Category: Film

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Going His Way: The Bing Crosby Trail

Well, I’m on his way. Instead of Going Hollywood, where the WGA strike is beginning to make itself felt, I am listening all this week to the BBC, taking in drama, music, and talk. Late to catch up, I started on The Bing Crosby Trail, a six week tour whose first installment took me on a road to California, New York City, and Spokane, where listeners get to meet the daughter, the widow, and many of the contemporaries of the man known as Bing.

With The Bing Crosby Trail, producer and host Michael Freedland, a prolific biographer (whose audio portrait “Danny Kaye: UNICEF’s Jester” is available online until 12 November), attempts a departure from the traditional approach to telling a life story: “This is not just another biographical series,” Freedland insists in his introduction. “You could say it is more in the way of geography than history.” He also issues a “warning” to those about to follow him: “No obvious star names on the roster here. No sycophantic interviews with actors or other singers who, in Bing’s lifetime, called him great to his face and whispered other things behind his back.”

Instead, Freedland has been traveling around the US, “talking to people whose life Bing touched.” Not that those he interviews are nobodies: Buddy Bregman (“Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings”), veteran Paramount producer A.C. Lyles, and historian Ken Barnes (who produced the CD box set “Swingin’ With Bing”) have all gone on Freedland’s record.

“My life is like an open book,” Bing is heard singing (lines from his “That’s What Life Is All About”); and the man with the microphone who is out to capture that life is taking Bing by his word. Not content to “glance back through the pages” of printed volumes, he tries to pick up bits and pieces that perhaps never made it into any biography. Sounds good to me.

And yet, the cross-country Crosby Trail gets lost on a Road to Utopia, an ambition that must remain a dream. Freedland has gone out of his way to come away with comparatively little. The tour is not off to a promising start. We are take on a “winding mountain road above Malibu” to hear Mary Crosby sharing the insight that her father enjoyed playing golf and liked to whistle a lot. Does one really have to travel way out west for such a soundbite?

A subsequent inspection of Bing’s statue at Gonzaga University in Spokane and a tour of the Student Center housing the Crosby Museum are altogether misguided in their visual-mindedness. I’d rather be listening to Bing whistle than being given this runaround, blindfolded. At times so glossy as to make me cross, the Crosby Trail is a gross betrayal of the medium.

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Silenced Movie: The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918)

Generally, we don’t regard our movie comings and goings as once-in-a-lifetime events, no matter how extraordinary the experience. In fact, we are inclined to opt for a rerun if a film manages to make us wax hyperbolic in our enthusiasm for it. To be sure, not many moving images have this force; nowadays, they are so readily reproduced, so instantly retrieved, that many of us won’t even bother to sit down for them, knowing that they can be had whenever we are ready for them. We miss out on so much precisely because we are comforted to the point of indifference by the thought that we do not have to miss anything at all. When I write “we,” I do number myself among those who are at-our-fingertipsy with technology. Last weekend’s screening of The Life Story of David Lloyd George at the Fflics film festival here in Wales was a reminder that films can indeed be rare; that they are fragile and subject to forces, natural and otherwise, that cause them to vanish from view.

The Life Story of David Lloyd George was produced in 1918; directed by the prolific but less-than-acclaimed British director Maurice Elvey. Now, I do not quite share the view that the hugely prolific Elvey was a hack. His talkie The Phantom Fiend (1932), with Hitchcock’s Lodger Ivor Novello may not be a cinematic masterpiece; but for all its technical flaws it nearly as experimental as Hitchcock’s version of the old Jack the Ripper thriller. Aside from Novello’s piano playing, Elvey makes great and at times reflexively sly use of the telephone, as he readies the silent version for sound. More accomplished still is Elvey’s second version of Hindle Wakes (1927), a bleak working class melodrama I mentioned here previously.

Like Hindle Wakes, Life Story was partially shot on location in Wales; but in the latter film, the scenery is no mere backdrop for romance, of which the documentarian if propagandist Life Story is almost entirely devoid (notwithstanding the sentimental scenes involving Lloyd George’s relationship with his daughter, portrayed by Hitchcock’s partner Alma Reville). It is the soil in which flourished the career of a British Prime Minister (pictured), the reformer they called the “Welsh Wizard.”

Elvey begins his biography of Lloyd George very nearly ab ovo by presenting us with a shot of his birth certificate. Life Story strives to be historically accurate, but is unapologetically propagandist in its portrayal of the Prime Minister’s accomplishments during the days of the Great War, near the conclusion of which the film was produced. The final image is of Lloyd George (portrayed by Norman Page) looking at his audience, insisting that there must not be another war.

His audience? That, of course, is the crux, the tragedy, and the mystery of Elvey’s D. W. Griffithean epic: it was never publicly screened during the Prime Minister’s lifetime, never referred to by those involved in its making, and discovered not until the mid-1990s, at the home of Lloyd George’s grandson. As film historian Kevin Brownlow remarked in his introduction of the film at the Fflics festival, it is equally astonishing and deplorable that no documentary has as yet been attempted to investigate the film’s disappearance and the silence surrounding it for nearly eight decades.

The Life Story of David Lloyd George is soon being released on DVD, another rarity to become widely available and largely ignored; but it was the bravura performance of silent film composer Neil Brand, whose dramatic underscoring of the cinematographically not always compelling 152-minute biopic made for a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical experience.

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Du a Gwyn: Shades and Shadows of Life in Wales

Well, I am used to it. That is, I used to be. Seeing images of my surroundings on the big screen is rather a common experience if you live in the cinematographically well-mapped center of New York City. Moving from Gotham to Cymru (that is, Wales) seemed to push my life effectively off the map I had gone by in the shaping of my existence ever since I first set eyes on the Big Apple. I have been reluctant to discard the old plan in exchange for a new atlas, one that matches my present environs, one that might help me to position instead of dislocating myself. This journal has been largely a mode of escape, a vehicle of expression designed to transport me from a place in which I have not yet found a voice. Just from what am I trying to get away, though? And how much longer can I get away with using a chart of my own making, drawn, as it were, with my eyes closed to the world?

You might say that moving from and vowing never to return to what is supposedly my home (my native Germany), whether to Manhattan (where I lived for about fifteen years) or to Wales (where I have been residing nearly three years now), is a continual rehearsal of my sense of displacement as a gay person, as someone not quite at home in any society, as someone suspicious of the very concept of home. As an expatriate, I have made the experience of being born an outsider a matter of choice.

I have been reminded of my estrangement—and the unease of longing and not belonging—while attending Fflics, the aforementioned festival of classic films representing Welsh life or a Wales imagined elsewhere. How queer, for instance, to feel alienated by The Corn Is Green (1945), a Hollywood movie based on a play by gay actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams and starring gay icon Bette Davis. Here is a studio version of Wales that bears little resemblance to any Cymru past or present, a film that now strikes me as disingenuous and calculating as the strumpet portrayed by Joan Lorring.

Three years ago, I would not have been able to tell that the accents in Corn are as phony as the painted backdrops. However willing I am to suspend disbelief, I cannot go so far as to suppress my new knowledge and experience for the sake of entering into a world that commercially exploits foreignness without embracing it. Williams’s own struggle to come to terms with his marginality is deproblematized, his secret code obliterated. What remains is the missionary message that it takes someone ignorant of your origins to assist in what amounts to a purge, to prompt and prod you into becoming someone you ought to be according to superimposed standards.

An extreme form of such reconditioning is presented in The Silent Village (1943), a propagandist documentary imagining the invasion of a Welsh (and linguistically entirely non-English) community by the Nazis, whose first act is to prohibit the use of the Welsh language. Meeting with silent resistance, then active revolt, the fascist invaders effectively take the town off the map, killing its men and razing its homes in retaliation of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official.

It is a remarkably restrained, unsentimental and unhysterical recreation of the Lidice massacre, acted out by ordinary folk in a Welsh mining town not unlike Lidice. While the town of Cwmgiedd was being turned into a symbol, it lost none of its character during or as a result of the location shoot, the iconography of its everyday being carefully rendered. Verisimilitude turned to reality, pastness to present, when one of the Welsh villagers, a schoolboy back in 1943, spoke after the screening of the film about the town’s non-hostile takeover by the British film crew.

Utter hokum by comparison is Graham Cutts’s The Rat (1925), a pseudo-Parisian melodrama reveling in its own irrelevance. Gay Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello plays a tormented object of heterosexual desire, an apache who comes to value the love of his gal pal over the glamorous world that enslaves him even as he seeks to conquer it. Penned by Novello himself (under the telling pseudonym “David L’Estrange”), The Rat invites decoding; but even if the code can be cracked, the film remains impersonal, sheltered as it is by its own artifice.

Rather more personally relevant to my experience is the image of the stranger in Proud Valley (1940) starring Paul Robeson as a black American introducing himself into a Welsh coal-mining community. “Why, damn and blast it,” one of the miners protests, “aren’t we all black down it that pit?”

As I learned reading Cadewch i Paul Robeson Ganu!, a fascinating account of Robeson’s ties to Wales, the actor-singer-activist found here a “cymuned o’r un anian,” a kindred community. “There is no place in the world I like more than Wales,” he once exclaimed. He expressed his solidarity with the Welsh miners, whom he first encountered and aided in 1929, singing for them (via transatlantic exchange) even when he was barred from international travel after his passport was confiscated by the US government.

It is a “kindred community” like this to which I have yet to gain access; it is this sense of being embraced and found valuable that I have yet to experience here. I realize that, for this to happen, Wales and Welsh have to become a more integral part of my existence as I am sharing it in this journal. So, after following a haunted and hunting Ivor Novello (as a suspicious foreigner and loner) into the London fog shrouding The Phantom Fiend (1932), the underappreciated talkie take on Hitchcock’s Lodger, I am discovering the actor anew in a Welsh setting established in speech and song by Cliff Gordon’s radio comedy “Choir Practice: A Storm in a Welsh Teacup” (produced in 1946) and subsequently adapted for the screen as Valley of Song (1953), another one of the films shown as part of the Fflics festival. Here, at least, the idiom rings true . . .

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From Here . . . to Eternity: Deborah Kerr (1921-2007)

It was only two weeks ago that I celebrated her 86th birthday and caught up with her early career by watching Major Barbara (1941). Today, the world learned about the death of Deborah Kerr, who passed away on 16 October 2007 after a long illness. While her name is on everyone’s tongue, I am going to keep her voice in my ear, listening to some of her radio performances of the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s, a busy time in the life of the British actress gone Hollywood. “I just wasn’t destined to be a homebody,” Kerr told the readers of The Fan’s Own Film Annual back in 1960, providing her British audience with a glimpse of her peripatetic existence, her life in Hollywood, the challenges of ploughing “through the jungle on an adventurous safari” (for King Solomon’s Mines, shot in Africa), or going on a coast-to-coast tour (thirty-five weeks, forty cities) to play Laura Reynolds in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, having starred in its successful Broadway run, which began on her 32nd birthday in 1953.

Yes, Kerr’s life was “one long round of packing luggage and then more or less living out of it for anywhere from four to fourteen months at a stretch.” Yet, through the wonders of the wireless, she still managed to enter the homes of millions of Americans who tuned to Jack Benny, the Screen Guild Theater, or the Hollywood Star Playhouse.

Now, I have never had the chance to see Kerr on stage, where she appeared, for instance, in a West End revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green, the film version of which (starring Bette Davis) I am going to catch at the Fflics film festival here in Aberystwyth next week. To me, radio, not film, is the next best thing to the theater. True, Kerr made her US radio debut at a time when live performances gave way to taped ones; but, even when its sounds are canned, radio still has the kind of intimacy not achieved on celluloid, no matter how small the image you are watching on your personal computer or television set.

Beginning in 1947, the year she moved from Britain to Hollywood, Kerr appeared on a number of popular or prestigious radio programs. Even though she is better known for starring in a film based on a sensational bestseller that, like few others, attacked the radio industry of the late 1940s, Frederic Wakeman’s previously mentioned The Hucksters, Kerr did go on the air, contaminated as it was, to promote her films and meet her audience.

In 1947, 1951 and 1952, she stepped onto the soundstage of the Lux Radio Theatre, starring in “Vacation from Marriage,” an adaptation of Alexander Korda’s Perfect Strangers, in which she had starred opposite Robert Donat back in 1945. For Lux, Kerr also reprised her roles in Edward, My Son (1949) and King Solomon’s Mines (1950).

As previously mentioned, Kerr played the title role in the NBC University Theater an adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (3 April 1949). She went on Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show to recreate a scene from The Women (17 December 1950), and was heard on the long-running Suspense program in a thriller titled “The Lady Pamela” (31 March 1952).

Just what or who was “The Lady Pamela”? Not your Richardsonian heroine, to be sure. The name conjures Silver Spoon romances; but the spoons all end up in the lady’s pockets. Shamela’s more like it. Written by the prolific radio playwright Antony Ellis, the play opens as Pamela Barnes lays her eyes on a tiara, browsing in a New York antique shop that is promptly held up.

As it turns out, the “Lady” was in on the robbery. A tough, no-nonsense crook, she takes $500 out of the cut of her partner in crime for slapping her rather too realistically during the holdup. The police are soon on her case and “Lady Pamela” lands in the slammer; but the loot remains missing. Released nearly three years later, she returns to New York in search of the stolen goods and the guys who got away with it.

Always the “Lady,” the “first thing [she] did was to get [her] hair done,” to restore the old front. She meets a charming if hardly perfect stranger, one Mr. Wylie, who promises to assist her in finding her former collaborator—for a price:

Pamela: In other words, before you tell me where he is, I have to agree to help you kill him.  Is that the idea?

Wylie: If you want your dough.  That’s the idea.

Pamela: I want my dough, Mr. Wylie.  Where is he?

“You’re quite a girl,” Wylie tells her, after she reveals to him that she was the mastermind behind the robbery. “And are you ‘quite a boy’?” she asks, before she slaps him, too. “You are much too emancipated,” she is told by the one who got away, now a “very top dog in black market,” whom she tracks down in London and confronts over cocktails. “I think I would have killed him there,” she confides in the audience, the play being written in the first person. “If I had had a gun, or a knife, I would have killed him.” Would she? You bet!

Billed as a “dramatic report,” “The Lady Pamela” is a sly playing against type for the generally dignified and often reserved Kerr, who gets her chance to play an American, rather than a British version, of a dame. It is Anna gone Warner Bros., a heroine stripping her period costumes and sipping her Long Island Ice Tea without sympathy. Only on the wireless, folks—Kerr like you’ve never seen her . . .

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Elinor Glyn: The Madam Who Had a Name for It

Well, it is Rita Hayworth’s birthday. And that of Arthur Miller, the reluctant radio playwright. Both have featured in this journal, which is reason enough to celebrate instead the birth of the “Madam” who brought “sex appeal” to page and screen by calling it “It.” Her name is Elinor Glyn, born on this day, 16 October, in 1864. “Fate and circumstances have combined to give Elinor Glyn a halo of sensationalism,” remarked Alice M. Williamson, the authoress of the aforementioned Alice in Movieland, from whose delightful tour of 1920s Hollywood the above portrait has been taken and freely adapted. No kidding, Glyn caused a scandal with her novel Three Weeks, published back in 1907, and came from her native England to Hollywood in the early 1920s.

Glyn, to be sure, was full of “It,” even if she felt compelled to cover it up. In the American edition of Three Weeks, for instance, Madam offered the following defense:

For me “the Lady” was a deep study, the analysis of a strange Slav nature, who, from circumstances and education and her general view of life, was beyond the ordinary laws of morality. If I were making the study of a Tiger, I would not give it the attributes of a spaniel, because the public, and I myself, might prefer a spaniel!

Yes, Glyn had learned how to package “It,” wrapping it up to be presentable while promising something you could not wait to unwrap. “I am only the conductor,” Glyn reportedly remarked, “of these glorious currents of health and hope and joy and success, but it is good to help pass magnetic vitality on to others.”

“How it would surprise readers of that long ago success Three Weeks, who think of Madam Glyn as a siren on a tiger skin, to hear this “line of talk” from her,” Williamson marveled. Her readers would get a chance to spot Glyn, who had the last word in Peter Bogdanovich’s Cat’s Meow (2001), in the hit comedy Show People, starring Marion Davies, whom Glyn visited at her Welsh retreat, the previously visited St. Donats Castle.

Glyn’s move to Hollywood, as Williamson recalls, had been a difficult and frustrating one. She had

almost everything against her.  She was supposed, even then, to direct a picture which would be made from her books; but in truth she was allowed to have no authority at all.

She was merely a picturesque figure-head, to whom those really in authority tried to be polite while being evasive—she was permitted to tell a pretty young star what style of hair-dressing became her best, or what the daughter of an English duke would wear when she “followed the guns” in the shooting season […].   If Madam Glyn went east, fondly imagining that she had directed a film, she would see it on the screen and hardly be able to recognise it as her won. But all is changed now. She is trusted and respected as a director. The girl stars whom she moulds for their parts in her pictures feel her fascination, and believe that her influence upon them doesn’t end when their work together is finished.

Now, pardon me, while I am under the influence of The Price of Things, one of the novels Glyn adapted for the screen and directed as well. Its opening lines promise the tale of a married woman who did not mind the influence of a thrilling, if thrillingly ugly, stranger who encourages her “to banish all thought.”

“What do you mean by thought? How can one not think?” Amaryllis Ardayre’s large grey eyes opened in a puzzled way. She was on her honeymoon in Paris at a party at the Russian Embassy, and until now had accepted things and not speculated about them. She had lived in the country and was as good as gold. 

She was accepting her honeymoon with her accustomed calm, although it was not causing her any of the thrills which Elsie Goldmore, her school friend, had assured her she should discover therein.

Honeymoons! Heavens! But perhaps it was because Sir John was dull. He looked dull, she thought, as he stood there talking to the Ambassador. A fine figure of an Englishman but—yes—dull. The Russian, on the contrary, was not dull. He was huge and ugly and rough-hewn—his eyes were yellowish-green and slanted upwards and his face was frankly Calmuck. But you knew that you were talking to a personality—to one who had probably a number of unknown possibilities about him tucked away somewhere.

John had none of these.  One could be certain of exactly what he would do on any given occasion—and it would always be his duty.  The Russian was observing this charming English bride critically; she was such a perfect specimen of that estimable race—well-shaped, refined and healthy.  Chock full of temperament too, he reflected—when she should discover herself.  Temperament and romance and even passion, and there were shrewdness and commonsense as well.

“An agreeable task for a man to undertake her education,” and he wished that he had time.

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Jigsaw Puzzled

Well, there she was again, flitting across the screen … unexpected, uncredited—and gone within seconds. You know, the kind of walk-on out of narrative nowhere they call a cameo. How strange, I thought, when I saw her passing by, having just had her on my mind (and in this journal) a few minutes earlier. I could hardly believe my eyes.  Yes (as I shared earlier today on Alternative Film Guide), Marlene Dietrich refused to get out of my head last night, even though the anniversary I had just commemorated (her guesting on the Abbott and Costello Show back in 1942) was hardly a memorable one.

There were many other radio anniversaries to consider that day; but somehow it was Marlene’s name that caught my eye, my ear pricking up to the chance of hearing her voice, forced as it was to utter lines so utterly unworthy of her allure and talent. That was that, I thought, as I closed my computer.

Most nights, just before bedtime, I roll down the blind to screen old movies, all of which are duly recorded in the list to the right of this. I watch whatever I can lay my hands on, even though those hands of mine tend to reach for Hollywood fare of 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s, British and German classics or contemporary film being rare exceptions to this rule of my thumbs.

Recently, I asked a fellow web journalist, the sharer of Relative Esoterica, what it is that makes her decide which movie to watch on any given night. It would not be easy for me to answer that question. When last I was in New York City, I purchased a collection of 100 Thrillers, neatly boxed and taking up no more space than a couple of hardcover novels. Many of the titles I watched this year come from out of that one box, however exasperating the quality of the print may be at times.

Going through that box as if it were filled with candy, slowly getting to those items you either don’t care for or are suspicious of (it might have one of those awful pink fillings), I dug up an item titled Jigsaw. I knew nothing about it, other than that it promised a reencounter with the aforementioned Franchot Tone, who was well past his prime when Jigsaw was shot.

As it turns out, Jigsaw (1949) was a veritable radio drama reunion party, being that it was directed by noted radio drama actor-writer-producer Fletcher Markle (previously mentioned here), and co-written by him and fellow radio writer Vincent McConnor, once known for adapting plays and novels for anthology series like NBC University Theater. The original story is by one John Roeburt, himself an expert on radio thrillers. I recalled his name from his 1940s article “Outlook for Radio Mysteries,” in which he remarked:

In its modern adjustment, the radio mystery show, all types and kinds, lives austerely, with a sharp frugality. The fat has been burned away; costs have been trimmed to the bone. Fees and salaries, for performers, writers, directors, are minimum scale only; musical backing is mainly dubbed in from royalty-free records purchased abroad. The mystery show seldom emanates live, as in halcyon years; the rule today is the mechanical taping of shows.

Jigsaw is not a big budget production, either, a trimming of costs to which Markle must have long been accustomed. In fact, he recruited many of his actors from radio. On hand were radio stalwarts like Myron McCormick, Brainerd Duffield, Hedley Rainnie (virtually a stranger to film), and the remarkable Hester Sondergaard (whose voice I last heard in one of Norman Corwin’s plays for radio). There was no getting away from the aural medium that evening. Not that Markle tried. He employed the device of interior narration, as one character commented on another, without uttering a syllable. It is a peculiar form of narrative that only a long career in radio can explain.

Jigsaw offers rather more than it is able to deliver. It wants to be Boomerang, say, or Arthur Miller’s Focus; but it soon gets lost in a romantic tangle that seems at once conventional and imposed. Still, Markle managed to rally quite a few noted figures from screen, press, and radio to lend their support for his directorial debut. And, yes, among those players was none other than Marlene Dietrich, who, in 1948, had twice been directed by Markle in radio productions of “Arabesque” (heard on Markle’s Studio One, co-starring Rainnie) and “Madame Bovary” (soundstaged by the aforementioned Ford Theater, adapted by Duffield).

So, had I read up on Jigsaw beforehand, I might not have been quite so bewildered by this reencounter with Dietrich. Yes, I can explain it now, citing my own ignorance as the source of my surprise; but I can’t quite explain it away. After what I said last night about her desperate attempt at self-promotion on the Abbott and Costello Show, the leading lady just passed me by, noiselessly, as I stared at the screen, gasping in puzzlement. Coincidence, my eye!

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Hear "What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have"

Well, they should have been slipped a Mickey Finn, for starters. Those boys in the back room scribbling gags for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, I mean. On this day, 15 October, in 1942, the comedy duo was called upon to accommodate Marlene Dietrich, who stepped behind the mike to promote what would turn out to be yet another dud: Pittsburgh. Like Hollywood’s film producers, the writers went no farther than to hark back to Dietrich’s image-revamping comeback Destry Rides Again, released three years earlier. Once again, Dietrich was heard singing a few notes of the raucous barroom number that had pre-war audiences “Falling in Love Again” with the formerly untouchable and largely humorless goddess.

Just a few notes, mind. After which promising introduction, the echo of good old Frenchy faded and gave way for the undistinguished lines of a Wild West sketch involving an alleged bank robbery, Bud and Lou going in search of the culprit, and Dietrich, taken as far from her German roots and world politics as the sound-only, accent accentuating medium would allow, emerging as the prime suspect. “What a fresh kid!” Lou exclaims. “What a stale plot,” the guest star is permitted to sneer.

Even without much of one, Dietrich could still rely on an asset as great as her “expensive pins,” of which bespoke and highly insured commodities the writers went through great length to remind the listener by having her talk of the “pin money” her character (“Marlene,” AKA “Black Pete”) had stashing away in her stockings.

Dietrich could read out the box office receipts that qualified her as poison and still make you swallow and like whatever “leperous distilment” (to class this up with some soundbites from Hamlet) oozed into the “porches” of the ear from that celebrated throat of hers. Hope lay at the bottom of her voice box. She could wrap you around her little finger with her vocal chords alone. Pardon the mixed bag of metaphors; this writer is having an off night, too.

Not that the censors were particularly awake that day. Discovering where Marlene is hiding her savings, self-confessed “baaaad boy” Costello, who earlier told his pal about being in love with a bow-legged cowgirl who had a “terrible time getting her calves together,” is invited to take a peek at the secret spot, exclaiming: “What a place to make a deposit!”

However tacky, getting any word in between those Camel commercials on the Abbott and Costello very nearly translated into money in the bank back in 1942, the year during which the show reportedly averaged higher Hooper ratings than Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Fred Allen.

“The power of radio to help careers has never been better illustrated than in the case of the Rowdy Boys of Stage, Screen, and Airwaves,” contemporary commentators Jack Gaver and Dave Stanley remarked (in There’s Laughter in the Air! [1945]). In 1938, they got their break from vaudeville on Kate Smith’s variety show, which featured them until 1940. They landed a prominent time slot filling in for Fred Allen during his 1940 summer hiatus, by which time they were well on their way to movie stardom. In 1942, they topped the popularity poll conducted by the Motion Picture Herald.

Stars and studios could not afford to ignore the “power of radio,” especially when Manpower was not enough to draw in the crowds. Earlier that year (as reported here), Dietrich had been told to get into radio. Her advisor, comedian Fred Allen, whose team of writers were sly enough to peddle a dumb script as a spoof on the drivel that passed for melodramatic radio entertainment by offering Dietrich the lead in a soap opera titled “Brave Betty Birnbaum.”

“The jokes that Abbott and Costello use are not really too important,” Gaver and Stanley summed up. “Half of the battle is their loudness and a sense of constant turmoil.” Yes, brave they had to be, those leading ladies, when they were sent out into the cornfield of radio comedy. In Dietrich’s case, the 1942 harvest would be none too rich.

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Casting the Votes: Are These the 100 Scariest Movies of All Time?

Well, there’s no accounting for poor taste. That did not stop the Chicago Film Critics Association, apparently as desperate for attention as myself, from issuing a list of the one hundred “scariest movies.” Let’s have a look at the association’s choices, as they were published today, just in time to cash in on the Halloween business. Only in recent years, Halloween has become big business here in the UK and in my native country, Germany. Considering that the tradition is so ancient, it is surprising how slow marketers were to catch on.

I remember watching Spielberg’s E.T. upon its first release, being baffled by the costumes with which the children paraded on the streets. Dressing up, in my youth, was reserved for Carnival (or Mardi Gras). Nowadays, the pagan festival of Halloween is upstaging Christmas, probably because it does not pressure folks to spend on others the money whose power to shock and awe they’d rather display on themselves.

Even the small town of Aberystwyth, in mid-Wales, is having its own Halloween film festival, cheekily called Abertoir, which screens classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Roger Corman’s The Raven, as well as recent camp like Poultrygeist (by director Lloyd Kaufman, who is a special guest of the events).

Now, I appreciate the diversity of the Chicago Film Critics Association’s list of scary movies, which, topped by Psycho, includes must-sees like Nosferatu, Frankenstein (1931), and I Walked With a Zombie; and even though I doubt that anyone is likely to be terrified watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, it qualifies as a beloved late-night drive-in staple. Then there are beauts like Eyes without a Face, which I haven’t seen in ages, and Carnival of Souls (presumably the original). Also getting a nod from the CFCA are genuinely disturbing films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Blue Velvet, and Fritz Lang’s M. An eclectic list, in short.

Inexplicably, though, my personal favorite did not make the bloody cut. It is Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957), based on “Casting the Runes,” a short story by the aforementioned ghost storyteller M. R. James. On US radio the story was dramatized under its original title on the literary thriller series Escape. When it was shown on BBC 2 TV here in Britain a few nights ago, I seized the opportunity to go once more into that not so gentle Night. Much to my relief, I had not yet become immune to its powers.

Once again, I was startled by that hand on the banister; once again, my skin showed pimply evidence of the film’s workings upon my imagination. After the screening, my unimpressed partner, an incorrigible prankster who knows how to make me jump (which is not all that difficult), caught me unawares (which is easier still) and passed me a slip of paper with a runic-looking message. Upon closer inspection, though, it bore an inscription of three little words far more reassuring. Though constantly under attack, my heart is still beating for him.

In its two versions, Night (or Curse) is central to the debate about horror and terror—the former trying to shock by showing, the latter causing unease by the subtler force of suggestion. A curse on the CFCA for not casting their votes for it! Anyone got runes?

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“. . . till the fat lady sings”

It seems that the proverbial one who’s got more curves than the skeletons on the catwalks has not warbled her last.  No, it ain’t over yet.  According to my students, at least, whose rallying cries generated enough interest to keep my rather esoterically titled course “Writing for the Ear” alive, death warrants and prematurely issued certificates notwithstanding. The “fat lady,” of course, is the diva who gets to have the last word in opera. I don’t know where the expression originates; but it seems to be true for much of the operatic canon.  Tonight, I am going to see Mimi expire in a production of La Bohème, performed by the Mid-Wales Opera Company.

Now, I have been going to the opera since I was a teenager, even though prohibitively high prices made for long gaps in my exposure to this kind of melo-drama.  And even though a tenor numbered among my close friends in New York, Opera-going still mostly meant finding an empty space to spread my blanket on the Great Lawn whenever the New York Opera toured the parks, taking the sandwiches out of the basket, and hoping that no cellular device would go off to mar the performance as I lost myself in the night skies in search of that rare star darting its long-delayed light through the smog and light pollution of Gotham.

My tenor friend tried to convince me that opera is the highest form of dramatic storytelling; but, for the most part, I struggled to follow the plot and keep straight just who is who and doing it with whom. Last night, watching the pre-code melodrama Secrets of a Secretary, starring Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall, I thought what a great plot for an opera it might have made.  A woman repentant of her follies, a sinister husband, a pining lover (a nobleman, no less), and bloodstained dress.  Perhaps, I’d rather lose track of the plot than the ability to lose myself in the drama of a moment; but I still find it strange to be confronted with a narrative only to ignore it, along with the translations flashing above the stage.

There are few plays I have seen as often as La Bohème, sat through the gloom of Rent and the glamour of Baz Luhrman; but, the music aside, I still recall little else beyond an extinguished candle and a distinct cough.  Not that I believe comedian Ed Wynn to be a reliable translator in matters operatic. Wynn, whom I previously consulted on Carmen, once tried to tell the story of La Boheme (or “La Bum,” as he called it) to tenor James Melton (pictured above), on whose radio program he was featured in the mid-1940s.

It was on the 10 March 1946 broadcast of The James Melton Show that Wynn introduced listeners to Mimi, who, preparing for a ball, had just put on her bustle and was “rearing to go.” In Wynn’s version, Mimi had been named “Miss Soft Drink of the Year” because she was “interested in any guy from seven up.” He had nothing to say about flirtatious Musetta, who had such terrible puns coming.

Now, Mimi lives in the same boarding house as Rodolfo, you see.  One day, she hears the pot, the poet [. . .] reciting.  He says: “There is an old lady who lives in a shoe.”  And Mimi says, “Well, she’s pretty lucky, the way that the room situation is.”

Not Rent-controlled, apparently. Such references to the housing crisis of the mid-1940s pop up frequently in radio entertainment, from Fred Allen to Hercule Poirot (who, as I discussed here, inexplicably relocated to the US and found himself without a flat).

The synopsis is mercifully interrupted by a few notes from the opera, sung by Annamary Dickey.  It is the kind of highhatting of the uplift that was so common an approach to the so-called high arts in the middlebrow medium of 1930s and 1940s radio. It is the working-class re-vision and consequent rejection of culture as imposition, of art as irrelevance, a way of looking without seeing to which I was conditioned as I grew up, my father being hostile toward anything that smacked of the “high classical,” a self-imposed exclusion from the beautiful, transporting and inspiring that expressed itself in crude mockery.

Fortunately, I don’t need to draw on the jovial if misfiring old Fire Chief to enlighten me. The Mid-Wales Opera’s La Bohème is “cenir mewn Saesneg,” which is to say, sung in English. For once I can just face the music, rather than being confronted with my own ignorance . . .

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That Flaming Urge

Well, I have been holding my breath. Problem is, if you do that for about a week, you are bound to get a little huffy. As I mentioned recently, I was scheduled to teach a couple of courses in web journalism and audio dramatics at the local university. As it turns out, the enrollment figures just did not add up. In fact, the bureaucratic arithmetic is verging on the Kafkaesque: a course won’t run if it does not attract a certain number of students; but that official and binding number (which cannot be derived from headcounts and is properly computed only weeks after registration ends), remains uncertain to the instructor stepping into the classroom. After an unpleasant exchange with the coordinator of the program, I felt compelled to abandon the courses. It is rather a letdown after weeks of preparation and the initial meetings with those few who seemed interested in what I had to share and from whom I might have learned plenty in return.

Having slept through the opening of the previous term, I was determined to get things right this time. Yet the ride proved to be a bumpy one from the start when the students of my third course, which seems to have generated sufficient interest, were sent to another campus after the designated classroom had been burgled. I ended up staring at an announcement on a closed door, those I expected to greet already on their way to an alternate location more than a mile (and a hill) off, a place that I, not being auto-mobile, only managed to reach, on foot and by bus, some thirty minutes later. Pardon me, but I sure felt the urge to vent.

What with planning, teaching, and not exhaling, I may seem to have put the breaks on broadcastellan; but, the lack of posts notwithstanding, I have been quite busy with the upkeep of this journal. I got it into my head to edit all of it entries, removing dead links and creating working ones, correcting obvious errors (did I really write “epitomy”?) and improving the phrasing and paragraphing of my less-than-Internet-ready prose.

To some, this overhauling of what may seem out of date, undertaken in the face of rather more urgent assignments, may very well constitute obsessive/compulsive behavior. “Obsessions,” of course, are social diseases, which is to say that many of the idiosyncrasies for which others call us idiotic and crazy are simply socially inconvenient—an impediment to the effective and predictable workings of a community, however artificial or theoretical a construct that may be. Last night, I watched a peculiar and somewhat inept melodrama about such behavior, a low-budget piece of pseudo-realism salaciously titled The Flaming Urge (1953).

The one feeling that Urge is portrayed by Harold Lloyd, Jr., the homosexual offspring of the beloved silent screen comedian aforementioned. Junior is the one first to go down that slide pictured above; and he sure went down faster than the rest of his family, unable, like so many sons of famous fathers, to live up to the name he was called upon to use wisely and pass on unsullied.

Junior plays a troubled young man fascinated by fire. Dashing off whenever a siren promises a conflagration, he cannot hold a job and is forced to move from one town to another. His latest employer is surprisingly understanding; but the comfort derived from the knowledge that the older man shares his feelings does not seem to make it easier for the young man to fit in. Eventually, only marriage can quell this urge and put out the fire that got our poor firechaser so hot and bothered all those years. What the blazes!

It does not require much of a stretch to read the Urge as a metaphor for Lloyd Junior’s struggle to come to terms with his own socially undesirable desires. Coming to terms, according to Hollywood’s Tea and Sympathy logic, often translates into termination. With all those fire-extinguishers tossed their way, it is not surprising why so many longing and faltering men turn to Walter Pater, who insisted that to “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

Meanwhile, dealing with my own uncertainties and certain failures, I continue to feel passionate about this journal, and I tend to it even when attention is demanded elsewhere. No, I do not require an analyst’s couch to have it all figured out, let alone out of me. I could do with a few chairs, though, virtual or otherwise, reserved for those who gather what I am trying to say.