Category: Adaptation

Posted on

On This Day in 1956: Aldous Huxley Opens a Radio Workshop and Talks About Our Brave New World

Rummaging through old photographs and notes, I came across a list of favorite books, a personal and highly incongruous assortment of titles I jotted down when I was twenty-one. Put together before I moved to New York City and went to college, that paper-thin time capsule is filled with thrillers like Maurice Leblanc’s The Double Life of Arsene Lupin and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. There is Truffaut’s wonderful book on Hitchcock, as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I eventually got to teach in a college course on friendship in American literature. Also on that chart are the author and work I am featuring today—because they happened to be featured on the previously discussed CBS Radio Workshop.

Architecture for a brave new world: Selfridges, Birmingham

There was little room for the Workshop in my doctoral study, whose subject is the rise and fall of American radio drama between 1929 and 1954—the quarter century during which audio drama (as a form, rather than radio as a medium) made the most significant advances and had its greatest cultural and socio-political influence in the US. This is not to say that there weren’t any notable radio plays either before or after the period defined by me as the form and the medium’s golden age, even though music and talk once again dominated the dial in the mid-50s as they had prior to the 1930s. The CBS Radio Workshop, however belated it may have seemed to a nation obsessed with television, was certainly first-rate.

On this day, 27 January, in 1956, the Workshop opened with a provocative piece of 20th-century fiction, introduced and narrated by its author, Aldous Huxley and scored by radio drama alumnus-turned-movie composer Bernard Herrmann. Addressing the audience, Huxley sounded very British indeed, avuncular, educated, opinionated, and somewhat frail; rather like E. M. Forster, who read several of his works for the record and was heard on US radio as a commentator on the NBC University Theater. What Huxley has to say, however, is anything but mellow or dated. It is still shocking today, mainly because his dark vision has already become reality.

As a teenager—I was sixteen or so when I first read Brave New World—I thought of Brave New Work as a work of science fiction. It was altogether more inviting than George Orwell’s dreary Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I was forced to read at school. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, none of the characters or situations were agreeable to me; everything described seemed too nasty and bleak to be endured even by the meek or uninspired.

In Brave New World, I was confronted with a seemingly uncomplicated future, a life not devoid of pleasures and comforts, a world not entirely unrecognizable—if cleaner and less hostile—in which I could imagine myself existing happily as long as I didn’t question myself or the system for whose workings I was being conditioned. Gradually, this rendered the novel all the more disconcerting to me: I realized that I was complaisant and complicit, willing to denounce my freedoms for relief and security.

Introducing William Froug’s two-part dramatization of his story, Huxley insisted on its relevance:

Brave New World is a fantastic parable about the dehumanization of human beings. In the negative utopia described in my story, man has been subordinated to his own inventions. Science, technology, social organization—these things have ceased to serve man; they have become his masters. A quarter of a century has passed since the book was published. In that time, our world has taken so many steps in the wrong direction that if I were writing today, I would date my story not six hundred years in the future, but at the most two hundred. The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.

It seems that sixty years would have been more accurate. Perhaps, Huxley’s dystopia has already become our present. As in the novel, we are being nursed and kept alive to keep business going; we are programmed to consume, hate, be shallow, satisfy those of our desires that are economically advantageous, and to go about our life without questioning how much we really are in control of it.

Established democracies are becoming more fascist in their curtailing of personal choice, freedoms whose realization may be harmful to our bodies and those of others and thus detrimental to long-term consumerism, a world of designer-labelled clothes and legalized designer drugs in which anyone who openly contradicts or loudly confronts is argued to be someone who sides with whose who have designs on our supposed liberties.

I’m still not sure what a tolerable alternative would be to such a Brave New World, one to be braved each day anew without the benefit of Soma.

Posted on

On This Day in 1949: The Radio Tells Americans All About “Eve”

Well, before I make an appointment with The Phantom President, another one of the lesser known motion pictures starring my favorite actress, Ms. Claudette Colbert, I am going to listen again to a radio adaptation of a story that was initially considered as a vehicle for Colbert, but fell into the lap of lucky Bette Davis instead. I am referring of course to “The Wisdom of Eve,” a dramatization of which was broadcast on this day, 24 January, in 1949—thus nearly two years prior to the general US release of the celebrated movie version known as All About Eve.

This is another adventure in recycling, an exploration of radio’s mediating position in the every widening web of multimediacy. Like Eve Harrington, radio was a spider—a yarn-spinning upstart snatching a principal role from its respected elders. Talking itself into the confidence of promoters and audiences alike, radio not only surpassed the theatre and the press in influence and mass appeal, but continued to take advantage of the talent it lured away from those competing media.

“Radio, of itself, has developed almost no writers. It has appropriated almost all of them, at least all of those who could tell a good story.” This assessment of the so-called writer’s medium was made in 1939 by Max Wylie, a former director of script and continuity at US network CBS; he went on to work for the radio department of a major advertising agency and wrote several handbooks for writers or producers of radio drama and edited a number of radio play anthologies.

Wylie knew what he was talking about. Although original plays became more prevalent during the Second World War, when radio served as a major purveyor of propaganda packaged as entertainment, this observation remained essentially an accurate one and does much to explain the gradual decline of radio dramatics in the US during the 1950s, when television assumed this mediating, central position in American culture. Proving the infinite adaptability of popular culture, radio programmed its own redundancy.

“The Wisdom of Eve” first appeared as a short story in the May 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan; before it became All About Eve, author Mary Orr adapted her nearly forgotten piece of magazine fiction for the airwaves. And quite a radiogenic production it turned out to be when it was presented on NBC’s Radio City Playhouse.

“If you were listening to the radio last night,” a female voice addresses the audience, “perhaps you heard what [a certain] radio commentator had to say about Eve Harrington.” On a filter microphone, a device often used to recreate the distortion of voices on the wire or the wireless, the enthusiastic commentator spreads the word about the meteoric rise of one Eve Harrington, “the most-loved, most sought-after, most talented actress Hollywood has seen in a generation.”

Without contradicting or mocking this statement, the narrator takes over again, and her encounter with the “hauntingly lovely” Eve is played out for us in dramatic flashbacks. The speaker is not the bitter and disillusioned Margo, the aging diva, but her friend, Karen Richards, wife of the playwright of Margo’s latest stage success.

What unfolds is the familiar story of Eve’s progress, her seeming innocence, her ambition, and her successful scheming. For the sake of her husband, a man being “made miserable by a temperamental actress,” Karen sides with Eve, too late undeceived about the young woman’s character.

In this play, the radio (the voice of the gossip columnist) is complicit in the world’s deception about Eve. Forever the snake in the make-believe garden west of Eden, it tells us what we want to hear, rather than what we ought to know. Luckily, the listeners of the Radio City Playhouse got just what they wanted that day: a darn good story. What’s more, the motion picture people tuned in as well, and the little piece Orr had trouble selling for years was turned into box-office gold.

Posted on

On This Day in 1948: James M. Cain Authenticates a “Lovely Counterfeit”

Well, I’ve done my darndest here to spread the word about old-time radio. Before it became “old-time,” radio did this rather more effectively, of course; spreading the word, about itself that is. It had professional announcers who could make you buy, or at least desire, most anything, from a can of soup to a slice of soap opera. Sure, not everyone fell for the hyperboles of the air, especially when they fell on the deaf ears of journalists who made a living trashing the American pastime of listening to romantic serials, aural funnies, and gory thrillers; if they did not ignore radio drama altogether, as they do nowadays, the peddlers of the printed word tended to denounce and deride as gleefully and excessively as radio announced and applauded itself.

Unlike the feud between radio comedians Fred Allen and Jack Benny, this was an all too real confrontation. If listening to the radio continued to be a pleasure, it was increasingly thought of as a guilty one, much to the displeasure of the sponsors.

One way of countering the attacks of the press, of assuring listeners that radio drama was perfectly respectable, middle-class fare, was to drag noted authors before the microphone, especially when their works were being adapted for the broadcast medium. When Howard Koch’s dramatization of Rebecca opened the Campbell Playhouse on 9 December 1938—thus predating the premiere of Hitchcock’s film adaptation by well over a year—the legitimacy of the production was underscored by producer-host Orson Welles’s transatlantic telephone conversation with Daphne du Maurier.

Five months later (5 May 1939), when the Campbell Playhouse presented Wickford Point, author J. P. Marquand was also on hand to add prestige to the production. And when Edna Ferber was heard in the 31 March 1939 broadcast of Show Boat, she not only appeared for a curtain call, but joined the stock company of the Campbell Playhouse to play the role of Parthy in a non-musical adaptation of her 1926 bestseller.

Of course, such cross-promotions, which were likely to benefit authors and publishers even more than broadcasters, were no guarantors of excellence or authenticity. Agatha Christie’s previously discussed sanctioning of The Adventures of Hercule Poirot (22 February 1945) could hardly have deceived anyone about the spurious parentage of this anonymously penned and not surprisingly short-lived series. Christie spoke with dignity and authority, but could lend none to the production.

Quite the reverse can be said about the Suspense production of Love’s Lovely Counterfeit and its endorsement by author James M. Cain, heard over the US network CBS on this day, 17 January, in 1948. The play, headed by James Cagney and introduced by Robert Montgomery (who also read an excerpt from the novel, was the real thing: not mere dramatic snipped, but an hourlong presentation that could do justice to Cain’s short novel.

Its author, however, was little of help when asked to address the public: “briefly, I thought it was excellent.” In a rather unusual move, bespeaking the prestige of the Suspense program, Cain also congratulated the two men responsible for the adaptation. Missing his cue twice during his short scripted small talk with Cagney and Montgomery, he rendered his authentication disingenuous in the process.

Perhaps, a bit of fakery, such as Cagney’s enthusiasm about the “particular element that makes Cain the most powerful writer of true suspense fiction in America”—the “inevitable climax, an explosion of the energy” generated by “two people in love”—might have been more convincing. Most listeners would not have noticed if their favorite author had been impersonated by a professional actor, reading lines prepared for the occasion by the author; but so eager were producers to demonstrate that radio was no cheap substitute, that they felt compelled to sell the authentic at the cost of sounding phony.

Posted on

On This Day in 1945: Katharine Hepburn Acts Like It Is Nineteen Thirty-Three

Well, the past three weeks or so have been rather trying. My New York City souvenir proves to be one of the most adhesive colds I’ve ever had the misfortune to catch. I’ve slipped up on several occasions composing my blog entries—and am indebted to those who pointed it out to me. For weeks now I have not been able to enjoy my daily dose of classic Hollywood. You know there’s something amiss when you, an ardent movie buff, find yourself dozing off while watching some of the finest motion pictures of Hollywood’s golden age. Over the past few weeks I’ve been falling asleep during or failing to follow film classics including (in order of their disappearance before my eyes) the exotic Greta Garbo vehicle Mata Hari; Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People; Garson Kanin’s Bachelor Mother; the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel; and The Milky Way starring my favorite comedian, Harold Lloyd. What will this cold deprive me of next!

Now, tonight I was determined to take in another holiday themed radio play—and, having selected an hourlong recording, I was anxious to put my attention to the test. Instead of nodding off, I found myself laughing and shedding tears as I listened to Erik Barnouw’s adaptation of Little Women, first heard on this day, 23 December, in 1945 on the Theatre Guild program.

Barnouw, who later became one of the first historians of American broadcasting (and who recalled one of his experiences adapting plays for the Theatre Guild program in Media Marathon, pictured above), chopped up Louisa May Alcott’s beloved story so expertly that it comes across as whole and rich and unhurried. The success of this production is in large part due to the passionate performance of Katharine Hepburn as Jo, a role she first took on back in 1933, when she appeared in George Cukor’s cinematic rendering of the 1868 original.

Now, Ms. Hepburn’s voice aged rather more rapidly than her exterior; or at least it proved more difficult to cover up the brittleness of her vocal chords than it is to apply fresh paint to pallid or freckled cheeks. Generally, radio served aging actors quite well; but Ms. Hepburn, then merely 38 years old, sounded considerably older, especially when heard among the youthful voices of the three women who played her sisters. Since she also told the story in retrospect, however, this did not create much of a problem; besides, Hepburn’s enthusiasm and vigor readily assist the listener in imagining her as the quick-tempered and sharp-tongued Jo March, whose “ambition was to do something very splendid.”

Hepburn did something splendid that night, as did Oskar Homolka in the role of the Professor who wins Jo’s heart. The wounds of war were still fresh that Christmas—so Professor Bhaer was turned into an Austrian, instead of being Alcott’s idea of a “regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes [Jo] ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one’s ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble.” With the exception of a line from Goethe, this adaptation cuts most references to and expressions in German, which feature so prominently in Alcott’s novel.

Still, after those two previously discussed holiday plays on Suspense—the second of which I apparently forgot as soon as I had heard it—this intelligible and charming aural production of Little Women was a joy not behold. “‘I wish it was Christmas or New Year’s all the time. Wouldn’t it be fun?’ answered Jo, yawning dismally.” I am yawning, too, now; but I am glad to have stayed awake long enough to see Jo and the Professor happily united.

Now it is time to pack my suitcase once again. I’m off to the south of Wales and to London thereafter. So (as not to be forced into perpetuating the unfortunate “Happy Holidays”/”Merry Christmas” debate), I’ll say in my native German, “Frohe Weihnachten,” one and all!

Posted on

‘Tis the Season to Reappraise

Well, you know ‘tis the season when you are pleased to find the cardboard likeness of Ms. Claudette Colbert dangling from the branches of a chopped down evergreen. After all, ‘tis the season to revisit old favorites, living, dead, or imagined—the season when the prefix “re-“ becomes the hook on which to fasten our sentiments as we remember old tunes, reflect upon past times, and return unwanted presents. To be sure, it takes a bit of effort (and a want of respect for etymology) to respond to each wintry gale with the determination to regale; but as I am eager to rejoice even while battling a relentless cold with ever-diminishing resilience, I am applying any remedy I can get my hands, eyes, or ears on.

So, once I had finished decking the halls with belles of Hollywood, I caught up with the week’s worth of serialized Dickens I had recorded while still in London. I am referring to Mike Walker’s twenty-part radio adaptation of David Copperfield. Having given up on the BBC’s thrilling television series of Bleak House after missing a few installments, I was anxious to get my Victorian fix for the holidays.

The first five chapters of Walker’s serial faithfully dramatize David’s birth and childhood, bringing before us the acquaintances of his youth—shapeless Peggotty, little Em’ly, hopeful Micawber, and the ever-willing Barkis were all there. Only David was missing, or his point of view, at least. Instead of retaining the first-person narration, Walker decided to install Dickens as the teller of this tale, rather than David, whom the author appointed partly as a stand-in for himself.

The charming, well-remembered opening was chopped in favor of some well-nigh inarticulate blather: “When you care greatly about something or someone . . . well, this is a story about a lot of things and a lot of people. It is a story, . . . but is it my story?” A rather bumbling, awkward start, isn’t it, especially considering that the narrator was not only a first-rate storyteller, but a celebrated orator and performer of his own material.

This is how the real Mr. Dickens, who still wrote in complete, structurally sound sentences, had David introduce himself: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.” And these are pretty much the lines Richard Burton utters at the opening of the US Theatre Guild’s radio adaptation of the novel back on 24 December 1950. The BBC may be a refuge for radio drama—but it frequently blunders where US commercial broadcasting used to succeed.

Is anyone else tuning in? The last broadcastellan poll suggested that radio drama is not quite as doornail-dead as I may have made it out to be. I guess I ought not to infer from the silence of cyber-space that no one is familiar with the culture I chose to recover here. And yet, while researching for my dissertation, I realized just how many plays by noted American novelists, playwrights, and poets have been kept out of earshot by those who have us believe that radio drama is neither remarkable nor marketable. It is the act of refusal that turns art into refuse, and it takes some digging to resist it.

My latest poll is meant to draw further attention to this neglect. Few of these plays are still are heard on radio today, and fewer still are in print. Are these works really any worse than the television offerings that spawn glossy companions and trivia books?

But I am being prickly, aren’t I? And ‘tis the season to be otherwise . . .

Posted on

Dancing with Scissors? Bourne Tinkers With Burton at Sadler’s Wells

Well, I have returned from London—just in time to dodge the “poison clouds” that were expected to blanket the city on 12 December after what the Evening Standard proclaimed to be an “apocalyptic” conflagration in Hemel Hempstead. I did notice the black band of smoke on Sunday afternoon, but failed to match either my observations or my persistent respiratory problems (my cough being a New York City import) with the headlines I had read just hours earlier. I don’t know, somehow bold print on a front page always makes news spell something not pertaining or happening to me. What did happen to me that day was a theatrical experience that, while not quite a blot on the sunny skies of my holiday disposition, left me colder than the wet ashes of an extinguished winter blaze.

I am referring to Matthew Bourne’s production of Edward Scissorhands, the quirky fairy tale created for the screen by Tim Burton and scored by Danny Elfman back in 1990. Burton’s motion pictures are distinguished by a peculiar tension of aesthetics, a confrontation of Post-Modern and Victorian sensibilities, of the queer and sentimental, that conjures up the bathos of a melancholy drunkard slipping in and out of consciousness at an anything goes Halloween bash. The Penguin in the bleak cityscape of Batman Returns comes to mind; or the lonely giant of Big Fish. Sometimes this aesthetic exchange feels rather forced and irksomely disingenuous.

The opening scenes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a movie-qua-computer game about as charming and magical as a dead rabbit pulled out of a plastic top hat, seem as authentic in their winter-of-our-discontentedness as the patched-up seconds of a third-rate Oliver!. With the sweet-and-sour confectionery that is Edward Scissorhands, on the other, finger-licking good hand, Burton got it just about right.

I considered myself both tickled and stirred. Here, the dark scenes contrast with and accentuate the bright in such poignant counterpoint, it is like watching an energetic MTV-age cut of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Unfortunately, Bourne did not manage to infuse his stage version with the same bathos.

Whimsical scenery and a general busyness of dancers jogging about in costumes apparently on loan from a touring company of Hairspray are violently yoked with more or less static scenes depicting Edward in quiet despair. I could have told Bourne that making Edward both move and moving would prove an impossible assignment: you simply can’t dance with scissors.

Edward cuts a dashing figure, all right, but it’s the topiary. At one point, this good twin of Freddy Krueger sheds the shears to take his limbs for a spin; but that only underscores the weaknesses of Bourne’s less than cutting edge production. It would be less painful to watch a clipped wings edition of Swan Lake, the resplendent ballet spectacular that had me in tears at Sadler’s Wells the previous year.

To borrow from an old Saturday Night Live sketch, the modern dance theatre version of Edward Scissorhands at Sadler’s Wells is neither modern, nor dance, nor theater…. Now talk amongst yourselves.

Posted on

On This Day in 1930: Old Sleuth Re-emerges in New Medium

Well, before taking a moment to give my page a bit of a makeover and getting all gimmicky by setting up a poll to encourage reader participation (despite my own difficulties with such surveys), I tuned in again to BBC 4 last night and watched another fine British thriller: Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949). Sufficiently motivated by the experience, I promptly cast my vote at IMDb, which is something I am just getting into the habit of doing.

Obsession is told mainly from the perspective of the criminal, a jealous husband determined to do away with his wife’s lover; eventually, Scotland Yard is on his case, and the storytelling loses some of its focus as the inspector keeps calling and occasionally takes the camera along with him. Still, with its emphasis on the execution and prevention rather than the detection of a crime, Obsession is a psychological thriller as opposed to a whodunit, the genre revolutionized in the 1880s by Conan Doyle and his famed Sherlock Holmes stories.

I have always enjoyed a solid whodunit, even though I prefer them in print instead of visualized on the screen or dramatized for radio, as I explained previously. I nonetheless put aside my copy of Agatha Christie’s Poirot puzzler The Clocks to commemorate a milestone in radio mystery drama. It was on this day, 20 October, in 1930, that master detective Holmes and his sidekick-chronicler, the logic-deficient Dr. Watson solved their first mystery on the air.

The mystery, “The Speckled Band,” was a familiar one, to be sure, as was the actor who assumed the role of the brilliant if conceited armchair detective. The performer before the microphone that night was none other than William Gillette, who had not only played Holmes more than a thousand times before but had rewritten some of his adventures to create a stage melodrama that was to serve as his star vehicle for over three decades.

As a Theatre Magazine critic pointed out, Gillette “himself cut the radio score, arranged by Edith Meiser [. . .], directed his cast, and spoke into the microphone from the special glass-curtained stage of the National Broadcasting Company’s Times Square studio” atop the theater that had been “the scene of Gillette’s farewell return to the footlights” earlier that year.

Gillette was already in his late 70s and did not return to the microphone for subsequent episodes; but, being described by a New York Times reviewer as standing “erect and unbending” and as having a “clear, precise, vibrant” voice, the aged thespian was lured out of retirement now and again to play the part for several years longer, returning to the airwaves once more for the 18 November 1935 Lux Radio Theatre production of his stage success.

Holmes survived Gillette’s death in 1937 and continued for another decade to solve mysteries on US radio, even though he had to face plenty of competition on the blood-speckled bandwidths. Like the motion picture series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the Holmes adventures on the air also played an important role in home front motivation, endearing Americans to their at times veddy peculiar and snobby sounding allies in Britain. After the war, the British reclaimed Holmes and continued to dramatize his adventures on BBC radio.

Although I was not immediately taken by such pastiche, the American dramatizations eventually won me over with their charm. Retaining Watson as the narrator added much to the cozy atmosphere of these miniature mysteries; the banter between Holmes and his friend supplied the wit; and the thrills were not wanting either, as aforementioned writer-adaptor Meiser managed to keep the guessing game going despite the challenge of making the short plays intelligible by reducing the number of suspects and dropping fairly conspicuous hints.

So, as the sun is setting earlier or refuses to appear altogether on these gray autumn days, I will sit back more often to join Dr. Watson at his fireside, listening attentively to his tales of intrigue and murder. Just don’t call it an obsession . . .

Posted on

How a Picture Perfect Brief Encounter Dissolved into a Not-So-Still Life

Last night, when it was time to dim the lights, set up the screen, and decide upon a movie to take in, I could be convinced to leave Broadway and Hollywood behind to make it David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945). Mind you, it did not require much coaxing. I purchased a copy of the film a few weeks ago, but believed myself to be not deserving of experiencing it just yet. Some motion pictures are so grand that they demand not only our attention but our emotional receptiveness.

I have always thought it possible, and indeed imperative, to approach art with a keen eye and an open heart, to feel it and to feel like thinking about it at the same time. To examine Brief Encounter without being enveloped by it would be tantamount to noting the ingredients of a great meal without taking time to savor it.

Only after I had dried the tears I was neither inclined nor able to hold back, did I go in search of another interpretation of the story—cinema reconstituted as radio drama. A while back, I did as much with Lean’s Blithe Spirit, but knew right away that, in this case, radio could not hold a candle to a portrait so delicately outlined and exquisitely lit.

When the Theatre Guild reworked both Brief Encounter and Still Life, the Noel Coward play of which the film is an adaptation, the show’s producers made a number of sensible choices. They managed to bring Ingrid Bergman to the microphone to assume the role of Laura Jesson, the married woman who inwardly rehearses the miracle and misery of her recent indiscretion rather than confessing it openly to the husband beside her. Subtle and dignified, Bergman is perfect for the part, her emotive voice well suited to capturing moments of dignity under the assault of passion.

At the time of the broadcast (6 April 1947), Bergman starred on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, along with Sam Wanamaker and Romney Brent. Both her costars were heard in the Guild’s “Still Life,” with Wanamaker as Laura’s lover and Brent as her husband. Unlike Bergman, the two male leads do not quite communicate the vulnerability with which Trevor Howard and Cyril Raymond invested their parts.

Watching the film, I was under the impression that Laura was tormented by her overwhelming emotions, whereas the radio version suggested that she was torn apart by the two disparate men in her life, by the one wanting so little and the other demanding so much. What contributed to this impression was the way in which the adaptation by radio playwright and noted broadcast historian Erik Barnouw reframed Laura’s narrative without having access to a camera’s perspectival manipulations.

Lean’s film opens with the lovers’ last parting at the train station, a final farewell rendered furtive and mute by the sudden intrusion of one of Laura’s chatty acquaintances. Before the story of Laura’s affair unfolds in retrospect, the viewer already knows that something went terribly wrong for her, that the man who merely touches her shoulder has a stronger hold over her than she can permit herself to make public. Close-ups convey Laura’s grief, her isolation.

The radio version, on the other hand, opens with a scene of domestic life, as Laura’s husband struggles to control his two children who are unwilling to go to sleep before their mother returns home, presumably from a day of shopping. The listener is thus encouraged to prejudge Laura’s actions, to question the indiscretion of an inattentive mother who leaves her charge in the care of her husband while amusing herself with another man. Before she utters even one word of remorse, Laura is already a marked woman. In other words, whereas radio listeners are invited to accuse or pardon her, the film audience is given access to Laura’s own sense of guilt, her inner turmoil.

Generally, radio plays are quite capable of performing close-ups by means of whispered or closely-miked narration; in this particular cinematic challenge, however, the camera suggests so much more than unillustrated speech can express. When Laura acts on the impulse to end her life, her movements and features (pictured above) bespeak the horror that is her emotional imbalance.

In Barnouw’s adaptation, Laura merely talks in retrospect of having wanted to “throw [herself] under his [that is, her lover’s] train”—an unfortunate prosaic shortcut for the sweep and sway of Lean’s storytelling, aurally underscored images that reminded me, despite my love for the non-visual medium, what a sacrifice it can be to take leave of one’s complementary senses.

Posted on

Hoping for More Scandal; or, When the “head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique”

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the pleasure of being lectured on sentiment and sensationalism in one of the back rows of The School for Scandal. It was a lesson conveyed with great wit and delivered without frills by the Northern Broadsides theatre company. I didn’t expect Sheridan’s characters to gossip in marked northern accents and thought Maria was less of a prize now that she was shouting just as angrily as the “odious” and “disagreeable” people around her. Generally, however, the coarseness of tongue lent realism to the idle chatter of the upper crust.

The Radio Guild players in 1930

Gone was the Cowardian disparity between elocution and vulgarity, between high class and mean instincts. Rather than being vocal acrobats in a Wildean vein, the graduates of this School were crass, brazen, and dangerous mudslingers. Only Joseph Surface was given the slick treatment in voice and appearance, a suitable gloss to reflect his falsehood. What might an American radio production do with such caricatures, I wondered, and went in pursuit of more Scandal on the air.

When aiming at respectability, US radio of the 1930s and 1940s not infrequently availed itself of British drama. Soap operas were for the kitchen—but Shakespeare and Pinero were for the parlor. As I put it in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio, Sir Benjamin Backbite’s remark about Mrs. Evergreen is an apt comment on US radio drama, a novel form of production that often exhausted itself in re-productions.”

“[W]hen she has finished her face,” Sir Benjamin quips, the unseen Mrs. Evergreen “joins it on so badly to her neck, that she looks like a mended statue, in which the connoisseur may see at once that the head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique.” Now, radio drama truly was a “mended statue,” a patched-up art form that rarely resembled the genuine article it tried to copy.

In radio, the trunk (the smart console) was modern, but the head, the boardroom of executives in charge of programming, was decidedly “antique,” that is, backward-looking rather than avant-garde when it came to defining wholesome or commercially viable entertainment. To be sure, in the case of Pre-Victorian plays like Sheridan’s Scandal, mending the statue might have required some whitewash to tone down its display of adultery and cover up its hints of abortion.

Unfortunately, the productions of Scandal as heard on the Radio Guild program are no longer extant, since no transcription have been preserved or recovered. Indeed, nearly the entire series seems to have been destroyed, an act as scandalous as the reputation of Sheridan’s characters. This is all the more lamentable considering that the Radio Guild (pictured above, anno 1930) was the first major theater anthology on US network radio. Beginning in 1929, just days after Wall Street laid its infamous egg, it brought free theater into the homes of millions, producing plays ranging from Shakespeare to Wilde, from Goldsmith to Boucicault.

Even if its producers kept their heads mainly in antique trunks, Radio Guild surely sounds like a statue worth mending, if only its pieces had been scattered instead of obliterated. So, if you find a fragment, please fling it my way.

Posted on

How the Blind Medium Immaterialized Coward’s Blithe Spirit

I guess I am still too wrapped up in US culture to have given British cinema its due. So, last weekend, while on a DVD shopping spree in Manchester, I made an attempt to rectify this cultural lopsidedness. Among my purchases was a copy of David Lean’s Blithe Spirit. Or is it more appropriate to call it Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, even after a noted director has . . . transubstantiated it? Generally, stage plays are treated like the brainchildren of their authors, while motion pictures are attributed to their directors. How many classic films could you trace back to their screenwriter parentage without resorting to the Internet Movie Database?

Anyway, it is an irksome inconsistency I grappled with when I needed to decide how to present and define radio plays for my dissertation (the aforementioned “Etherized Victorians”). Far from being a dead issue, the question arose anew when I followed up my screening of Blithe Spirit (1945) by taking in two radio disincarnations of Coward’s 1941 play.

The first one, soundstaged for Everything for the Boys on 16 May 1944, preceded the world premier of Lean’s feature by a year. Its adaptor was none other than Arch Oboler, probably the biggest name—and not the smallest ego—in US radio drama. Whether daring Americans to turn their Lights Out! or to put on a pair of 3D glasses, Oboler was hardly a subtle craftsman; he certainly was ill-suited to deliver the wit of Noel Coward.

Not surprisingly, Oboler’s rewrite of Blithe Spirit is a humorless affair, a tepid romance rather than a wicked romp. Presented to a live studio audience, the reconstituted comedy elicited only one laugh and a few mild chuckles; nor did it deserve more. The soundman was permitted to break a few dishes—flung by the two ghostly wives of the “hag-ridden” protagonist—but the damage was done largely by eraser, as hardly any of the play’s celebrated witticisms survived the adaptor’s indiscriminate airbrushing.

The challenge seems a formidable one when the play to be radio-readied involves ghosts visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, as well as the flesh and fancy of a decidedly material psychic. A filter microphone and a few hints from The Shadow will not suffice when wit is what is wanting.

Aside from a clipped and colorless script, the casting of Madame Arcati—the robust medium with a penchant for sandwiches, physical exercise, and dry Martinis—made matters worse: fluttery and frazzled, she lost much of her comic weight when portrayed by Edna Best. The Theatre Guild on the Air, at least, had access to the original New York cast. It also had the benefit of thirty-five extra minutes, and a script that retained much of the sparkle of Coward’s virtual sex comedy.

On 23 February 1947, nearly two years after Oboler’s inept dabbling in Coward’s froth, the Theater Guild revived Blithe Spirit with considerably greater success. It also broke a few dishes too many (to the audible delight of the studio audience to whom following the job of the soundmen had all the relish of an inside joke); but it kept both the spirit-flesh dynamics and civility-vulgarity dialectics relatively intact.

Sure, Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati fudges a few good lines, and the attempt to explain the fact that Elvira, the irreverent revenant, is visible only to the tormented male and not to his second wife is almost as clumsy as my prose here. Still, having missed the recent London revival of the play , this was a more than tolerable substitute.

However much it tickled me to watch the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford (captured above in an ethereal fade) as she throws herself into the role of Madame Arcati, the Theater Guild adaptation brought the wit of Coward’s lines home to me like no coating of Technicolor ever could.