sawalha, and the ever compelling Francesca Annis (last seen on UK television in the latest Marple mystery).

I was anxious to learn how my favorite moment would be dealt with, whether it would be told or dramatized. Surely it is too hilarious a scene to be omitted. I am referring, of course, to the aforementioned “pussy” incident. The treatment was, shall we say, rather graphic and indecorous, which is not to say that it was not wildly amusing.

Miss Deborah Jenkyns, that advocate of “[e]legant economy” who much preferred Dr. Johnson to the young author of the Pickwick Papers (then newly published), would no doubt have objected to the sound effects employed to dramatize pussy’s response to the “tartar emetic,” not to mention the shot of the piece of lace thus extracted. In the hands of the producer, this “anecdote” known only to a circle of “intimate friends” so civilized and reserved as to be “afraid of being caught in the vulgarity of making any noise in a place of public amusement,” becomes an attack on the Victorian fabric of Cranford that the worthy Amazons might have been spared.

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Dark Echoes

Well, perhaps I am a medium. Perhaps, broadcastellan is more than a mere series of ever so slight and seemingly inconsequential messages. Or, perhaps, this is simply another one of those alleged coincidences I have been pondering, on occasion, with the author of those Relative and to me altogether relevant Esoterica. Two days ago, I shared a make-up chart from the celebrated House of Westmore. Apart from being a fascinating artefact, remotely related to my topic of the day, I thought it was neither here nor there—that realm in which I often find myself while exploring the out-of-date everyday. This evening, though, I learned that another branch of that fruitbearing family tree, Monty Westmore, has died off at the age of 84. Westmore, who was Joan Crawford’s personal makeup artist during the latter part of her career, was still active in the 1990s, working on blockbusters like Jurassic Park.

Last night, I watched what I believed to be the altogether inconsequential College Swing (1938) starring Bob Hope, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, along with a handsome and ever so handy handbag serving as a radio receiver, and that celebrated comedy team of Burns and Allen (aforementioned), who enjoyed such popularity that they were called upon to sell the Paramount feature in the film’s trailer. Today, I learned that Ronnie Burns, the adopted son of Burns and Allen—who frequently featured on his parents’ 1950s television series—passed away on 14 November 2007 at the age of 72; he was three years old when College Swing was shot.

“In the midst of life we are in death,” I thought, without the slightest ambition of being original. It seems there really is no such a mode as escapism; there is no signing off, as long as we acknowledge that the signs and signposts of old lead us straight into the present day. To the receptive mind, any old vehicle has the power to drive us home; everything connects, if only you let it, and even the remotest piece of formerly popular culture will insist on rendering itself significant . . .

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All About Tallulah! (Never Mind “Wardrobe, make-up, or hair”)

Well, Tallulah Hallelujah! How could I pass up the chance to pass on this anniversary double treat? On this day, 16 November, in 1950, Tallulah Bankhead grabbed the microphone to entertain the multitude, first in a recreation of her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Two year later, she was heard in the part that might have gone to Claudette Colbert (had she not given her all to make sure that Three Came Home) but is now almost exclusively thought of as belonging to Bette Davis: All About Eve (previously discussed here in its pre-filmic radio version). When I featured clips from these performances in first adventure in podcasting, I was unaware that both “Lifeboat” and “All About Eve” were broadcast on the same day, two years apart.

Now, la Bankhead is more often thought of as a legend than an actress; that is, she is foremost a star, and only secondarily a performer. We generally do not have access to the stage appearances of Hollywood stars of the studio era, a couple of stills and reviews aside. Radio theatricals, however, can give us an inkling of those ephemeral performances. So, once again, I am conjuring up the Tallulah spirit, as I did when last I placed her image on my Quija board.

Bankhead’s performance in the Screen Directors Playhouse production of “Lifeboat,” broadcast on this day, 16 November, in 1950, serves to remind us how good an actress an icon can be. As an uncommonly humble Alfred Hitchcock tells the audience in the introduction to the play,

. . . I think you should know that Lifeboat is not what we call a director’s picture.  There are no trick sets, no camera tricks, in fact, no tricks at all.  When the director approaches such a picture, he offers up a little prayer and delivers himself wholly into the hands of his actors.  Since they are very good actors, the result is just as you should hear it now.

Indeed, the production is very fine, with Bankhead serving as narratrix of her character’s experience aboard that ill-fated vessel. That time around, there were no calls for “Wardrobe, make-up, or hair,” no matter how many times the eccentric star uncrossed her legs.

The Theater Guild adaptation of “All About Eve” was more in keeping with the Bankhead persona in those Big Show days. “Thank you, Mr. Brokenshire,” Bankhead seizes the microphone from her announcer,

and good evening, darlings.  The play we are performing for you this evening on Theater Guild on the Air is called—and I never could understand why— All About Eve.  All About Eve.  True, there is an Eve in it, and what a part that is.  There is also a glamorous and brilliant leading lady of the theatre whose true identity has been kept a secret too long.  Tonight, darlings, tonight baby intends to do something about that.

What a bumpy night it turned out to be. Those two years sure made a difference. You might say, that the campy “Eve” is an extension of or promotional vehicle for the Big Show and the Tallulah image in general. Character had given way for caricature.

How odd it is that such camp is so personal to me; and yet, when I think of Bankhead, I am inevitably reminded of my years in New York City. Sitting in my favorite local park by the East River while preparing for my dissertation on radio drama by listening to a few programs (oh, the hardship a doctoral candidate has to endure), I got to talk to a fellow sun worshipper who, learning about my uncommon soundtrack, asked whether I had come across the name of Florence Robinson, who was an old friend of his. No, I could not say I had; but I soon discovered that Robinson had been Tallulah’s co-star in “All About Eve.”

Just about that time, in those early days of the 21st century, I got to see the Tallulah Hallelujah! starring Tovah Feldshuh in the title role (no, not Hallelujah). A few years later I became friends with the “producing associate” of the show. So, listening to Bankhead, however outré or larger than life she might sound, triggers many a personal memory.

Then again, listening is always personal, as sounds pass the threshold of my ears, entering my body in a way images never could, and keep reverberating in my mind. While no longer surprised, I am still disappointed when I flick through biographies like the one by Joel Lobenthal I am clutching above, accounts of an actor’s life that make so little of their roles on radio and the role radio played during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Sure, the The Big Show was not being ignored (even though George Baxt, who novelized Bankhead’s broadcasting experience in the volume shown here, barely gets a mention). Beyond that, though, Bankhead’s “many radio appearances” are summed up as involving “acting in sketches or trading patter with Hildegarde, Fred Allen, Kate Smith, and others.”

Given that recordings are now so readily available, the general disregard for the medium, expressing itself in a line like “[r]adio was Tallulah’s only medium for the next six months,” becomes an intolerable distortion of American popular culture. I wish more attention was being paid to the cultural force of the old wireless, a wish that, aside from all the nonsense and dross you might expect here, is the raison d’être of broadcastellan.

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The Second Hand Sense

Well, I don’t think there is such a thing as a second-hand experience. I mean, either you are experiencing or you are not. That said, much of popular culture consists of hand-me-downs, the most retail-generative of which are being continually retailored to suit new media and markets. Pop is what keeps popping up, what pops in and out of the media we very nearly reserve for popping corn. It is the culture that is second-hand, though, not our appreciation of it. Earlier today, we booked tickets for the Young Vic’s touring production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, based on the comic book Tintin in Tibet, first serialized back in 1958-59. I sure am looking forward to my reencounter with the aforementioned Tintin (or with Tim und Struppi, as I got to know the boy reporter and his dog many years ago in my native Germany). Without requiring any reanimation, the adventure will come to life on the stage of the magnificent Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. I shall take it all in, with whatever senses are being engaged, no matter how many layers of text and context separate me from the original strip.

Sometimes, an approximation is all we get to experience. Take Charles Laughton, for instance, who was heard on this day, 15 November, in 1936 in a radio-readied scene from the biopic Rembrandt, in which Mr. Elsa Lanchester played the title role. The radio version (of a scene from the motion picture) was broadcast from London over NBC in the United States. I know, the movie is still extant; it is this original broadcast that seems hard to get.

Laughton (seen here through the eyes of make-up artist Ern Westmore in a chart published in the 24 December 1938 issue of the British Picture Post, previously raided for a shot of Claudette Colbert’s gams and this portrait of Laughton’s Jamaica Inn co-star) is heard extolling the virtues of women, probably not a romantic subject in which the actor had much of a first-hand knowledge.

Considering that the original recording does not appear to be in circulation, I was glad to catch an earful of Laughton’s performance on this 6 March 1957 broadcast of NBC’s self-celebratory second handbasket Recollections, which was being stuffed with this Rembrandt copy more than twenty years after the initial live broadcast. Other goodies shared out on that occasion were Dinah Shore’s “big break” on the Eddie Cantor Show (2 October 1940), a tribute to Wynn Murray, and a 1937 performance by Ray Heatherton (whose photograph you may find on my homepage).

NBC’s broadcasts of Recollections are a first-rate introduction to American radio entertainment of the 1930s and, indeed, to the everyday of US citizens during that period. However much broadcasters depended on stage and screen plays for their material, teasing listeners with their if-only-you-could-see-us-now approach to on-air promotion, tuning had lost little of its excitement during those early days of network broadcasting. I, for one, have never treated listening as a second hand sense, no matter how second-rate the material.