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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On This Day in 1930: ‘”Mystery Gun” Disappears As Lights Go Out’ in Invisible Courtroom

I don’t suppose I shall ever get used to it. The Welsh weather, I mean, the nocturnal roars and howlings of which I often drown out by listening to the familiar voices of old-time radio, reassuring and comforting voices like those of Harry Bartell or Elliot Lewis, both of whom were born on this day, 28 November, in 1913 and 1917, respectively. Storms are part of the Welsh soundscape, much like the bleating of sheep on the hills. If such climate conditions were faced by the people of New York, among whom I numbered for some fifteen years of my life, I wager that the local television newscasts would report little else. To be sure, last night’s storm did make headlines, being that a tornado wreaked havoc in a village just a few miles from my present home.

Thanks to some well-chosen radio thriller, I managed to sleep through it all, losing myself in dreams that, once radioactivated, tend to become particularly vivid. I often wonder just how much my mind, conscious or not, is influenced by the popular culture I consume by listening in. Sometimes, though, it is what we hear about, and not what we perceive, that stirs our imagination. There are a few listening experiences I can only dream of, plays I have only read or read about and consequently fascinate me no end. One such unheard soundplay is the serial The Trial of Vivienne Ware (previously mentioned here and discussed at some length in Etherized, my study of American radio dramatics). Pulled by the Hearst press and propagated on the air by station WJZ, New York, it was a spectacular publicity stunt designed to promote Hearst’s less than reputable papers.

Those tuning in did not only get to hear the proceedings, but were cast as jurors. They stood a chance of being awarded $1000 for coming up with the most convincing verdict (be it “guilty” or “innocent”), thus making it unnecessary for the author of the story—one Kenneth M. Ellis—to determine upon a reasonable conclusion and the fate of his titular character.

From the 25th to the last day of November, the fictional trial was broadcast live, with eminent figures of law and politics, New York Senator Robert F. Wagner and prominent attorney Ferdinand Pecora, heading a cast that included noted stage actress Rosamund Pinchot. Here is how the New York American, the Hearst paper sponsoring the series, described the session of 28 November 1930:

It was almost at the close of the session that the lights suddenly were extinguished and the court plunged into total darkness. Women’s screams, the shouts and bustle of court attaches, and the hammering of the gavel filled five or six black seconds with sound. Then the lights came on again—but the .38 caliber revolver which George Gordon Battle, chief counsel for Vivienne Ware, had just introduced as evidence had disappeared from the table where it lay.

Now, that’s a melodramatic conjuring act fit for the airwaves. It probably wouldn’t do much good during a stormy night, though, since such interactive thrills—let alone the pondering of the verdict, and what to do with the prize money—are, unlike much else that was presented on American radio with comforting predictability, anything but soporific.

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Between You, Molly and Me: Should We Settle for Squirrels?

Well, it’s like looking for a park bench. Picking up a book, I mean. If I find one I like, I tend to stick around to enjoy the vistas it opens, willing to overlook its more or less obvious faults. Otherwise, I move on fairly quickly, knowing that there are seats out there that suit me better. Sometimes, however, I get stuck on something that I did not reckon with, something that remains long after I left, like a bit of chewing gum you sat on and struggle to remove. It makes you work, it irritates you as it forces you to deal with it, and you remember it (rather than the bench to which it was appended) for just this unexpected bit of friction and activity. Let me give you a “for instance.”

Last weekend, I picked up Molly and Me, an autobiography by actress-playwright-businesswoman Gertrude Berg. For several decades, Ms. Berg was best known as Molly (or Mollie) Goldberg, a character she created and kept pushing from medium to medium, from print to stage, from radio to television. Now, I haven’t gotten to the point in the book where Molly comes to life. I got stuck on her pre-history, which, in Berg’s 1961 memoir, begins with her grandfather, Mordecai, a tinsmith who opened a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (come to think of it, not all that far from the store where I bought the book last August).

The following piece of wisdom is that bit of gum I found myself struggling with. In an attempt to advertise his store, Mordecai carefully crafted a fine model of a steamship, five foot long and all made of tin. He placed it in the shop window in hopes of attracting customers. Sure, a few people stopped by and looked; but the time he spent on the display stood in no fair relation to the number of people he drew in. So, Mordecai decided on another way to dress his window: a cage with a wheel. In it, he placed a squirrel; and as it kept running in circles, people stopped by to look, far more than had been interested in the boat.

From that experience, Mordecai extracted a simple moral and applied it to all manner of situations, Berg explained:

Grandpa worked hard to make a boat that he was proud of. It was practically a masterpiece but what did people come to see? A squirrel running around in a cage! So what was the lesson? The lesson was, you can’t joint them, you can’t beat them, you can’t even understand them, so don’t bother. Hope for the best and maybe somebody’ll come in who’ll appreciate the boat. Meanwhile feed the squirrel, it’s not his fault.

Undoubtedly, this anecdote appealed to Ms. Goldberg, a popular wordsmith who found her niche by giving people—listeners and advertisers alike—what they wanted, even though what she came up with did not receive much respect as a craft, let alone as an art: the soap opera. Mordecai, you sure got me thinking. Keeping this journal, I wonder whether I should not tear apart the boat I put together and settle instead for a squirrel in a cage . . .

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"The Party’s Over": Anita O’Day and Betty Comden

Well, by pronouncing the “Party” over I am not referring to Thanksgiving (which I only observed from afar this year), but to a popular song and two remarkable women closely associated with it: “The Party’s Over” from Bells Are Ringing, a musical revived on Broadway, if unsuccessfully, back in 2001, when I saw it with Faith Prince in the part made famous by Judy Holliday. Yesterday, lyricist Betty Comden, who wrote it, and singer Anita O’Day, who performed it, both passed away at the ages of 89 and 87, respectively. I spent some time this weekend researching their careers in search of a radio angle.

Being that Ms. O’Day was a popular singer in the 1940s, that angle was not hard to find. Here you may hear her sing the “Drum Boogie,” accompanied by Gene Krupa’s orchestra on the Command Performance program, broadcast 4 September 1942. “Brother, that is solid sending,” mistress of ceremony Tallulah Bankhead put it in the slang of the day.

The “fine little red-headed vocalist,” as Bob Hope introduced her, would return to the Command Performance microphone on 16 December 1944, this time singing “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” Together with bandleader Stan Canton, O’Day is heard reading the names (and the fanciful monikers) of the servicemen who requested the number and to whom it was dedicated.

Just a few days after this broadcast, the musical On the Town opened on Broadway, capturing the mood of a war-weary nation by following three marines on shore leave, out for fun in the “wonderful town” of New York, New York (which is where I caught the show in 1997, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park). On the Town was the first of many shows written by Betty Comden and her lifelong collaborator, Adolph Green, who started out with a comedy act in Greenwich Village, called “The Revuers.” As early as 1939, the team took their act to the airwaves. Fun With the Revuers, which featured Judy Holliday (then still performing under the name of Judy Tuvim), became a weekly series on NBC radio and ran until November 1940 (as I learned here).

Comden and Green understood how to maximize their exposure; not only did they perform in the plays they wrote, they also recycled their material for various media. One such piece was the operetta “The Baroness Bazooka,” which was shoehorned into the “Cliche Expert,” a radio comedy produced on 2 May 1944 by Columbia Presents Corwin (for a recording of which I am indebted to the keeper of BlogAdvance’s “Blog of the Month” for October 2006). Based on a character created by Frank Sullivan, “Cliche Expert” is a courtroom farce of sorts, with Comden and Green playing themselves, as “star witnesses” called in to testify to the titular character’s expertise on the subject of trite phrases. Being a burlesque, rather than cliche, “The Baroness” is rudely interrupted and stricken from the record.

This is not to say that Ms. Comden was not an expert in the matter; indeed, she wrote so many memorable lyrics that strike us as overly familiar today. “The Party’s Over” is riddled with cliches like “It’s time to call it a day,” “They’ve burst your pretty balloon” and “the piper must be paid.” Yet somehow such lines lose little of their pathos when delivered with conviction by an artist like Anita O’Day.

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Now As Then: "Thanksgiving Day—1941"

Well, it took me some time to get it. Thanksgiving, I mean. Being German, I was unaccustomed to the holiday when I moved to the United States in the early 1990s. I didn’t quite understand what Steve Martin’s character in Trains, Planes & Automobiles was so desperately rushing home to . . . until I had lived long enough on American soil to sense the significance of this day. Now that I am living in Britain and, unlike last year, not flying back to America to observe it, I wish I could import the tradition.

I don’t mean to ship over all the trimmings and fixings, the pies and the parade. Just the concept of an annual get-together that encourages one to reflect upon what matters in life—provided that those who matter as “family” are understood to be any gathering of people (and, Montague insists, pets) whose presence spells home.

To the horror of some, an Americanized Halloween has caught on big time here during the last few years. Why not a grown-up holiday like Thanksgiving, regardless of the direction in which the Pilgrims were heading? With an eye to the future, I am not even being ahistorical.

A feast in defiance of the old saw that you can’t go home again, Thanksgiving is often thought of as an occasion to wax nostalgic. Sure, it is a time to look back; but that does not mean it should exhaust itself in sentimentality. It can be an incentive to pull through, an event for which people pull themselves and one other together in the face of adversities.

Belittled as a ritualistic tripping on tryptophan, bemoaned as an annual family headcount that starts with the headache of getting there and ends in a bellyache getting back, Thanksgiving still compels millions to travel hundreds of miles and, unlike Christmas, has remained remarkably free from commercialism. It mobilizes more folks than a national election. It is a day of the people, not of corporation (unless you are running an airline). And despite its culinary excesses, it is simple, solid, and reassuringly primal in its cheering of the harvest and the life we owe the land and its natural riches.

A celebration “wholly of our earth,” is how the aforementioned American poet Stephen Vincent Benét expressed the meaning of the day in a speech delivered by actor Brian Donlevy and broadcast on 19 November 1941, just a few weeks before the US entered the Second World War. “This year it is and must be a sober feast,” Benét reminded the listener. Even if the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, the bombs over London were clear enough signs of the perils ahead:

Today, one hundred and thirty million Americans keep the day they first set apart.  We all know what Thanksgiving is—it’s turkey day and pumpkin pie day—the day of the meeting of friends and the gathering of families.  It does not belong to any one creed or stock among us, it does not honor any one great man.  It is the whole family’s day when we can all get together, think over the past months a little, feel a sense of harvest, a kinship with our land. It is one of the most secure and friendly of all our feasts.  And yet it was first founded in insecurity, by men who stood up to danger.  And that spirit is still alive.

“The democracy we cherish,” Benét concluded,

is the work of many years and many men.  But as those first men and women first gave thanks, in a dark hour, for the corn that meant life to them, so let us give thanks today—not for the little things of the easy years but for the land we cherish, the way of life we honor, and the freedom we shall maintain.

If it is set aside to cherish land, life, and liberty, Thanksgiving cannot mean a retreat into the home, a shutting of doors and a closing of one’s eyes to the responsibilities that lie beyond the closest circle of relatives and friends: the duties of citizenship and the challenges of living in a global community. Some of the liberties fought for, the life and the land enjoyed in the past are now being threatened; not by foreigners alone, but by those of us who rely on or deal in outmoded constructs, who promote the concept of nation while defying the communal for their own profit.

“There are many days in the year that we celebrate,” Benét remarked, “but this one is wholly of our earth.” Although he might have meant his native ground—his speech being a pep talk to potential soldiers and a rallying cry for the home that soon would turn front—it won’t hurt to misread him, to consider “our earth” to be that truly common ground we share and to reflect on the global crises that may lie ahead and that, if at all, can only be met jointly. I hope we are “still alive” to this “spirit” and am thankful to those who keep on conjuring it.

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George Gershwin, "Composer of the Week"

Well, I gave up on it years ago. I lost touch, or the desire to catch up with it. With Pop music, I mean. You know, whatever it is that is being presented to you as the latest and therefore presumably the hottest. The “hottest” is rarely what anyone tells you it is; it is something you’ve got to discover for yourself, no matter how odd, old, or remote it may be from current, industry-generated trends. Trends are for those too inert to develop an individual taste, those who listen, wear, read or see whatever sly marketers have styled “stylish.” There’s a lot of this trendsetting by proxy going on in the blogosphere, which has at last turned into an extension of the advertising racket.

I do not feel sorry for web journalists who go in for and are let down by schemes that promise them a few bucks, at the mere mention of which they forsake their integrity and turn hawkers. No, I do not pity them—I despise them for subjecting me to what can only be described as more or less inept infomercials. For once, amateurs and professionals alike, writers and artists with a creative impulse quickened by exhibitionism are given a chance to publish and display whatever they please, whenever they choose, without any interference from patrons or sponsors. Never before has such an opportunity presented itself to so many. Why squander it all to become a mouthpiece for someone else, rather than your own product, idea, or person?

However incompetent in the arts of self-promotion, I am not averse to conjuring the entrepreneurial spirit; nor am I condemning advertising outright. If that were the case, I could hardly endure, let alone enjoy, American radio drama, the first entertainment designed to sell something above and beside itself. It just ain’t for me, this kind of double-dealing. Instead, I relish in the freedom of sharing whatever crosses my path or tickles my still sensitive fancy. And (commercial free) BBC Radio 3 is certainly doing some tickling these days: its “Composer of the Week” is George Gershwin, a song plugger (some kind of human demo tape) who Tin Pan Alley-ooped himself to the top of the perennial pops.

A tuneful if cursory biography of the composer and the many people who shaped his career (Astaire, Max Dreyfuss, Paul Whiteman and Walter Damrosch, impersonated by accomplished if unidentified radio actors, including Kenny Delmar, Frank Readick, Tom Collins, and Agnes Moorehead) was presented on the Cavalcade of America program on 27 February 1939, a year and half after after Gershwin’s death.

I developed a taste for Gershwin’s music some five decades later when a close friend of mine, himself formerly in show business, invited me to see the cheerful pastiche Crazy for You on Broadway (the above poster, signed by the entire cast, being a memento of that memorable event). Now, I have seen plenty of musical theater since then, anything from Show Boat and Gypsy to Sweeney Todd and The Drowsy Chaperone; but no show has left me humming quite as many long familiar yet ever thrilling tunes as Crazy for You, cleverly billed as a “New Gerswhin Musical Comedy.” Now, I don’t know how I might have felt about it had I seen Pia Zadora and Brady Bunch alumna Ann B. Davis in it (the latter getting far more requests for autographs than the former); let’s just say I was lucky to have experienced it being performed by the original cast.

The five broadcasts of BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week series are a serviceable introduction to Gershwin’s works, featuring the voices of Fred and Adele Astaire (“Fascinating Rhythm,” “So Am I”), Al Jolson (the inevitable “Swanee”), Ukulele Ike (“Lady, Be Good!”), Ella Fitzgerald (“The Man I Love”), Audrey Hepburn (“How Long Has This Been Going On”), excerpts from Of Thee I Sing, Strike Up the Band, Porgy and Bess—and plenty of Gershwin at the piano.

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Robert Altman (1925-2006) on the Air

Well, news is spreading fast these days; and by now anyone within reach of a computer will have learned that film director Robert Altman has died on Monday, 20 November 2006, at the age of 81. Since my own web journal can do little to propagate this message, it will provide instead an addendum to the small number of long-prepared and oft-copied obituaries currently circulating in the blogosphere. I have attempted as much on previous occasions by sharing a lesser known aspect of the careers of Don Knotts, Shelley Winters, and composer Cy Feuer, all of whom had connections to the world of radio to which broadcastellan is largely dedicated. As it turns out, Robert Altman is no exception. Indeed, his debt to the medium was far more profound than that of the other artists aforementioned.

To be sure, Altman’s name is already being closely linked to the so-called golden age of radio by virtue of what would be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), a filmic realization of a world evoked by radio romancer Garrison Keillor. Altman was greatly influenced by 1940s radio. He revealed as much in a National Public Radio documentary broadcast in May 1995 (a recording of which you may find here). In a tribute to Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph,” Altman made the following statement:

“Anything I know about drama today comes more from Norman Corwin than anybody. If I had to list my mentors, I would say Norman Corwin, David Lean, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, and then a countless number of people whose names I forget where I learned what not do.”

Now, what could Altman have learned “about drama” from Corwin, America’s foremost radio playwright (whose first letter to me I cheered recently)? As a film director, Altman did not fare well on the stage. His production of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues earlier this year was widely panned; indeed, the reviews were so unfavorable that, while in London at the time, I decided to pass on it, despite my interest in the career of Miller, a former radio writer (one of whose works I discuss here). Perhaps, what Altman did take from Corwin—and what he could do on film more readily than on a stage—was the idea of an ensemble piece comprised of a large cast, a sprawling drama of many voices (such as The Player and Gosford Park). Everybody‘s in it, you think, when you look at the cast for an Altman production.

The same can be said for the signature pieces written and directed by Norman Corwin—plays with a vast number of characters, their stories intersecting, their voices adding up to something, to an idea, a statement, about Hollywood, for instance, about politics, about the state of American society. Corwin’s seminal On a Note of Triumph was such a piece, a play for voices; not a choir, mind you, but a cacophony; not a traditional drama of linear storytelling, but a fictionalized documentary, a record of a moment. Of this play, Altman said, some fifty years after its initial broadcast: “I can recite 40% of On a Note of Triumph from memory,” having listened to it “time and time again.”

I had not been aware of Altman’s admiration of Corwin’s work, until today. Come to think of it, both Corwin and Altman were belatedly honored at the Academy Awards this year, Altman receiving a lifetime achievement award, and Corwin being the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary about the making of “On a Note of Triumph.” Now, when I watch Altman’s films, I will look for Corwin and “Anything” he might have brought to the craft of the late director.

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Now on the Air: Sam Shepard’s True West

Well, it still does what it has been doing for over eighty years now. If you let it. And on this wet and stormy afternoon, I was ready to let it. Take me to a show, I mean. The radio can do that for you, even today. Drama on the air started out like this, back in the early 1920s: broadcasts right from the Broadway stage. In fact, such home entertainment predates wireless technology. As I discussed here, remote theater-going began in the 1880s by way of the telephone. However grateful for the service, those tuning in to wired or wireless theatricals must have realized right away that something was amiss.

Not being there to see what unfold as the curtain rises makes it difficult to follow all that transpires onstage, especially when characters are speechless or when one responds to the silent actions of another. You cannot hear a hand being raised, a cold shoulder being turned, or a door being opened quietly so as to escape the notice of the characters present.

Obviously, some translations are in order to avoid the chaos of an auditory void. This problem was initially dealt with by an announcer or narrator who filled in the blanks as the action progressed. Soon, however, it became clear that stage plays had to be properly adapted if they were to succeed in the non-visual medium. Carefully reworked, radio adaptations can be both culturally significant and aesthetically satisfying, even though those advocating pure audio drama—plays conceived for the airwaves—deem such efforts at translation inferior or downright detrimental to the of true aural arts.

Yesterday, BBC Radio 3 presented an audio version of Sam Shepard’s dark comedy True West (1980), by now a classic of American drama. The Radio Times heralded this very nearly “True West” as a copy that “could well be the drama of the year.” While that may be an overstatement, the radio adaptation, featuring David Soul in the role of Lee, is certainly an event worth catching. For those ready to grab, the Drama on 3 production by Peter Kavanagh is available online for the entire week; you may listen in (by visiting the BBC’s “Listen Again” page and selecting “Drama on 3”).

It is difficult for me to sit through an eighty-minute radio play. Listening to “True West,” I found myself scrubbing pots and pans, which is something I would not have done (and very rarely do) otherwise. It seems I needed to do something and that listening was not activity enough, as reading most certainly is. After years of studying and taking in radio drama, I still lack the attention span to take in a play I might easily follow in a theater, even if there is as little to see as there is in True West.

It is two brothers engaged in the kind of verbal sparring that makes for good radio drama. One of them is a successful (or at any rate, busy) Hollywood screenwriter, the other a seasoned and desert-hardened crook. They couldn’t be more different, it seems, and at first you can’t help but feel sorry for Austin, the writer, who is so rudely interrupted by his no-good sibling; but, while housesitting for their mother, who is away on a trip, the estranged brothers are forced to brush up on and against each other. In the friction that ensues, the tarnish of the one and the polish of the other rub off, muddling the personae and laying bare the common nature of both, their true insecurities and western discontent.

Soul is excellent as the irascible Lee, even though he sounds rather old for the part (especially when compared to Richard Laing as Austin). He reminded me of the cantankerous Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) on The King of Queens. In fact, the entire play comes across like an extended sitcom episode, rather than a profound comment on the human condition. It also pales somewhat when revisited in the shadow of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), which pushes a very similar situation quite a bit further. That said, “True West” is still an outing to stay in for, an evening (or afternoon, or morning) of free theater, if you are at home and aching for such.

Unfortunately, the BBC Radio Player does not allow you to fast-forward, to skim and skip, which is bad news in case you, like me, need one or two (or more) intermissions to take in an audio drama of this length. So, I recorded it on my laptop and listened to it in instalments—theater chopped up for easy digestion and ready review—the True West of Silicon Valley.

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The Candy Man Can’t: "Junk Food" Advertising Outlawed on British Television

Well, it’s been a bad day for Willy Wonka. The snack manufacturers in the UK are in a state of sugar shock. Sure, the chocolate factories will remain open; but the popsicle peddlers and potato chip pushers have been dealt with a restraining order, forced to keep a low profile when it comes to accosting their most valued customers. The golden ticket—or any such gimmick designed to promote so-called “junk food” on television—is a thing of the past. Count Chocula will have to go underground in search of fresh blood, and millions of hyperactive and hypoglycemic kiddies might have to learn about candy from strangers, now that cable channels are closed to the trans-fat movers and saltshakers that thus far defined and financed much of children’s television.

The ban on “junk food” advertising is to go into effect in January 2007, the BBC reports. The measures are surprisingly far-reaching, considering that such commercials will no longer be permitted on any “pre-school children’s programs,” “programs on mainstream channels aimed at children” or “cable and satellite children’s channels,” “programs aimed at young people,” including those featuring music videos, and “general entertainment programs” that “appeal to” a “higher than average” number of viewers under the age of sixteen.

The decision, presumably on behalf of an obesity-prone or malnourished public, was made by Ofcom (Office of Communications), a new regulatory body established in 2002 and authorized by Britain’s Office of Communications Act in 2003. Will this catch on elsewhere? Are ice cream, soda pop, and French fries going the way of the cigarette, now that health fascism is on the rise in the west?

What might have happened to American action heroes like Buzz Corry, commander in chief of the Space Patrol, had the FCC clamped down on US radio advertising in the 1930s and ’40s (whose jingles you may hear and see discussed here)? Would Buzz have had to load his tank with corn flakes or oatmeal, like most of the competition? Space Patrol, after all, “was brought to you by Nestle’s Eveready, the instant cocoa, and famous Nestle chocolate bars. Remember N-E-S-T-L-E’-S.” And, as the announcer promised, those listening in could get their own “rocket cockpit” and fly “into space” with Buzz Corry if only they sent in those Nestle labels.

Are we, in this happy meal age of movie tie-ins and product placement, really Buzz Lightyears removed from such sponsorship models? No doubt, there’s lots of dough in cookies, and those protective of commercial television foresee great losses in revenue; losses, they argue, that might very well lower the quality of programming in Britain, as advertisers lose interest in a large group of potential viewers previously seen as a target audience, thus decreasing the purchasing power of advertising-dependent cable channels.

So, who is to gain as kiddies trim down (if indeed such a widespread downsizing of pint-sizers will follow)? The outlawing of “junk food” advertising might prove a boon to those with poor parenting skills, those who rely on legal strictures and thrive on lawsuits to raise a new generation of leaner, healthier consumers, sturdier taxpayers with fewer cavities and lower blood sugar, calm little low-sodium dieters deprived of the catchy tunes that used to cheer our everyday.

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Live and Let Die: Is It Time to Give Bond the Boot?

Well, I know, it is an old argument. One that is being dusted off every time a new man slips into the suit. Always a man, mind you. And the man in question is Bond, James Bond. With Casino Royale now in theaters, and the less-than-favored Daniel Craig assuming the role of 007, the question arises anew: does Bond still matter, over fifty years after he was introduced to the world in Ian Fleming’s spy stories? Should he die another day, right this minute, or some time tomorrow (which presumably never dies)? What does his resilience tell us about the crumbled British Empire, about the state of international diplomacy, about the ways of the warring world?

A new Bond picture is still a media event, some forty-five years after the release of the first entry in what turned out to be a highly lucrative franchise. For me, it all began with The Spy Who Loved Me, the second movie I ever got to see in a theater; as such, it made quite an impression on me. Okay, he did not love me (little did I know how much he loathed me and my kind). The villain was played by a fellow German (Curt Jurgens); but dubbing, as it is still being practiced in my native country, all but obscured the lingering animosity toward Germany as expressed in such castings. It is easy to watch James Bond thrillers without noticing their cultural and political agenda. It is convenient to do so; but it also renders those films irrelevant.

Bond did much to keep the Cold War alive—or any crisis beneficial to the West. He has always been On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (rather than the people’s)—and a grateful Queen Elizabeth II once again attended the Royal Premiere of the latest 007 mission she thus endorsed. Bond is the anti-diplomat—ultra-conservative, xenophobic, and unapologetically sexist. Dame Judy Dench was brought in as a response to decades of Pussy Galore and the casting cat calls it provoked; but “Octo” never did denote octogenarian and female sidekicks still get the kittenish outfits, the headlines and centerfolds, along with those less than subtle names suggestive of slippery bodies just waiting for a firm . . . well, you know.

Bond is an institution—perhaps one that is ripe for abolishment. Austin Powers may have mocked the machismo, as others have done before him, but left the Bond franchise unshaken if slightly stirred.

The producers of the latest installment could have responded to such claims of obsolescence by turning Casino Royale into a period piece, setting it in the political climate in which it was conceived. It would have been a bold move for Bond, at once an acknowledgment of the datedness of the character and its historical significance, a topical significance long obscured in favor of gadgetry and reduced to pop-cultural nods to celebrities of the day (such as Goldie or Grace Jones, last seen at a Guinness Book-making gathering of the Joneses). Diamonds Are Forever—but traditions? Upon reflection, the Bond image might be as timeless as a rhinestone on an extravagant designer suit: dernier crie one day, but “for crying out loud” thereafter.

That said, I am looking forward to the latest James Bond, if only to take him on. If Freddy Kruger can be confronted with Jason, how about a match-up of Bond versus Shaft, to kick the imperial highness right out of 007’s pants? How about Bond having the living daylights scared out of him by Lara Croft? I’d put my Moneypenny on such a fight. How about, Goldfingers crossed, Shaft and Lara Croft as James Bond? You might get to witness just that . . . if you only live twice.

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An Inspector Calls Our Bluff

Yesterday’s gloomy afternoon gave way to a splendidly sinister evening at the theater. The play was J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, which I had previously seen back in 1995, with 80’s heartthrob Maxwell Caulfield in his Broadway debut. In that production, the set pretty much upset the text—a huge, dark house confronting the audience from behind a curtain of rain. It was an impressive spectacle calculated, it seemed, to veil or countermand Priestley’s directives, the stark simplicity and artifice of his didactic play. Yet, as I realized last night, watching a touring Clwyd Theatr Cymru production directed by Barry Kyle, An Inspector Calls loudest when the lines are clear and the stage bare.

I had prepared for the evening by reviewing the 1934 film adaptation of Priestley’s Dangerous Corner, starring Virginia Bruce and Melvyn Douglas.  The movie struggles to open Priestley’s play to the demands of a dynamic camera.  The cinema audience wants, or is at any rate accustomed to, something other talking heads and sedentary bodies.  Even Martyn Bainbridge’s design, while effectively sparse compared to the melodramatic Broadway treatment of An Inspector Calls, at times displayed a doubt in the sufficiency of Priestley’s script by underscoring his words with visuals, turning walls into movie screens and tilting the stage to demonstrate the downfall of a supercilious and self-centered family.

Do we need images to get the picture? The theater of ideas is best accommodated by radio, a non-visual medium that forces our mind to focus on the spoken word and telling silences. Back in the early 1930s, Priestley may not have been convinced of this. After all, Dangerous Corner is a rather scathing commentary on the wireless as a soundcarpet under which the unspoken and unspeakable can be swept: the receiver has to break down to crack the surface of idle chatter among the civilized yet rotten.

In An Inspector Calls, which reworks the central idea of the earlier play, the part of the radio is performed by a telephone that rings to shut up a group of culpable and contemptible individuals talking themselves back into a state of calm. Unreliable or intrusive, both means of telecommunication are called upon to penetrate the walls of bourgeois conventions, obliging those standing apart to connect and disclose what has been carefully concealed from others.

Priestley could and did rely upon the wireless to spread the word and to popularize his ideas. His novels and plays were often heard on American and British radio during the 1930s and ‘40s, among them adaptations of Angel Pavement and Laburnum Grove, as well as the two works discussed here. The author-dramatist even made an appearance on Rudy Vallee’s show, as I read in a September 1939 issue of the Radio Times, and agreed to let the BBC serialize one of his novels prior to publication, with its author reading the first installment.

While expressing his reservations about the experiment and its effect on book sales, Priestley nonetheless decided to reach out to the populace he was eager to unite. Perhaps, some six years prior to the completion of An Inspector Calls, he had already gotten the call from his inquisitive messenger. It is a call that still resonates strongly today, not so much as socialist propaganda, but as an appeal to think beyond economics, beyond present self-interest, for the sake of turning a Dangerous Corner in the path of the planet we share.