Category: Adaptation

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Fancy Pencils/Coloring Books: Radio Vs. Television, Round Two

Well, “I ‘aven’t patience.” For indifferent rehashings, that is. Last night I watched the premiere of the long-promised and (at least by me) highly anticipated made-for-television adaptation of H. G. Wells’s comic novel The History of Mr. Polly (1910), a radio dramatization starring Boris Karloff I discussed previously. I have often wondered whether it might not be better to leave it to our minds to color our books or whether the pencils our fancy (or imagination) supplies while listening are perhaps too dull or small in number to do the coloring when not guided by the hand of experience.

Unlike Anthony Pelissier’s 1948 black-and-white screen adaptation starring John Mills, this Mr. Polly was shot in the rich polychromes of a Welsh summer—emerald, sunset gold, and sea blue. Not that Mr. Polly ever ventured into Wales; but Gillies MacKinnon’s picture was made here on location (which led me to create the above collage, the first lines of the novel covered by a Welsh shopfront as I saw it in an excellent state of preservation at the National History Museum at St. Fagans).

Perhaps, the pages were splashed with rather too much color. After all, Mr. Polly’s life is not at all a fancy or brilliant one. When first we meet him, he is middle-aged, dyspeptic, and so thoroughly dissatisfied with his middle-class existence as to contemplate suicide. The misery of his life (or, rather, the monochrome way in which Mr. Polly sees it) does not come across strongly in Adrian Hodges’s retelling of Wells’s story. Unlike the earlier movie adaptation, it even skips the famous opening scene, in which Mr. Polly, sitting on a metaphorical “stile between two threadbare-looking fields” and referring to his situation as a “Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!”

This new Mr. Polly is full of holes; and unlike the earlier adaptation, from which it frequently borrows, it tries to fill them synopsizing the character’s early life. Such skimming of pages (handled, in a quaint fashion, by resorting to title cards like “Three Years Later”) leaves us less with a sense of depth than with a feeling of being dragged across the surface without ever getting inside the man.

After all, as Wells put it, “Wonderful things must have been going on inside Mr. Polly,” his inner workings suggesting a “badly managed industrial city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence, strikes, [. . .] and the thunder of tumbrils. . . .” However well-chosen the leading man, the look on Lee Evans’s suitably “dull and yellowish” face, rarely shown in close up, cannot convey this turmoil; and his lines, substituting for the novel’s opening, are comparatively prosaic.

Mr. Polly is looking more like Miss Potter; even his adversary, the villainous Jim, is looking pale, Wells’s characters drowning in pools of green. Radio adaptations do not suffer from such an excess of paint. Without being vulgar, they can take you “inside” a character like Mr. Polly, giving you a tour of his mind, his heart, and his bowels. They can preserve much of the original text without feeling compelled to translate them into images. They are more likely to succeed in being literate or liberating instead of literal or unfaithful. That is, they are less likely to be burdened by authenticity and claims of infidelity by not having to show us anything as it imagined (rather than imaged) in the text.

It is the listener’s responsibility to fill in the blanks with images supplied by formers readings, by travel and experience. To be sure, phony accents can be misleading; but radio adaptations (depending on the richness of the listener’s empirical knowledge of the world and prior literary excursions) are more likely to be generic than false. It is for these reasons that I’d rather listen to the soft-spoken Mr. Karloff, who, on 17 October 1948, gave voice to Mr. Polly’s complaints in the NBC University Theater production of Wells’s comic tale of discontent.

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Tara on the Danube; or, The Ambassador Wore Ballet Shoes

Well, that didn’t last long, did it? The wireless connection in our hotel room in Budapest, I mean. It pretty much collapsed after about 48 hours, even though we had paid a small bundle to be online for the week. Not that I find it easy to keep this journal, to keep up with the out-of-date while being out and about on my travels. Our days were filled with taking in the sights; our evenings (and bellies) with goulash, goose liver, and Hungarian wines—from which culinary excesses arose the most curious and vivid dreams. I was paying my respects at the bedside of the by me previously pooh-poohed Zsa Zsa Gabor, shared a moldy piece of decades-old cake with Madonna, who told me my gray roots needed a fresh coating of dye, and was set to teach “My Fair Lady” (whatever that might entail) at a soberingly conservative village school. Those subconscious night flights of fancy were not nearly as strange, though, as the experience of going to the Budapest Opera House to see Gone With the Wind transformed into a Hungarian ballet.

“I bet you, if it was handled right, that picture would make a great book.” That is what the aforementioned Fibber McGee told his wife Molly after watching the premiere of Gone With the Wind at their local theater in early 1940. And there I was, 67 years later, hundreds of miles from my local theater, asking myself whether it could make a great ballet. I had never considered the question; but when we walked into the magnificent Operaház to find out what was playing, we could not resist snatching up what might have been the last as well as the best tickets to the pop-cultural and historical confrontation that was the world premier of Elfújta a Szél.

In her introduction to the piece, US ambassador April H. Foley made a somewhat desperate effort to stress the connections between Gone With the Wind and Hungarian culture, reminding readers of the playbill that the novel was awarded a prize named after Hungarian-born newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer; that the production of the movie had involved Hungarian-born director George Cukor; and that it starred a leading lady once “under contract to Hungarian filmmaker Alexander Korda.” Such connecting-the-dottiness rather reminds me of the treatment I am giving American radio drama, which I am wont to work into just about any conversation; especially into this one, given that a scene from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller had been dramatized for radio more than three years before it hit the big screen in December 1939.

But, back to the ballet. The last time I exposed myself to the spectacle of cinema gone tiptoeing, my response was less than rapturous. Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands seemed to rely overmuch on fanciful costumes and fantastic sets than on the footwork that had made Bourne’s earlier Swan Lake such breathtaking theater. Choreographed by Lilla Pártay (to the music of Anton Dvorak, whose “New World” was not the bygone one romanticized by Gone), Elfújta was decidedly more traditional in its approach to ballet, even though its retelling of the contrived melodrama that is Gone often felt like a danced synopsis—a series of tiptoe tableaux. However charming or thrilling the moves, it was the tiptoeing around American history that had me wriggling in my seat.

Commenting on Gone’s depiction of the American Civil War, Foley remarked that the “attitudes toward slavery and stereotypes of African Americans are consistent with the historical era” and that “[a]lthough we certainly do not share these views today, we appreciate Gone With the Wind for what it is: an icon of American historical fiction that is still enjoyed by millions the world over.” Now, aside from feeling that Scarlett’s struggles are so much less interesting than the period in which they are set, I was disconcerted to see that there was next to nothing “historical” about Elfújta, that its love story might as well have taken place on the banks of the Danube—had it not been for those three white actors grinning and swaying in unconvincing dark makeup that was nearly as cartoonish as blackface.

I am not sure in which way Elfújta could “enrich an already close and thriving bilateral relationship” between Hungary and America, other than celebrating a mutual dumbing down of the social sciences. Having long been oppressed and subjected to foreign terrors under the communist regime, Hungarians might be better equipped to identify with the suppressed stories of the slaves than with tales involving Scarlett, Melanie, and Rhett. Now, I don’t know what the role of ballet should or could be in today’s culture; but, for all its splendor, the frivolous Elfújta struck me as an ambassadorial misstep.

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Out of the Bag: The Fiction of Laetitia Prism

She could have run Hollywood. Miss Prism, I mean. You know, the governess in The Importance of Being Earnest who couldn’t tell a book from a baby. Summing up the ends (the conclusion as well as the purpose) of her novel, she explains: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”  We know where her story ended up, of course; but what end did Miss Prism face, and what ends might she have served after and beyond Wilde?

Where do fictional characters go once their creators are done with them? What do they think, dream, or do between chapters or acts? Where have they been before entering the story their creators had in mind for them? Those are the question tackled by Celluloid Extras, a series of sketches now playing on BBC Radio 4.

What every governess knows: It is impolitic to point.

The practice of picking up familiar characters from the world of literature, disentangling them from the plots that contained them, and getting them back onto a public stage to let them tell us something else about themselves is hardly a novel idea. In January 1937, for instance, the familiar characters of Alice in Wonderland were released from the confines of “Copyright Lane” to mingle with Hamlet and assorted originals from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit in the free-for all of radio’s “Public Domain,” a play produced by the aforementioned Columbia Workshop. It is a tongue-in-cheek approach to pastiche that is both liberating and controlling of the afterlife and private lives of imaginary personages, who, even without those efforts, often do quite well in the minds of those who recall them from their excursions into drama and literature.

Natalia Power’s “Miss Prism, or the Dreadful Secret,” the first of those five Celluloid Extras promises the untold story of the absent-minded governess, whom last we saw being embraced by Dr. Chasuble, much to her delight. Now, I might have picked up some queer vibes, given that the Miss Prism I last experienced on stage was impersonated by a male actor; but Power seems to have gotten a similar impression, however her conclusions were drawn. And yet, Miss Prism seems to have been coerced into speaking up, if indeed the words coming out of her mouth were not put there by another. If it was her mouth.

In “The Decay of Lying,” one of the fictional characters through which Wilde spoke in his dialogued essays, remarked that the “only real people are the people who never existed.” In a postmodern dismissal of boundaries and binaries that would not have done for Wilde, whose stage plays and word plays depend on them, Power suggests that Miss Prism did exist as something other than the prism or lens of our changing mores, that she was, in fact, an acquaintance of the playwright to whom we are indebted for immortalizing her. By telling the fictive truth about imaginary people, “Miss Prism, or the Dreadful Secret” seems to be degrading the art of lying to a practice as indelicate and vile as tabloid journalism.

Giving Miss Prism a dirty secret (aside from the ones already out of the bag when the curtain falls on Wilde’s comedy) and by extracting it in a moment of alcohol-induced carelessness means to imitate life and, according to Wilde’s logic, to take it. Now that is character assassination.

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A Bell for . . . Talafar?

It is the fuel that keeps the search engines humming. It is fodder for loudmouthed if often unintelligible webjournalists thriving on the divisive. It is the foundation of many a rashly erected platform by means of which the invisible make a display of themselves. The so-called war on terror, I mean, and the time, the shape, and the lives it is taking in Iraq. My position becomes sufficiently clear in those words, as tenuous as it sometimes seems to myself. Experiencing the uncertainty, the turmoil and sorrow that was New York City during the days following the destruction of the World Trade Center, I was anxious to see prevented what then felt like an out and out war against the democratic West; but as a descendant of Nazi sympathizers who is convinced that putting an end to thralldom is a noble cause and conflicted about the use of military force to achieve this end, I could only work myself up to a restrained fervor, which soon gave way to bewilderment, anger, and frustration.

Presented as a success story of the US led invasion of Iraq, the town of Talafar is once again in the news this week, shown in the unfavorable light of exploding bombs and insurgent violence. It has (or ought to have) become obvious that the US and its allies (reluctant or otherwise) are failing in their professed mission against terror and tyranny not because they lack military expertise or international support but because they engaged in this operation with an insufficient awareness and understanding of the different and differing cultures in a region they presumed, hoped, or misrepresented to be a unified (or at any rate unifiable) nation.

I was reminded of all this, if any reminders were required, while watching the wartime parable-turned-Hollywood romance A Bell for Adano (1945), a movie depicting the occupation of an Italian village by American forces toward the close of the Second World War. I generally dislike and avoid war pictures; at least those that reduce history to well-staged action sequences interspersed with scenes of map-pointing generals exchanging remarks about strategies and objectives as if contemplating a game of checkers. A Bell is not that kind of movie.

Based on a 1944 Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller by John Hersey (a Time correspondent and former secretary to Sinclair Lewis), it tells of the struggle for peace, order and community in a battle-scarred town whose lack of pride, hope, and unity is symbolized by the missing bell in the town square, weaponized by Italian’s fascist regime. Realizing the significance of this communal centerpiece, a New York Italian major disregards military orders to find and install an adequate replacement.

On this day, 28 March, in 1944—well over a year before the movie version premiered in US cinemas—NBC radio, in cooperation with the Council on Books in Wartime, presented an adaptation of Hersey’s novel as part of a series titled Words at War. Henry King’s film would attempt to shape parts of Hersey’s narrative into the romance of a lost “Belle” from Adano by casting Gene Tierney as John Hodiak’s Italian love interest, considerably downplaying the ugly Americans his character is up against.

The radio dramatization dispenses with such heartstringings-along to concentrate on the heart of the story: the failings of military strategy and the imperative of cultural sensitivity in the treatment of liberated civilians as exemplified by the response of one Italian-American to the challenges of ideological reorientation, his efforts to understand and assist his ancestral people after the removal of the enemy force that possessed, intimidated and estranged them.

On the radio, A Bell for Adano was announced as a story about “thoughtful Americans, and Americans not so thoughtful.” The very suggestion of America’s humanitarian blunders in an essentially propagandist series like Words at War renders this broadcast “Bell” altogether more compelling than those backlot scenes in which all-American he-fighters show the Axis what what is. The “what” here is “What to do with occupied territory?” once it appears to be under the control of the ostensible victor.

The war in Iraq has yet to deliver a bell ringing loudly enough to convince the world (or me, at any rate) that the freedom, stability, and opportunity it meant to bring about were worth all those local blasts and their global repercussions. Romancing a cracked one just won’t do.

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It Happened Another Night: A Return Trip for Colbert and Gable

Well, you can’t go home again; but that sure doesn’t stop a lot of folks from getting a return ticket or from being taken for a ride in the same rickety vehicle. And with pleasure! Before I head out to the theater for another meeting with Moll Flanders, who’s been around the block plenty, I am going to hop on the old “Night Bus” that took Colbert and Gable places—and all the way to the Academy Awards besides.  On this day, 20 March, in 1939, the Depression era transport was fixed up for a Lux Radio Theater presentation of It Happened One Night. Whereas Orson Welles would try to shove Miriam Hopkins and William Powell into their seats for the Campbell Playhouse adaptation of Robert Riskin’s screenplay, Colbert and Gable (as Peter Warne) were brought back for Lux, reprising their Oscar-winning roles of runaway socialite Ellie Andrews and the reporter on her trail.

Also on board that night were Walter Connelly as Ellie’s father and, “believe you me,” Roscoe Karns as the fellow traveler Ellie can stand even less than the arrogant newshound—”Yessir. Shapeley’s the name, and that’s the way I like ’em.”

Of course, if you like ’em like Shapeley, George Wells’s rewrite of the Production-Coded tease that is It Happened One Night will be a disappointment. For starters, you won’t get to admire Colbert’s traffic-stopping gams or Gable’s retailer-headache of a bare chest. Capra’s down-to-earth comedy suffers badly from becoming airborne—if, indeed, it ever does.

On the airwaves, you won’t get to hear Ellie’s liberating plunge into the ocean; her story picks up at the bus terminal, with Peter getting fired while the “Extra, Extra” of a newsboy alerts him to the scoop that could revive his career. Before we quite get why Ellie is out of her element, Peter is already in his, as the elements of screwball are beaten to the pulp of romance.

The old bus sputters along as if someone had slashed its tires. Gone, too, are many of Riskin’s censors-defying innuendos. Still, if you got a mischievous mind, you can tear down the Walls of Jericho or any barrier that might keep you from imagining what is really happening between Ellie and Peter. “You haven’t got a trumpet by any chance, have you?” Luckily, I always carry a spare.

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Of “Past and Paste”: Rereading (Myself on) Mildred Pierce

The generally reliable and greatly appreciated Blogger has been given me quite a headache these past twenty-four hours. I was unable to upload any images; and although this journal is primarily concerned with the spoken word, I was irritated to the point of name-calling it a day. In the meantime, I dug up one of my undergraduate essays on Mildred Pierce, one of the movies (listed, right) I screened again recently. Say, how many motion pictures do you consume over a twelve-month period? That is the question I am posing in my current poll (a feature I resurrect herewith).

As if to account for time spent, whether well or otherwise, I try to keep track of what I experience, see or do. Sometimes, only the title of a movie remains; I remembered very little about Prick Up Your Ears, for instance, a copy of which I picked up a few weeks ago, some two decades after watching it during its initial release (in Germany, mind you). Back then, the fact that playwright Joe Orton, whose life is the subject of Frears’s biopic, began his short career by submitting a radio play to the BBC would not have meant much to me. About what the film did mean to me my diary is disappointingly mum, aside from the rather astonishing remark that I deemed it enjoyable. While I tend to summon up feelings far better than facts, my initial impressions were beyond recall.

Not so with Michael Curtiz’s crowd-pleasing gem, about which I once penned a trifle titled “The Loathsome Scent of Low Descent: Of Past and Paste in Mildred Pierce.” In it, I comment, without much originality, on the role of the “past, its influence and irrevocability,” in this shadow play of “a mother’s struggle to shed her past in order to secure the happiness of her daughter.” The opening credits, “washed ashore and wiped away by the surf,” suggest that the “past, though carefully concealed, may suddenly resurface, and that time itself, like the tides of the sea, is an element beyond our control.”

Since I require something more stimulating to enter into an argument with anyone, including myself, I pricked up my ears instead and took on the 24 June 1954 Lux Radio Theater adaptation starring Claire Trevor, in the title role originated by Joan Crawford, and Crawford’s co-star Zachary Scott as Monte. In an earlier Lux broadcast, Rosalind Russell had impersonated the fierce Mrs. Pierce, Academy Award-winning Ms. Crawford having been (as Louella Parsons reminded me) a less-than-confident radio performer (her notorious Christmas special notwithstanding).

The final screenplay for Mildred Pierce was written by one of radio’s better writers, Ranald MacDougall (previously mentioned here). Yet little of Curtiz’s noirish vision, James M. Cain’s rags-to-wretchedness design, or MacDougall’s smart revision remains in Sandy Barnett’s audio version, which not only cleans up Veda’s act (by refraining from mentioning her feigned pregnancy) but sidelines the central figure of her mother by opening with a dramatization of Wally’s arrest at the beach house rather than Monte’s call of “Mildred,” the dying word of a murder victim that implicates the named one from the get-go.

Since we are not encouraged to think of her as a suspect (her suicide attempt is not even mentioned), Mildred’s subsequent storytelling loses much of its ambiguity. From her reaction to the police inspector, the listener senses that she is uneasy about the fact that her first husband is the prime suspect; but it is unclear whether her narrative is designed to shelter him (or anyone else). Without those scenes at the beach house and the pier, there is little reason to distrust Mildred, who comes across here as a hard-working, suffering parent abandoned by her husband and stuck with an ungrateful child.

The radio adaptation seems determined to take literally the famous tagline of the movie—”don’t tell anyone what she did”—by keeping quiet about what Mildred might have done and suggesting that she didn’t do much at all aside from baking pies to do well by ne’er-do-well Veda. Lux sure got the stains out of Mildred’s past.

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Senseless: One Soldier’s Fight to Speak Against War

Well, how do you like that! We just got ourselves a DVD/VCR recorder, in hopes of upgrading our video library and phasing out the old tapes that are piling up all over the place. As it turns out, the cassettes I shipped over from the US, which had played fine on the machine that gave up the ghost a couple of days ago, are being rejected by the new, regionally coded, high-tech marvel. Is it any wonder I am such an advocate of the state-of-the-Ark, the marvels of old-time radio drama?

On this day, 9 March, in 1940, for instance, playwright Arch Oboler masterfully exploited the potentialities of the medium with his adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. As reworked by Oboler, this “most talked of book of the year” relates the experience of a soldier (portrayed by James Cagney) who lost his limbs, his vision, his hearing in combat. More than twenty years later, lying “alone in a room in a hospital close to your city,” having “no arms, no legs, no ears with which to hear, no eyes with which to see, no mouth with which to speak,” he yet learns to communicate what serving his country at once enabled and disabled him to say. He does not want a medal; he wants to speak up. It is a freedom for which he fought with the weaponry that is responsible for its loss.

According to Oboler, Trumbo’s story “has even greater emotional impact” on the air because, by virtue of being “transformed into living speech,” the soldier’s words attain an “almost unendurable reality.” Johnny does not address the audience, but is overheard in his desperate attempt to make himself understood by the hospital staff and visitors, the living beings he senses only through the vibrations of their movements.

Oboler was particularly impressed by the scenes in which the “blind, deaf and dumb soldier learns to recognize the approach of the nurse by the vibrations of her footsteps coming up through the bedsprings and reacting against his skin.” It is a cruel irony that appeals to the melodramatist: a man who nearly lost all his senses now tries to make others come to theirs.

Unlike the 1971 movie adaptation, however, “Johnny Got His Gun” was produced at a time when speaking up against war was neither daring nor idealistic. Indeed, most intellectuals warned against a false peace, whereas to isolationists, who didn’t mind dealing with fascists overseas, keeping out of it was literally good for business.

Oboler was no pacifist; soon he would distance himself from “Johnny” and advocate instead the stirring of “hate” as being instrumental in motivating the masses in wartime. “Do not tell me that the people are disillusioned because of our past sins, our ‘Johnny Got His Guns,’ and so on, and that they need a dream of the new world before they are going to fight,” Oboler argued; “anger is what people want. And they want hate, the hate of a determined people who are going to kill and must kill to win this war.” That mass of “living flesh” in the hospital bed had made his appeal in vain.

New generations of Johnnies are getting their guns. No one hands us a voice; that we have to find for ourselves and raise while we may.

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Blandings Waves: Cary Grant’s “Dream House” Annex

Well, glamorous it ain’t! Chasing a runaway trash can down the lane and harvesting stray garbage bags from the hedges—before dawn, no less, with little more than a tiny flashlight to guide me. The storm that has been wreaking havoc across Europe swept over Wales this morning, however accustomed folks here may be to such violent weather conditions. Barring outages of power, as experienced by thousand of households in the wild west of Britain, I am going to get my dose of glamour and sophistication yet, by celebrating the career of Cary Grant, born on this day, 18 January, in 1904.

I regret not to have spotted the statue erected in his honor down in Bristol, England, where Grant (or Archibald Alexander Leach) came into this world. He left it in 1986, which prompted me, a sour-faced and romance-starved youth, to compose a eulogistic piece of poetry (not to be dug up for this or any other occasion). This year, I have already revisited two of Grant’s performances—the one truly Grant (George Cukor’s charming adaptation of Holiday), the other cash-and-Cary (Leo McCarey’s World War II oddity Once Upon a Honeymoon). I very nearly caught a third—Destination Tokyo—which is frequently showing on the very poor cousin of Turner Classic Movies here in Britain. Tonight, I might pair him with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, or Rosalind Russell.

Like so many Hollywood actors of his generation, Grant was frequently heard on US radio; here, for instance, you may listen to Grant singing in a 1936 broadcast trailer for Suzy. On his very birthday, back in 1955, he was once again heard in a Lux Radio Theater adaptation of his screwball hit The Awful Truth. After having been cast opposite Claudette Colbert (in 1939), he was reuniting with his original screen co-star, Irene Dunne.

Yet Grant was also among a number of leading men—including Alan Ladd, Glenn Ford, Humphrey Bogart, and James Stewart—to seize the opportunity of starring in a radio program of his own. Together with wife Betsy Drake, who also wrote some of the scripts, he was heard in Mr. and Mrs. Blandings (1951), a situation comedy based on the novel Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, filmed in 1948 with Grant and Myrna Loy. By the late-1940s, radio shows were no longer performed live, which made the medium attractive to busy film actors interested in making a few thousand bucks on the side, for the comparatively easy assignment of spending a few hours in a recording studio reading (rather than memorizing) a short script.

Radio, in turn, had its influence on Grant’s career in motion pictures. In 1944, he starred in Once Upon a Time, a film based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “My Client Curley.” Yes, once upon a time, radio played a significant role in the lives of actors and audiences who, like ambitious Mr. Blandings, managed to evaporate the humdrum of the everyday by building castles in the air.

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Please, Mr. Memory: Concussion on The Thirty-Nine Steps

I felt torn last night. Torn between The Falcon’s Brother (in which George Sanders passes the thriller franchise to sibling Tom Conway) and John Buchan: Master of Suspense, a television documentary about the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Quandaries like these are peculiar to life in a single-TV household. Considering that I am going on a New Year’s trip to Glasgow (where Buchan grew up) and just saw a dramatization of his classic spy novel in London, I decided in favor of the latter. Not that the documentary (part of BBC Four’s Adventures for Boys season) did much to clear the muddle my mind, at work under the influence of Patrick Barlow’s stage adaptation, has made of the Steps, one of those books everyone claims to know but few ever read, let alone without preconceptions.

Now, I have read Buchan’s 1915 novel (available online here); and, like most readers who come to it by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 adaptation, I was astonished at the film’s brazenfaced infidelity. I was disappointed, as well. Missing was the wit that Hitchcock and writer Charles Bennett brought to the original by reworking it in the screwball comedy tradition. It Happened One Flight, they might as well have called what amounts to conclusive proof that tying a male hero to a dame (absent in Buchan’s story) does not have to slow down a fast-paced chase. Infusing sex appeal rather than sentimentality, Hitchcock’s cinematic update created a new adversary for the already much-beleaguered hero, Richard Hannay, who finds that a lot can go wrong in the effort to do right.

Barlow’s dramatization, by comparison, aims at demonstrating that a lot can go right in the effort to do wrong. When I read that John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps” was playing at London’s Criterion Theatre (where it can bee seen until April 2007), I had reason to expect an update of the novel, rather than a recreation of the film, however farcical the treatment (as reviews and poster art suggested).

As it turns out, Buchan’s novel has little to do with the nightly frivolities at the Criterion. The attribution to Buchan in the title of Barlow’s play (based on an “original concept” by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon) seems to be part of an elaborate practical joke—a set-up in which spectators gladly take the fall since they are being coddled by travesty into assuming themselves superior to the material, whatever its source. Being tongue-in-cheek is a convenient escape, a laughing away of what could—and perhaps ought to—have been an engagement or confrontation with Buchan’s story, a tale of espionage and persecution anxities so relevant in this age of terror and so-called anti-terrorism.

Aside from the material of which John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps” makes light, the main attraction of the play lies in its being performed by a cast of only four actors, who dare to take on well over a hundred characters. With a small supply of basic props, those nimble four are shown in the ludicrous struggle to recreate the screenplay as realized by Hitchcock (who, in one of the many inspired moments of silliness, makes a cameo appearance in silhouette). This minimalist-absurdist approach to adaptation was not entirely a novelty act to me, having previously attended a production of The Importance of Being Earnest acted out by a cast of two.

Overly familiar as well felt the play’s reflexivity, its awareness of and delight in the improbability of being equal either to Buchan’s spy story or Hitchcock’s screwball caper. Many self-conscious remakes operate in this manner, escaping the challenge of finding the new in the old by making a mockery of the attempt at renewal and a mess of what is presumably so outmoded that it deserves nothing more than a send-up.

There is enjoyment in seeing things go awry, no doubt; and John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps” rewards theatergoers for their knowledge of the Hitchcock version (one of three film adaptations of the story). Cineastes will appreciate the effort that went into finding ways of making it almost work, whereas those who read and respect Buchan may regret how much is being squandered by ignoring his paradigm. After all, his thrills, too, depend on the pleasure derived from seeing things go awfully wrong, albeit with far higher stakes for the protagonist and his world.

Calling the play John Buchan’s The 39 Steps obscures the fact that the first motion picture adaptation was already a comic revision of Buchan’s rip-roaring yarn. Going after Buchan, Hitchcock managed to be fresh (both new and irreverent) without losing sight of the hunter-on the-run formula that would serve him so well, without neglecting the task of dusting off this decades-old story for action-seeking motion picture audiences. Forgoing thrills, sentiment, and politics alike, Barlow is strictly after laughs.

That said, the bungled dramatization is a chuckles-filled joyride for those who take pleasure in playing fast and loose with supposed literary classics. I gladly go along, provided I can still pride myself in being able to tell a sly impostor from the real thing. Instead, the theatrical experience has given me somewhat of a concussion, leaving me in a state of confusion that neither the aforementioned documentary nor the numerous American radio dramatizations (by the Lux Radio Theater and the Mercury Players, for instance) are likely to clear up. Was Richard Hannay a South African, a Canadian, or a Scotsman? Was he driven by the impulse to save a crumbling empire, to counter boredom, or to clear his name? Come to think of it: just who built The Thirty-Nine Steps, an unstable architectural composite of which now arises before my mind’s eye?

Even Mr. Memory won’t be of much assistance to me, I suspect. Besides, he is . . . but you know the story.

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“These Three”: Gay Lovers Straightened through Air-conditioning

The history of taboos sure is shocking. I mean, it is shocking to realize what, over the years, has been hidden from view and banned from our discourse. Interracial marriages. Same sex unions. Gender reassignments. While denial can be as harmful as our tendency to designate, you would have to have been living under that proverbial mineral formation or petrified by the religious fundamentalism that passes for faith these days to regard such realities as unmentionable. They may not be widely understood or tolerated, let alone embraced, but as the facts of life in all its complexities they are too much in the public eye to be ignored.

Simeon Solomon, The Sleepers and the One who Watcheth (1870; detail)

Often argued to be responsible for foisting a liberal education on the masses, Hollywood has, in fact, played an important role in keeping quiet about many aspects of our everyday lives. Beginning in the mid-1930s, and for several decades thereafter, the Production Code curtailed what could be shown or talked about in motion pictures.

It was on this day, 6 December, in 1933, that James Joyce’s Ulysses was ruled to be “not obscene,” lifting the ban on its sale in the US; but that, aside from its narrative structure, hardly made Ulysses ( 1922; previously serialised 1918-20) a hot property in Tinseltown. Writers who wanted a share of the profits to be made by selling stories or streamlining them for the silver screen had to deal with the strictures of the code and learn to rework their material accordingly.

One playwright who accepted this challenge was Lillian Hellman, whose 1934 stage success The Children’s Hour was brought to the ears of American radio listeners on this day in 1937.

The Children’s Hour tells the story of two women whose teaching careers and personal lives are wrecked when one of their pupils alleges that they are having an intimate relationship.  Like Hellman’s 1936 screen version of The Children’s Hour, titled These Three, George Wells’s radio adaptation for the Lux Radio Theatre drowns out the unspeakable by suggesting instead a triangulated relationship with a virile heterosexual male at its center.  Wedged between Stanwyck and Mary Astor that night was the presumably irresistible Errol Flynn.

Hollywood had long thrived on love triangles, although they were rarely as ambiguous as in the above painting by the aforementioned queer artist Simeon Solomon.  Indeed, the three-cornered plot is key to the first new genre of production-coded cinema—the screwball comedy, in which heterosexual marriage is challenged by old flames or new rivals until it is ultimately reaffirmed. Although—or perhaps because—These Three is more concerned with libel than with forbidden love, with allegations rather than physical acts, the revision eliminates the unmentionable to make room for a rumor that can be talked about.

As if determined to remove any doubts as to the straightness of the radio adaptation and all those associated with the production, Lux host Cecil B. DeMille opens the program by letting listeners in on a “secret,” a story that had “completely escaped the headlines.” The unheard-of item amounted to little more than the announcement of a recent marriage. According to DeMille’s anecdote, the unconventional Ms. Stanwyck had just attended the wedding of her stableboy, danced with the hired hands, and “made them all forget” that she was the “groom’s boss.” The Lux program presented itself as clean entertainment without wanting to appear stuffy.

What is more stuffy—and objectionable—than the codes governing radio and motion pictures is the subsequent silencing of the history of such hush-ups. A description of the Lux broadcast in a 1995 reference text, for instance, keeps mum about the pedigree of the adaptation by alluding vaguely to “[c]ertain aspects of the stage production’s plot” that “made a straight film version out of the question.” Phobic histories like these not only contribute to our ignorance of past inequalities. They keep us from moving beyond them.