Category: Film

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A String of Pearls? Sweeney Todd on Stage, Screen, and Radio

As much as I have enjoyed our Gracie Fields trip—which continued last night with Look Up and Laugh (1935), featuring Vivien Leigh in her film debut—an excursion into the make-believe of contemporary cinema seemed long overdue. And if “contemporary” means Victorian melodrama set to music by Stephen Sondheim, such a break is hardly a violent disruption. Still, I was reluctant to return to Fleet Street. I’m familiar with the Demon Barber’s establishment; and unlike those to whom Burton’s slasher with songs serves as an introduction to this well worn piece of penny dreadfulness—Sweeney Toddlers, I call them—I cannot help but be reminded of past encounters with the not-so-gay blade. Would the razor, as swung by Burton, be sharp, dull, or just too ornate to be effective?

According to my diaries, whose racier passages I skipped to extract the data I required from it, I got my first look at Sweeney in September 1989, when Sondheim’s 1979 musical was revived by the York Theater Company and moved to the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway, with Bob Gunton as Sweeney and Beth Fowler in the role of Mrs. Lovett (see Playbill above). Referred to as “Sweeney Todd, Up Close and Personal” by its director, it was a scaled down production that depended far more on the talents of its performers than on an elaborate set design. What besides rage, a razor, and that ingenious chair does Sweeney really need to get the job done?

A little more than three years later, Mrs. Lovett was Judy Kaye and Fleet Street was a set at the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey. As I remarked in an undergraduate essay, venturing out to New Jersey “meant not only the reluctant departure from the cultural center, but also from personal stereotypes about Manhattan’s periphery.” Ms. Kaye, whom I would meet on a few occasions thereafter, truly brought the amoral pie maker back to life for anyone who might have thought she had died after the spirit of Angela Lansbury departed from a body so easily collapsed into a single dimension.

A decade later, the melodrama The String of Pearls by George Dibdin Pitt had made it onto my reading list as I sauntered toward my doctorate. The barber’s chair and the revolving trap were already in place when the play premiered in 1847; but in this version, borrowed from French sources, the motive Todd’s scheme to “polish off” his customers was a hankering after the titular pearls rather than suffering and revenge:

When a boy, the thirst of avarice was fist awakened by the fair gift of a farthing; that farthing soon became a pound; the pound a hundred—so to a thousand, till I said to myself, I will possess a hundred thousand. This string of pearls will complete the sum.

Since my studies were chiefly concerned with US radio drama, it had also come to my ears that, back in 1896, Sherlock Holmes had attended, “with obvious delight,” a revival of the shocker. In one of Doctor Watson’s accounts of his life with the famed detective (broadcast on 28 January 1946), Holmes is invited backstage, where the actor in the title role shares his horrible suspicion:

I know it sounds fantastic, but it’s true. I’ve often heard of actors beginning to live their parts off the stage that they play on it. Well, it’s happening to me. I am turning into another Sweeney Todd, the character I am portraying on the stage.

A reference to this oft sliced chestnut, heard here in a CBC production from 1947, can also be found in John Dickson Carr’s this episode of Cabin B-13 (5 July 1948), in which an American visitor to London learns that he resembles a killer who lives above a barber shop in Fleet Street, has got a razor and “is ready to use it.”

While not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated, Burton’s Sweeney is joyless and drab, rendered in computer generated imagery that, by now, has become more tiresome than the traditional hokum on display in this black-and-white version from 1936 starring Tod Slaughter. Being forced to fly rather than slowly make our way through the labyrinthine passages of the dingy, darksome metropolis, one gets no sense of entrapment or secrecy.

Our minds do not get the workout that make our bones ache in the keen awareness of having travelled on foot rather than some multi-purpose not-so-magic carpet from the CGI warehouse. Whatever happened to a sound brick wall like the one we want to bang our head against after having been taken for a ride that?

Removed from its narrative frame (“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd”), the epic theater convention of encouraging detachment to achieve a demonstration of social problems, what remains of Sondheim’s Sweeney is old-fashioned melodrama for the pathos of which Burton used to have a flair. And yet, more so even than Charlie (discussed here), Sweeney is largely devoid of wit and vision. With the exception of the Pirelli-Barker shaving contest, in which Sacha Baron Cohen steals the show as the Todd’s spurious rival, most of the numbers are listlessly assembled.

It would have been intriguing to see this melodrama turned into a pop-up book in which cardboard characters struggle to emerge as three-dimensional individuals; but the characters, as presented by Burton, would not stand a chance to distinguish themselves. They are utterly forgettable—a rare feat, given such material.

Burton might do well to look beyond his ensemble once in a while. Depp, who is being given a virtual Botox treatment that renders his phizog expressionless, and Bonham-Carter, who is buxom yet bloodless, are not suited for every costume he throws at them. Their voices are thin, their singing flat and, what is worse, the enunciation frustratingly poor. Bonham-Carter, if you’ll permit the pun, has probably the worst pipes in London. The orchestra is meant to give the musically challenged actors a boost; but here it ends up given them the boot instead. Casting, after all, is not as easy as “popping pussies into pies.”

In short, this latest Sweeney is as tired as a Victorian scullery maid who has lost the ability to dream up ways of disposing of her employers. With all those pearls of ruby blood spilled onto screen, some ought to have been set aside for an emergency transfusion.

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Will It Go Her Way?: Some Seriously Belated Oscar Predictions

As usual, I am slow to catch up. A few years ago, the BBC relinquished the rights to televising the Oscars; and since we are not subscribing to the premium channel that does air them, I am relying on the old wireless to transport me to the events. So, here I am listening to … the 17th Academy Awards (as broadcast on 15 Mar. 1945). Considering that Claudette Colbert is nominated for Since You Went Away, I just had to tune in. Also among the nominees, for his supporting role in the same picture, is Monty Woolley, the man to whom my terrier owes his name. This year, the event is broadcast nationally for the first time in its entirety. The host is Bob Hope; it was rival radio comic Jack Benny last time. There will be scenes from the nominated pictures, which are going to be explained to us radio listeners. While the president of the Academy, Walter Wanger, is saying a few words (at sixty minutes, this is a rather overblown affair), I might as well share my predictions with you.

As much as I enjoyed Since You Went Away, my money is on Double Indemnity in the Best Picture category. Gaslight is just a one dark note affair, and I don’t think that Wilson, which I haven’t seen, or Going My Way got much of a chance. Stanwyck should get the trophy for Best Actress; but, as you may know, I am partial to Colbert, who hasn’t won in a decade. Besides, she’s delivered a beautifully restrained performance, rather than going all maudlin or hysterical.

Hush, the ceremony is getting under way. It is broadcast live from Grauman’s Chinese. Hope just quipped that he never knew it was a theater, but thought “that it was where Darryl Zanuck had his laundry done.” He can joke; after all, he is being honored with a lifetime membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his many services to the Academy (“Now I know how Roosevelt feels”).

Could Agnes Moorehead win this time for Mrs. Parkington, her second Best Supporting Actress nomination? I certainly like her radio acting. Did you catch “Sorry, Wrong Number”? Mark my word: if it ever gets adapted for the screen, she’s sure to get the Oscar for that role. She also was terrific in the brief scenes she had in Since You Went Away, in which Joseph Cotten’s character refers to hers as the voice that haunted him across the Atlantic. I don’t think Angela Lansbury has got much of a chance in this category; Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with her. Maybe she’ll find her medium one day.

Gosh, can you imagine all those stars in one big auditorium? According to Hope, “it’s informal dress”—“they only had to send Bing Crosby home twice.” Now, the winner for Short Subjects (Cartoon) is announced; the award goes to Fred Quimby’s “Mouse Trouble”—what’s next, rats winning best animated feature?—and Max Steiner just scored for scoring Since You Went Away.

I know this makes me sound like a nance, but I’d be terribly upset if Art Direction (Color), did not go to the team behind Mitchell Leisen’s Lady in the Dark; the film faces tougher competition in the Cinematography (Color) category, though, where it is up against Kismet and Meet Me in St. Louis. For Black and White, Joseph LaShelle for Laura should come out on top. I was rooting for Leisen’s No Time for Love and its clever dream sequence to win the Oscar for Art Direction (Black and White), which just lost to Gaslight.

Hang on, there is some mix-up about the trophies. Sure sounds unscripted. In fact, Hope, the old pro at the microphone, seems to have forgotten the audience outside the theater, folks like me who don’t get to see what’s going on. At least we are being treated to a few notes from the twelve nominated songs and the voices of Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Meanwhile, I am testing out my second sight. Best Director is going to be either Wilder or Hitchcock, who faced such tough competition a few years back when Rebecca lost, rightly, to The Grapes of Wrath. A shame, really, that Tallulah wasn’t even nominated for Life Boat, for the Original Motion Picture Story of which John Steinbeck is likely to get awarded. Original Screenplay, of course, will go to Preston Sturges, who, after all is nominated twice (for Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek). And if the Screenplay Oscar doesn’t go to Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder, then I don’t know what what is . . .

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Hang On! It’s That Girl from Number Seventeen

As I recently remarked in a comment on another intriguing entry in the Relative Esoterica journal, I live in a house that is filled with art—with etchings, drawings, paintings and pottery. Yet I still lower a blind on it all and turn down the lights each night to screen copies of moving pictures, few of which would seem relevant to the cinemagoers of today. I have been just as slow or reluctant to relate to the art on the walls and shelves that surround me, not having been actively involved in selecting it. There are pieces I pass without perceiving, unmindful of their cultural significance, indifferent to their monetary value. Others I insist on declaring mute, being that they seem incapable of speaking to me without denouncing me as an ignorant trespasser. There are those I am fond of and care to wonder about, that I permit to involve me in musings and study. Well, I needn’t tell you what art can do to you if you let it.

Quite by design, then, there is a general disconnect between the Hollywood images flickering on our screen and the Welsh landscapes, still lives, and portraits bordering or facing that square of blank canvas set up and aside for my cinematic getaways—my “blind” spot, you might say. Sometimes, though, the still images in our collection begin to mirror those we set in motion. That is just what happened last night during a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen (1932).

By the director’s own admission, Seventeen is somewhat of a “disaster.” It is one of those old dark house thrillers in the short-lived but lively manner of Earl Derr Biggers’s aforementioned Seven Keys to Baldpate, a theatrical heritage Hitchcock acknowledged only to blast it in a fast and furious finale set on a runaway train. As in many of those Cat and Canary affairs, you struggle to keep track of who’s who, aware that the identities of the two-dimensional characters are interchangeable, or chameleonic, at best. The biggest surprise in this at times frantic picture is none that Hitchcock and his team could have anticipated. Trapped within Number Seventeen is a girl whose age has not quite reached said number. Ann Casson! my partner exclaimed, the name having appeared in the credits. And there she was, whoever she was, playing a handcuffed damsel hanging from a broken railing of the winding staircase in that old, dark house (as pictured above).

Now, who exactly is Ann Casson (1915-1990)? Trust me, I did not have as much as an inkling. She is, to begin with, the daughter of Dame Sybil Thorndike, the noted British stage and screen actress with whom Casson, as Phaedra, toured in Hippolytus by Euripides; during the Second World War, the actress also toured Wales, my present home. By that time, she had given up on a career in motion pictures. She had appeared in a small number of films in the early 1930s, making her debut in an adaptation of Galsworthy’s Escape (1930) under the direction of Basil Dean (whose Sing as We Go we had already decided on watching tonight). To me, though, Casson is now “that girl in the picture.” Not Number Seventeen, mind you, but one of the images in our collection.

The picture in question is a portrait by Christopher Perkins (1891-1968), a British artist best known in New Zealand, where he lived, painted, and taught during the early 1930s. The drawing is not dated, but, judging from the dress and hair style of the sitter, must have been executed some time between Perkins’s return to England in 1934 and the outbreak of the Second World War. It came into our home some six decades later, a purchase from a dealer who acquired it from the descendants of the artist. If it hadn’t been for Number Seventeen, I would not have gone on this trip of discovery and returned with a sense of relationship. Like Hitchcock’s model train, my mind went off the track, carrying me where I hadn’t thought of ever going. We did not have a strong attachment to this modest drawing; but now I am determined to hang on to it, if only as another reminder of the thrills of research, the art of making other lives relevant to our own . . .

In this spirit of connecting I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Reg Adkins (of ElementalTruths.com), who took the time to review broadcastellan on Blogexplosion, and of the Blogged.com team, who have done the same for their site. Long accustomed to the blindness of strangers, I no longer aspire to mattering or making sense to others—but it is gratifying to learn that our voices from the niche have the potential to echo beyond the hollow we dig for ourselves.

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A Letter to Three Wives and a Couple of Radio Executives

“Then heaven help the masses!” That’s what English teacher George Phipps exclaims in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) when confronted with the notion that soap operas were the “literature” of his fiercely commercial, communists fearing day. Alerted to this mock prayer by Leonard Maltin’s Great American Broadcast, I began to wonder what radio executives, whose business it was to take note when their line of business was threatened or questioned, would do with such a line if ever A Letter were to be read on the air.

To begin with, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning screenplay would have to be reduced to a memo, given the tight, commercials-cluttered slots allotted for post-World War II broadcast drama; but the Letter had already been severely edited, two of what had once been five wives receiving the pink slip in an economic downsizing of a property initially spread out on the pages of Cosmopolitan back in 1945. It was too prominent a missive not to be bottled anew and tossed into the airwaves.

Sure enough, on this day, 20 February, in 1950, “A Letter” was posted by the prestigious, popular if highly conservative Lux Radio Theater, with Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas (pictured) reprising their screen roles. Would the wireless-defiant educator make the cut? Or would a radio rewrite mean “Goodbye, Mr. Phipps”?

The Lux producers were not generally concerned with aesthetics; but, Phipps’s disparaging remarks notwithstanding, the screenplay for A Letter is most radiogenic. After all, it depends on voice-over narration by an unseen character (played by Celeste Holm in the film version), a storytelling convention suited to—and appropriated from—radio drama, whose publicly confidential talks transported audiences straight into the mind of the speaker.

The film version also makes excellent use of the aforementioned Sonovox, a device that could turn any sound into speech. In A Letter, it gets droplets of water to seep insinuations into receptive ears. What speaks volumes in the Lux production is that the Sonovox, largely relegated to advertising duty on radio, was being scrapped altogether. Its innovative props disposed of, its potentialities ignored, radio theater was frequently reduced to borrowing its material from the movies it had assisted in furnishing and shaping.

However impoverished, Sandy Barnett’s radio adaptation does take on the challenge posed by George Phipps, even though the teacher’s arguments have little bearing on the plot involving the two leads of the Lux production. And rather than being turned into a hausfrau, George’s spouse Rita is the soap opera writer she was on the screen.

The scene for the assault on radio is set: Rita (played by Joan Banks) has invited one of “those radio people” to dinner. “You know what I like about your program?” her maid tells her, “Even when I’m running the vacuum I can understand it.” Besides, it keeps her “mind off [her] feet. George (Stephen Dunne) is not pleased having to entertain the entertainers; he is unwilling to serve them expensive liquor to make them feel at home:

Rita.  People in show business, well you know what I mean.  Those kind always drink scotch.

George.  I know what you mean, dear, but I wish you wouldn’t say it in radio English.  That kind, not “those kind.”

Rita.  There are men who say “those kind” who earn a hundred thousand dollars a year.

George.  There are men who say “Stick ‘em up” who earn even more.

Not surprisingly, given her husband’s attitude, Rita is concerned about the evening’s entertainment.

Rita.  George, just one thing, please.  No jokes about radio.

George.  Oh, the time for joking about it is past.  Radio has become a very serious problem now, like juvenile delinquency.

Rita.  That’s just what I mean.  Cracks like that.

The get-together does not go as smoothly as planned by Rita, who would like her self-consciously impecunious husband to quit teaching in favor of writing for the soaps.  A debate about radio’s cultural offerings and the lure of the big money behind them ensues:

George.  Look, Rita, let’s put aside my personal likes and dislikes.  They’re not important.  I am willing to admit that to a majority of my fellow citizens I’m a slightly comic figure: an educated man.

Rita.  But nobody’s asking you not to be.  Think of the good you could do.  Maybe raise the standards.

George.  And what’s even worse than being an intellectual, I am a schoolteacher.  Schoolteachers are not only comic, they’re often cold and hungry in this richest land on Earth.

Rita.  And thousands are quitting every year to take jobs that pay them a decent living.

George.  That is unhappily true.

Rita.  Then why not you?

George.  Because I can’t think of myself doing anything else.  What would happen, do you think, if we all quit? Who’d teach the kids? Who’d open their minds and hearts to the real glories of the human spirit, past and present? Who’d help them along to the future?

I suppose the impressionables of 1940s America have, for the most part, survived those radio days unscathed. Besides, the lessees of the airwaves awash with suds had learned to respond to the dirt on radio offered by its detractors by giving such criticism a good rinse and a clever spin. Sure, it got Fred Allen and fellow satirist Henry Morgan into trouble during the ’40s; but The Hucksters (shown here) had proven how profitable rants against radio could be.

When “A Letter” was sent off by the renowned toilet soap promoters (having been delivered previously by the Camel-sponsored Screen Guild, without any references to the evil influences of radio), such attacks were as old hat as the consoles from which they occasionally sputtered.

By 1950, there was little need to suppress a memo critiquing what was becoming immaterial as its subject matter was being yanked from the broadcast schedules. Everyone was making eyes at television; and while Hollywood stars still flocked to the microphone to make a quick buck, the radio theater audience dwindled as Americans scraped together their savings for the set that would define our everyday in the second half of the 20th century.

In a 21st-century update of the Letter, Rita Phipps would probably be designing interactive games or reality shows—the literature of today?

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Off on a Fields Trip

Last night, we unwrapped the newly released DVD set of seven films starring British icon Gracie Fields, whom I last saw opposite Monty Woolley in the charming upstairs-downstairs comedy Molly and Me (1945), released at the end of her screen career. Included in this present anthology of earlier, British films is Fields’s feature debut Sally in Our Alley (1931). It is directed by the prolific Maurice Elvey, whose long-lost silent epic The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918) I discussed previously. Although Elvey is not held in high regard by today’s critics—something that happens when you, like the radio, dispense a steady stream of popular entertainment, I had been favorably impressed by Elvey’s 1927 remake of Hindle Wakes (mentioned here), the story of a mill worker’s daughter lured into crossing class boundaries—at a terrible cost. Co-written by Hitchcock partner Alma Reville, Sally is a similar story, designed, it seems, to keep those boundaries intact by telling the working classes taking in such fare that it is best to stay with the folks you know and be content with what you are dealt.

In the title role, Fields gets to sing loudly and be of good cheer, while her character is being exploited, betrayed and abused by those around her. She is told that her lover, George (Ian Hunter), has died during the Great War. It is he who made up that story in hopes of not burdening his sweetheart with the physical impairments he sustained in battle. When he recovers, at last, and returns to London a decade later, other men having designs on his girl try to convince her that George has been unfaithful and married another. Such hard luck notwithstanding, Sally, never sings the “Lancashire Blues” for long, even if her performance of “Fred Fannakapan” at a posh ball ends in humiliation.

Sally is the kind of movie Fields, who had her own US radio program during the 1940s and ’50s, got to sing about when she joined Fred Allen in the Texaco Star Theatre back on 15 November 1942, when she, aside from demonstrating the differences between British and American broadcasting, performed “I Never Cried so Much in All My Life”:

Oh-oh-oh-oh, it was a lovely picture and I did enjoy it so
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I never cried so much in all my life
When the villains seized the maiden everybody shouted “oh”
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I never cried so much in all my life.

In her autobiography, Fields relates how she choked and broke into tears singing her signature tune “Sally”; the cause, though, was the air on stage, which, the scene being the coffee shop where Sally serves and entertains, was filled with the smoke generated to produce the atmosphere of an old-fashioned establishment.

Nearly stealing the show from Fields, which is difficult enough given her musical numbers, is Florence Desmond. I did not recognize her as Claudette Colbert’s fellow prison camp inmate in Jean Negulesco’s harrowing Three Came Home (1950), one of only four films Desmond made after a movie busy career in the early to mid-1930s. In Sally, Desmond plays Florrie, a girl who wants to get out—and, according to the conventions of melodramas that defend the status quo—is duly punished for her attempts at transgression until she finds salvation in fixing things so that Sally gets her man.

Florrie is flighty and wouldn’t mind being a floozy; she is also a consummate fibber and faker. After all, she is caught up in the world of Hollywood (not British film, mind you); and in the to me most intriguing scene of the movie (pictured above), she rivals Marion Davies in impersonating screen siren Greta Garbo. Just how to seduce and betray she seems to have gotten right out the movie magazines she devours; and if seduction is not quite her forte, she proves an expert at spreading malicious rumors about Sally, who had it in her tremendously roomy heart to take Florrie in and shelter the girl from her abusive father.

It seems to me that the British film industry was trying to get back at Hollywood, having largely failed to copy its successes. That said, I am going to continue my Fields trip tonight with Elvey’s Love, Life and Laughter (1934) . . .

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Pulp: A Tissue of Lies

In the house I now call home, I am surrounded by a great many works of art, from oils and etchings to ceramics and stained glass. When I moved in the walls were already crowded with images; and I felt strangely if understandably disconnected from them and my new surroundings. For this simple reason, our Welsh cottage soon came alight each evening in the ersatz glow of moving images imported from the Hollywood of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s (a few exceptions notwithstanding). These pictures are projected onto a blind behind which unfolds the celebrated beauty of the Welsh landscape which, on a cloudless night, is more silver than the screen. For weeks after moving here from New York City (back in November 2004), a move worthy of a Daphne du Maurier thriller, were it not for my genial partner, I was unable to draw the blinds without bursting into tears, no matter how serene the scenery (our living room view being this or, as the season changes, that).

Not that there weren’t objects in the house to which I could relate. In our library, for instance, I am greeted by the no-one-else-likes of Chaucer and Shakespeare (who, along with Francis Bacon, are being sent from room to room, with Bacon now diurnally aglow in the window of our bedchamber). These stained-glass likenesses were installed for the very purpose of making me, a former literary scholar, feel welcome, familiar, and understood. It is in the attic that I am harboring the rather more lowbrow art churned out by Hollywood’s advertising machinery, all of which feature my favorite leading lady, Ms. Claudette Colbert. The most recent acquisitions to my collection—a Valentine’s treat—are these two posters for The Secret Fury (1950), a thriller whose fierce but fallacious (and ultimately pointless) pushing I previously discussed after getting my hands on this piece of promotional literature.

The smattering of rousing captions that accompany the images sure smacks of desperation. How do you sell a forgettable thriller as a must-see? You resort to words and phrases like “kill” and “cold blood, “evil” and “insane,” “murder” and “monstrous secret” to align the indifferent material you are pushing with the neo-gothic literature known to sell. In radio dramatics, no words were more prominent than “murder” and “death.” “Love” doesn’t sell half as well as death. “Sex” might, but radio was too cautions to go where most minds—and the species at large—are on a regular basis. To this date, US entertainment is more tolerant of mutilation than titillation, owing chiefly if indirectly to the violence that is religion.

Even though its solution relies on a prominent visual clue, The Secret Fury was produced on radio by the Screen Guild. A recording of the broadcast is no longer extant; but a picture of its leads, Colbert and Robert Ryan, posing with the script appears in David R. Mackey’s Drama on the Air (1951). I don’t mind being taken in; in fact, looking at poster art like that (or this one for Colbert’s Sleep, My Love), I am approaching the dramatic territory of the radio thriller. I am being given just enough clues to let my mind’s eye imagine a pretty sensational picture.

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The Women Who Saved My Reputation

Close, but no big star. That’s what I’ve always felt when I come across Hollywood actor George Brent, the kind of actor I happen upon merely because he happens to be in something or opposite someone I care to see. Capable, certainly. Likable, perhaps; but Brent is lacking in the charisma, the je ne sais quoi that turns mere mortals into icons. There he was again, last night, at the close of a particularly quiet day (another one without telephone or internet here at our cottage). His dashing entrance notwithstanding (a rescuer on skis), I cannot say that I watched him. I sort of look past him, usually at the women with whom he had the fortune to be paired.

In My Reputation (1943, but not released until 1946), the woman in question is Barbara Stanwyck. Now, there’s a leading lady that is impossible to overlook; and in My Reputation she is particularly lovely. Perhaps, a little too lovely to be the questionable woman the title suggests her to be. I was reminded of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, a novel that tends to make readers go “What’s to forgive?” After all, Stanwyck’s character is a widow, not a bigamist. I suppose the Shakespearean Instruct My Sorrows, the title of the novel on which this romance is based, did not strike Hollywood producers as enticing enough.

What saves My Reputation are those minor players that manage to make a major impression in the few minutes they are allotted on the screen; they are supporting in the truest sense of the word. There’s Eve Arden, for instance, in the kind of role she filled in Mildred Pierce; her confidence and wit are always welcome. She often seems to be on her way to a party of her own and you wish she could have handed you an invitation; instead, she picks up her gift and dashes off. Cecil Cunningham walks on memorably, and Esther Dale is comfortingly efficient as the maid. And then there is Lucile Watson.

What a woman! In her expressions of disdain and her haughty delivery, Canadian-born Watson (1879-1962) bears a strong resemblance to Patricia Routledge, best known to television viewers as Hyacinth Bucket (of Keeping Up Appearances). And yet, as Stanwyck’s mother she remains formidable both in her dignity and her indignity, rather than appearing ludicrous in her pretensions. Just watch how she rebuffs the impertinent Brent, how she makes Stanwyck squirm in the above scene. It isn’t her stare alone that compels you to take notice. Hers is a voice made for lectures on etiquette and the uses of conventions. A voice that insists on being heard and heeded. A voice … for radio.

Unfortunately, radio adaptations of Hollywood films like My Reputation had no use for supporting actors, most of whom were replaced by repertoire players like Janet Scott, who was heard in Watson’s part in this Lux Radio Theater production from 21 April 1947. Even when, in this Screen Guild production of Watch on the Rhine (10 January 1944), Watson was given a rare chance to share the microphone with the film’s stars, Bette Davis and Paul Lukas, the script was so severely condensed that her supporting role was reduced to a mere cameo.

Far more interesting are Watson’s personal recollections in this tribute to Ethel Barrymore on Biography in Sound; having played opposite and observed Barrymore on the stage, Watson remarked that she “learned an important lesson in acting”:

When thousands came nightly to be thrilled by her magnetic voice, I was watching something else: the way she listened to the speeches of her fellow players.  And I thank her now for any knowledge I have of what is perhaps the highest art of an actor: the art of beautiful listening.

My Reputation makes plain just how well Watson had learned that lesson; at the same time, the supporting actress claims the center of the stage, defying us to ignore her. More than the leading lady herself, Watson, as Mrs. Kimball, makes you understand Stanwyck’s character: a repressed woman struggling to let go; not to let herself go, exactly, but to let go of the past when forced to confront an uncertain future after the death of her husband.

It is Watson’s performance that explains the pressures and strictures this blameless woman has always been up against. After all, Mrs. Kimball does not simply try to save her daughter’s reputation—she defined it.

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“Ich weiss . . .”: The Certainties of Zarah Leander

“Es ist unmöglich, von Edgar Wallace nicht gefesselt zu sein,” the German translation of a famous publisher’s slogan goes. Never mind the author, whose name, to me, is synonymous with a long series of neogothic film shockers produced in Germany from the late 1950s to the early ‘70s, starring, the enigmatic Klaus Kinski aside, the by then soured crème de la crème of German cinema. It is not the author or the actors but the catchphrase that came to mind today. The original—the assertion that it is “impossible not to be thrilled” by said writer—is decidedly less expressive.

But then, English so often is, compared to the directness of the emotionally charged German language, whose dictionary, largely free from sterilizing Latin, lays meaning bare like a wound bleeding with the memory of deeply felt sensations. “Sehnsucht,” “Weltschmerz,” “Leidenschaft”—I know of no equivalent vehicle in the English lexicon with which to convey quite so forcibly the shattered frame of an agitated mind! The exclamation point, an expedient in punctuation to which I rarely permit myself the resorting, is meant here to imply at once the passion evoked by the German and the frustration of approximating it as my mother tongue sticks itself out at me.

Let us not get tongue-tied. “Gefesselt” loosely translates into “captivated” or, so as not to be loose about what is tight and binding, “tied up” and “enthralled.” What could be more enthralling than the timbre of Zarah Leander? Who could capture longing better than she? Enthralling, yes; but listening to Leander, I can feel rope burn—the sensation of struggling to loosen a restraint. A desire to put a name and voice to my feelings (described in the previous post) compelled me to go in search of her online, the internet being a lifeline for those who, like me, have struggled and failed to sever their ties from the culture into which they were born.

Leander, of course, was a leading lady in Third Reich cinema. As such, her voice and image are both riveting and repulsive to me. Like my present wavering and uncertainty, the figure of Zarah Leander, spellbinding as it may be, spells ambiguity and contradiction. To begin with, Leander was not German; she had Jewish ancestry; a homosexual friend wrote some of her best-known songs. And yet, she was in the service of fascism, implicated in song, as the jolly crowd of Nazis listening and swaying to one of her signature tunes, “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” in this clip from Die Grosse Liebe (1942) drive home.

Knowing this, I still feel like the blond boy sitting by her side as she teases him that he could not possibly know the most basic sensations—the smell of hazelnuts or an icy wind against one’s cheeks (a song performed, no less, in in a film by the man who would be Douglas Sirk). Wrapped up in her presence, “Schatten der Vergangenheit” (shadows of the past) are crowding in on me.

Zarah Leander is telling me more about myself than I have had the guts to digest at times. By the 1970s, she had become a queer icon, appropriated by the crowd that the regime she tacitly endorsed used to send off to the camps. “Kann denn Liebe Sünde sein?” (Yet can love be sin?) she famously sang, which became—or indeed was conceived as—a song of gay longing. I did not want to be reminded of that liberation, either. In the confusion of a childhood spent in the awareness that I would be unlike the men who desire women sexually, there was no assurance in the taking possession of her in the name of the love then thought of as having to remain unnamed.

Tonight, Leander’s performances are strangely reaffirming. There is “something understood” in her voice, in the lyrics and their delivery. She knows, her character claims in this song, of a future miracle (“Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehn”), in her voice a conviction her tears seem to belie. I have no need of miracles. Instead, I glory in the wonder of feeling intensely, of being alive to my conflicting emotions, my fears and longings. Recognizing those feelings, I suddenly know myself again . . .

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Bookshelf Cowboy

Well, howdy. His handsome mug is before me whenever I grab a book from my shelves. Randolph Scott, Series two, Number 385 of Zuban’s “Bunte Filmbilder” (a German line of cigarette cards, issued in 1937). I caught a glimpse of Scott this afternoon when I turned on TV, switching channels for an update on the stock market, the Heath Ledger autopsy, and whatever else made news today. Rage at Dawn (1955) was playing on Channel 4. Checking the Internet Movie Database, I realized that it might have been shown in commemoration of Scott’s birth, on this day, back in 1898.

Now, my frequent encounters with him in my library notwithstanding, I rarely come across his appealing phizog. This is mainly because I don’t care much for the genre in which Scott made his mark. Stagecoach aside, which to me is more of a small-scale Grand Hotel on wheels, I rarely watch Westerns (even though a certain—if unlikely—Texas Lady is prominently displayed in my bedroom). True, Scott co-starred in My Favorite Wife and played opposite Marlene Dietrich on two occasions; but otherwise, there isn’t much on his extensive resume that appeals to me. So, I am once again twisting the dial, the ether being Hollywood’s parallel universe.

Sure enough, apart from recreating his roles in Pittsburgh and Belle of the Yukon, Scott can be heard co-starring aforementioned Texas Lady, Claudette Colbert, in an adaptation of Preston Sturges’s ”Palm Beach Story” (15 March 1943), filling the shoes of Joel McCrea. He was to do so again, a few months later, when McCrea did not appear, as scheduled, on the Cavalcade of America program, starring in the propaganda drama ”Vengeance of Torpedo 8” (20 September 1943).

While he did not get much to do or say in the rather dull rehash of Palm Beach Story, Scott was given a chance to prove his comedy skills on a number of occasions. Opposite Gene Tierney, for instance, he was cast in “A Lady Takes a Chance” on the Harold Lloyd hosted Old Gold Comedy Hour (unfortunately no longer available in the Internet Archive). For more laughs, Scott joined Paulette Goddard for a parodic “Saga of the Old West” on Command Performance (21 June 1945). Assigning the parts, Goddard declared: “Randy, you play yourself. A real, two-gun cowboy.”

Turns out that Scott got a chance to play the Ringo Kid, after all. On 4 May 1946, he took on John Wayne’s role in the Academy Award production of Stagecoach. Sharing the microphone with him to reprise the role of Dallas was Claire Trevor, radio’s original Lorelei Kilbourne of Big Town (whom I recently saw in Born to Kill).

To me, the more intriguing performances were Scott’s curtain calls, during which he got to address the audience. Having delivered his lines in the digest of “Palm Beach Story,” the actor was called upon to put his southern charm to work for the war effort, reminding the women on the home front that “it’s men like your own sons and brothers, your husband or sweetheart whom the Red Cross is serving. This year, don’t measure by ordinary standards. Make your contribution to the Red Cross War Fund just as generous as possible.”

“For most of us the war is a distant terror,” he told listeners of the Cavalcade broadcast, “until it is brought forcefully home by those very close to our own lives. Let’s match their effort at the front with ours at home. Back the attack with War Bonds.”

Of course, Scott’s commitment to the war effort went further than those appeals; he was, after all, a veteran of the first World War. And, like many of his fellow actors, he went on tour with the USO (an experience he shared with listeners of Hollywood Star Time).

Meanwhile, the gentleman from Virginia has gone back on the shelf. I shall see him again soon enough, as I reach for another volume on old-time radio. For this spur-of-the-moment tribute to him, Scott made me round up Cavalcade of America and Radio Drama by Martin Grams, as well as John Dunning’s On the Air.

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” . . . same again? Only a little different?”: Cary Grant and the Radio

Well, this being the anniversary of the birth of the man everyone including Cary Grant wanted to be, I decided to listen to a Lux Radio Theater production of “The Awful Truth,” originally broadcast on the actor’s 51st birthday in 1955. By that time, the program was transcribed (that is, recorded), so that Grant did not have to spend this special evening (previously commemorated here) behind the microphone entertaining a vastly diminished crowd of far-flung radio listeners. Not that the early to mid-1950s had been a particularly busy period in the actor’s career. Aside from its felicitous air date (unacknowledged by the host of the program), the 1955 version constitutes the first reteaming of Grant with his original co-star, Irene Dunne, even though both had shared the Lux soundstage for “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (10 October 1949), which would serve as the premise for Grant’s own radio sitcom, co-starring wife Betsy Drake (who also wrote some of the scripts for the series).

Prior to their Awful reunion, Grant and Dunne reprised their roles in the mascara hazard Penny Serenade (16 November 1941) for the Screen Guild Theater, appeared together in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of My Favorite Wife (7 December 1950), as well as the Screen Guild’s original radio play “Alone in Paris” (30 April 1939).

Nearly two decades of Grant’s life in picture are echoed on the air, in radio dramatizations ranging from Lux’s 8 March 1937 broadcast of ”Madame Butterfly” (adapted from the 1932 film) and the comparatively obscure (if recent DVD release) Wings in the Dark (1935), reworked for the aforementioned Silver Theater to classics like His Girl Friday (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Radio also invites speculations as to what a difference Grant might had made in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and I Confess.

Equally at home in melodrama and comedy, Grant guested on a comedy-variety programs like Pepsodent Show, starring Bob Hope (much to the delight of hundreds of screaming WAVES and nurses in the all-female studio audience), and the drama anthology Suspense (in which he was cast in a number of memorable thrillers, including two plays—“The Black Curtain” and “The Black Path of Fear”— based on stories by Cornell Woolrich). On the big screen, in turn, Grant was given the opportunity to star in an adaptation one of the best comedies written for radio, Norman Corwin’s “My Client Curley” (previously discussed here), even though the sentimental film, titled Once Upon a Time (1944), does not manage to capture the magic and wit of the original.

Listening to the actor’s radio performances through the years, it was interesting to hear the changes in Grant’s voice—a voice as distinctive as the cleft in his chin—divorced as it is on the air from the features that became rather more distinguished with age. Truth is that Grant, never known for passionate emoting, sounded awful staid in the 1955 rematch with Dunne, his next to last performance in radio drama. He had been heard once before in a Lux presentation of Leo McCarey’s raucous romance; but his sparring mate that night—the opener of the program’s fifth season on 11 September 1939—was Claudette Colbert, whose character in Without Reservations would write a role assigned to Grant (for the 10 March 1941 Lux broadcast, the role of Jerry Warriner was tailored to Bob Hope, with second fiddle Ralph Bellamy as the only original cast member in that production).

Back in 1939, there was zap and brio in his voice, which, in the sound-only medium, had to make up for the loss of some wonderful slapstick. Nearly sixteen years later, in a reading of the same if somewhat condensed script, what had once come across as carefree and devil-may-care sounded an awful lot like “who cares.” The by then all but defunct genre of screwball with its unsentimental take on love as war (from courting to court case) demanded more energy than either Dunne or Grant were willing (or able) to bring to their connubial tussles. Indeed, the loudest laughs in the studio audience are generated by the less than convincing barks of Mr. Smith, the couple’s pooch (granted, somewhat of a scene-stealer in the film as well).

After experiencing episodes of puerile madcap in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952), which did little to rejuvenate his career, Grant was finally slowing down. Unfortunately, he appeared to be rehearsing for An Affair to Remember with material not designed to make us forget that his days of cheeky indiscretion lay in a livelier past. Perhaps it is just as well that adaptor George Wells cut Jerry’s final speech in The Awful Truth. It might have sounded too much like an aging actor’s apology, his plea to an audience expecting lively antics: “So, as long as I’m different, don’t you think things could be the same again? Only a little different?”

In the 1930s and ’40s, Grant’s vocal chords were as elastic as his vaudeville-tested sinews. A few day’s after his 35th birthday (on 22 January 1939, to be exact), the lad from Bristol surprised those tuning in to the Ronald Colman hosted Circle with a spirited rendition of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” What’s more, the tune is followed later in the program by Grant’s tuneful delivery of . . . the FCC’s regulations regarding station identification. Something different, all right.

“No cackling,” Grant told Colman a few years later on the Command Performance (22 July 1944); but he could be persuaded, nonetheless, to sing a few notes. With the exception of his performance of Cole Porter in the disingenuous Night and Day (1946), there was nary a false one in Grant’s long and varied career on screen and radio.