Category: Radio

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In Clover . . . or Out?

“Broadway. It’s a swamp that’ll drag you, breath by breath, into its shadowed pools. Or it’s a meadow shining with golden light. It’s a place and a time and a loneliness that reaches out for you, then beckons you into an airless room and locks the door. You get out or you don’t. Either way, it’s Broadway, my beat.” That was the opening of the final episode of Broadway Is My Beat, which ended its run as a summer replacement for The FBI in Peace and War on this day, 25 August 1949. Final episode? Not in hindsight, of course.

The series (which I previously discussed here) would return to CBS radio, eventually, and run for another five years; but most of the listeners tuning back on that evening in August had no clue. “You get out or you don’t.” Was detective Danny Clover going to get out of the black hole of summer, the “airless room” that was the slot allotted to programs on probation while the shows that sold were on hiatus?

A man dies in silence and in dark, and a city sets up a shrieking clamor, and you’re part of it.  You ride a scream through the crowded, heat-heavy streets.  And then you hit a dead end, and it’s a building, and a room at the top of the building.  And it’s a man lying in the center of the room while other men take notes on the history of his dying.

Executives, no doubt. Is Danny Clover to vanish into the dark of the city, to be silenced in the shrieking clamor of the network schedule, hard hit as it was by the coming of television, on which sponsors were ever more likely to lay their bet. It is hardly a coincidence that writers Morton Fine and David Friedkin concocted for their final outing that summer a story involving the death of a popular yet generally despised author—a murder perpetrated in a locked room, bolted from the outside.

To eat or not to eat. That was the question in the “Val Dane Case.” His room was “like a tomb,” Clover comments; except that it was “loaded with food, all jarred.” Canned food, waiting to be consumed. Food, food, everywhere, but the author “died of starvation.” Even his ghost has to laugh at this irony. Dane’s ghost writer, Lyle Brooks, that is, who is in “convulsions of hilarity” about the conclusion of the whole rotten business of penning The Great Fake, Dane’s latest piece of fiction, without receiving the credit promised to him. “What does it matter if his exact words are remembered?” a yogi observes with a equal lack of remorse about the dead man’s career.

The shady mystic who was Dane’s titular Fake is mum about the outcome of the case, a case of a murder whose victim was not blameless in the death of his own child. Only the ratings could tell whether the Beat should go on; and when the less-than-neat case is considered done and dusted, the narrating detective muses: “How do you fill it in reports, how do you make statistics out of it and file it in a ledger? How do your write sorrow as a number? How?”

Fine and Friedkin’s Broadway Is My Beat was known for its fanciful rhetoric; but “The Val Dane Case” was all metaphor . . .

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To Hear, to Belong, to Submit: The Volksempfänger Turns 75

Nowadays, the concept of not having a voice is so alien to most of us Westerners that we fool ourselves into believing that what we are saying is of consequence, that because words are sent into the world they may also change it. We are too used by now to telecommune via phone or internet that the one-sidedness of broadcasting strikes us as downright barbaric. Why listen and be still when we can chatter and twitter, why take in a thought when we can put out a great deal of thoughtlessness with the greatest of ease? Publishing online or opining about world events on our slick mobiles, we are apt to believe that we have the world at our lips and by the ear. We are given gadgets—or, rather, we purchase them at considerable cost—that encourage us to exhaust ourselves in gossip while permitting others to check that our talk is indeed idle.

The talking disease is the talking cure of our modern society: the comforting illusion of having the power to say anything, anytime serves a system that, if our words mattered, would have to resort to more drastic acts of silencing.

Back in early 1930s Germany, Bertolt Brecht rejected radio as a distribution apparatus, a machine through which the few addressed the many, generally in the guise of speaking on their behalf. The German for broadcasting itself is misleading.  “Rundfunk” (literally, sparking around) hardly captures the one-sidedness of transmission. Brecht was looking forward to the day in which broadcasting could be a system of exchange, the kind of wireless telephony now available to us, at least technologically speaking.

Instead, German radio cut off all means of response other than compliance. It removed from the dial any voices that might utter second opinions. Effectively, it removed the dial itself by tuning the public to the official channel, and to that channel alone. Today, 18 August, the Volksempfänger turns 75. It was not simply the furniture of fascism.  It was its furnisher.

The Volksempfänger (the people’s receiver) fed Germans with whatever was in the interest of the Reich, that is, the governing body rather than anybody being thus governed. This privilege of being talked down to, of being shouted at and being shouted down, was offered at a discount—a discount that ended dissent in the bargain. Dictatorships, after all, depend on dictation.

Brecht had reason to be wary of broadcasting, a means of listening that precluded response. Does not the German language suggest that the German people are prone to being led by the ear? The German for “hearing” is “hören,” a related form of which is “horchen.” Both are the root of a great many words, and some weighty ones at that.

Take “gehören,” for instance, which means to belong, while “verhören” means to interrogate. “Hörig sein,” in turn, means “to be submissive,” and “gehorchen” means to obey. “Auf jemanden hören” means to pay heed. Remove the “jemand” (the anybody), and you have “aufhören,” which means to end, as free speech did when the Volksempfänger became cheaply available to anybody.

Today, we have the opportunity to receive as well as broadcast. We can take in hundreds of channels and put out millions of words. It calms many of us to the point of not speaking up. We can, therefore we don’t. A system that does not take the microphone away from us, that permits us to air our concerns, must be fair system. Why listen to anyone who tells us otherwise? Well, “Wer nicht hören will muss fühlen,” a German saying goes. Its meaning? Those who don’t listen shall feel the consequences.

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“How’dja Like to Love Me?”: Baby Rose Marie Turns . . . She Is . . . Well, Here She Is!

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe my ears, either. That is how I felt when I first watched International House (1933) and saw the sensational Baby Rose Marie belting out “My Bluebird Is Singing the Blues.” Watch out, Shirley Temple, I thought, this kid has got a little more octane; she’s more Maker’s Mark than Little Miss Marker, more moonshine than Sunnybrook. Today, that kid is celebrating her ( )th birthday. Her shoes may be on display at the Smithsonian in a few weeks; but, later this year, she is also going to be back on the screen—in a movie adaptation of the musical revue Forever Plaid. To find out more about the wunderkind from her own lips, I am tuning in to the first installment of a five-part interview with Rose Marie, recorded in 1999.

The interviewer, one Karen Herman, is about as dense as a pea souper, only far less absorbing; but the quondam phenom doesn’t seem to be phased by it, brushing aside or simply ignoring what she does not care to hear or answer: “Age is only good with wine and cheese,” she responds when Herman quizzes her on her date of birth, something “Baby” had to deal with right from the start of her career.

She also had to deal with doubters like me who, listening to her, imagined a rather more mature performer. “I never sounded like a child. I never had a Shirley Temple voice. Always had a Sophie Tucker type of voice,” Rose Marie commented. Now, that is a problem for a performer who is not seen. Sure enough, the singer-actress recalls, “people started writing in letters saying ‘that’s not a child, that’s a thirty-year-old midget.'” So, the alleged midget was sent on tour around the country.

Very little of Rose Marie’s many years on NBC radio is extant or readily available today. A clip from the 14 March 1938 broadcast of the Baby Rose Marie Show may be found here. Among the number is the catchy “How’dja Like to Love Me?” from College Swing (1938). Nearly a decade later, in 1947, “the little tyke who used to be in movies and on the air” was featured on Command Performance, hosted by a cheerfully daft Ken Niles, who was looking forward to holding her in his lap once again. Ginger Rogers set him right by describing Rose Marie to listeners as a “grown-up, luscious, attractive blonde.” “Well . . . ?” Niles replies rather salaciously and invites the guest to come up to his apartment to look at his rattles.

Mercifully cutting short the patter, Rose Marie sings “My Mama Says No, No” and, later in the program, goes back to the year 1926 BS (“before Sinatra) and does a swell Jimmy Durante impression (also heard on Durante’s own show).

This anniversary strikes me as just the occasion to reopen my Gallery of Radio Stars . . .

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Fight . . . Headache . . . Three . . . Ways

I’m fighting them any which way I can. Headaches! This time, though, nothing seems to work. And all the while, during a very nearly sleepless night, I’ve been torturing myself, thinking of the old Bromo-Seltzer train and its insistence that listeners to those Bromo-Seltzer sponsored programs “fight . . . headache . . . three . . . ways.” That meant taking care of stomach upset and jangled nerves into the bargain. Jangled nerves? I don’t know, but somehow that train whistle is the last thing you want to hear when you are under the weather (or whatever is firing up that blasted steam engine in my cranium these days).

The Bromo-Seltzer train was a menace, if you ask me; but it was also a marvel. It came to life through the magic of Sonovox, one of those fabulous if artistically insufficiently explored sound effects devices used in 1940s film and radio, where it was largely relegated to commercial duties. Its potential becomes no more apparent than in those insinuating drops of water dripping on A Letter to Three Wives (discussed here). As Time magazine described the invention in its 24 July 1939 issue, a recorded sound is “fed through wires to two little biscuit-shaped gadgets which are placed on each side of the throat against the larynx. These gadgets transmit the sound vibrations to the larynx, so that the sound comes out of the throat as if produced there.”

For comic effect, the novelty was used in the comedy-thriller You’ll Find Out (1940; mentioned here) and Disney’s Dumbo (1941). The Sonovox was also heard in The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943), and, rather more hauntingly, in the Joan Crawford-starring melodrama Possessed (1947; mentioned here). The swan song for the Sonovox appears to have been The Good Humor Man (1950), as a fellow web journalist shares it here, with a clip from the film.

The other day, I caught another glimpse of the Sonovox in operation while watching the The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a promotional tour of the Disney Studios filmed during the making of Dumbo, which was released early the following year. The proxy visitor taking the tour on our behalf is Algonquin Round Table wit Robert Benchley (pictured).

Tonight, though, it had better be a silent movie. Why not a stroll in Hitchcock’s Pleasure Garden, (1925)? After all, it is Alma Reville’s birthday.

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. . . but Grandmother Was a Radio

I am, in the words of a fellow webjournalist, “a child of television.” Being a latchkey kid, the TV set was a surrogate parent to me. It was around. It talked to me. And when it began to bore or annoy me, I had sufficient force in my little finger to evade its glare. True, during my early childhood, Germany had only two television channels (father and mother, you might say) and programming did not start until mid-afternoon; but it still came home earlier than my parents. At night, when I was assumed to be sleeping, I re-enacted what I had seen and played out stories with whatever I could lay my hands on. And those hands were greedy enough to grab at straws, or less.

When separated from my folks during a three-months stay at a sanatorium (I was a sickly child suffering from chronic bronchitis), I was so thirsty to satisfy my artistic impulses that I used saliva to draw images on the bed linen, for which offense I was rebuked by the nurses who, lacking both the imagination and the sense of humor to appreciate such spitting images, accused me of having wetted my quarters. I could have done that by crying; it was the only sound to penetrate the nightly silence.

Breathless as I was, I retreated into an inner world, imagining my ear to be a knob at the turning of which I could talk to the animals. Stuffed animals, that is. No sounds were made; we communicated without utterance. That way, I did not have to speak on their behalf, but could believe them to be responding without feeling quite so pathetically lonely. For the most part, my imaginings remained non-aural. I created motion pictures using rolls of adding machine paper my mother brought home from work; I invented cartoon characters and penned stories the moment I learned to make letters add up to words.

It was only after we moved into our own house, the house my father built for us, that I got intimately acquainted with that old-fashioned kind of television for which you supplied the picture. I got a radio. Not the enormous console that stood in my grandparents’ dining room, but a portable one with a built-in tape recorder. Soon I got carried away by sounds and thrilled to foreign voices.

I was not easily weaned off TV, though.  Once in a while, when I was assumed to be sleeping, I attempted to watch television through my binoculars (ours was an L-shaped house, and from my window I could peep into the living room); but gradually I learned to make the most of the wireless. Before my English was good enough to understand what was being said, I tuned in to the British Forces Broadcasting Service; I intercepted citizens’ band radio conversations and went dxing in search of faraway stations.

Yet what really awakened my love for the drama of sound was not the radio at all—it was a gadget my father insisted on installing in our house. It was an intercom. Now, our bungalow was hardly large enough to warrant such a device; but Papa was a professional electrician and avid hobbyist, aside from being somewhat of a show-off. While we were certainly not above shouting at each other, the family had to have an intercom (and, come to think of it, we had it before we got our first phone). It did not make us communicate any better; but it was certainly an interesting feature.

One night, when the wallpaper in my room (my very own room!) had not yet lost the smell of incomplete attachment, my father was ready to put the talking machine to the test it. He went into the kitchen, the control center from which we could all be summoned to the table and, I became aware later, monitored in our doings, provided we weren’t hush-hush about them or dared to switch off, suggesting we had something to conceal. Then he pressed a button and started talking to me as I was lying in bed. We chatted for a while; but, knowing my father close by and not being used to holding longer conversations with him, the novelty of the exchange soon wore off . . . until Papa hit on an exciting idea.

He went “off the air” for a while, during which time he rummaged through the kitchen drawers. I could hear as much through the closed doors; but my ear was fixed on that cream-colored box on the wall. Then it went on again; and the next sound I heard was not my father’s voice, but . . . what? The splank of a spoon in a pot, the sploshing of water in a glass, the swooshing of a tea towel being flung through space? Sounds. Mundane yet suddenly magical. And while I was invited to guess their origins, I also imagined their destination. I heard a church bell where others saw a pot, found an ocean in a cup, and saw, not a tea towel, but a dragon spreading its giant wings.

It was this little sound effects quiz that brought home a new world to me. Once I realized that there did not have to be a single right answer to those sonic puzzles, there opened up a realm of noisy possibilities. Sounds divorced from their maker, ready to be imbued with a new, almost independent life. Sounds waiting to be taken in like stray kittens, to be dispatched like carrier pigeons. Those were the sounds of latchkey child longing . . .

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All Washed Up: A Lament for Those Soap Sisters

“Poor Old Helen Trent,” a fellow webjournalist exclaimed the other day. It is right and proper to join in this lament; not only was she single, middle-aged, and beset by troubles into which she was drawn each quarter hour to tease but never quite satisfy those members of the radio audience who had the morbid curiosity that is a requisite for serial listening. She now has very little to show for all those years of turmoil. While still recalled by many who used to follow her getting nowhere fast, she is very nearly silenced today, with only a few chapters of the long-running serial readily available to anyone desirous to catch up. Even worse is the fate of Stella Dallas (pictured), who does not get a single mention in Robert C. Allen’s Speaking of Soap Operas (1985), one of the books I consulted for the occasion.

When I began to research American radio drama and narrative (there is something dissatisfying to me in the term “radio drama,” considering the importance of the narrator in most of these fictions), I wondered whether I would ever get to hear the programs I had hoped to write about. In my recovery efforts, I went so far as to dig up MA theses and dissertations written during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, if only to marvel at the material accessible to a student tuning in back then. Sure, I could have asked some of the old ladies whose Manhattan apartments I was cleaning back then; but, my memory being less than elephantine, I have come to distrust the recollections of others and much rather consult contemporary sources. One such is “The Radio Serial,” an unpublished thesis by Stanley Robert Rowe, who received his MS in 1949 from Boston University.

As Rowe puts it, his “treatise is based upon six weeks of regular listening in July and August 1948 to all the dramatic serials offered by the two radio networks which broadcast them [i.e. NBC and CBS].” Can you imagine? Six weeks with Stella Dallas, Helen Trent, and Ma Perkins! These days, one has to make due with isolated chapters; and, in some cases, with less.

In the summer of 1948, over thirty daytime serials were being broadcast each weekday over CBS and NBC alone. Beginning at 10:30 AM and concluding at 5:45 PM, NBC presented, in order of their broadcast time, the serials Road of Life, Joyce Jordan, MD, This Is Nora Drake, We Love and Learn, Lora Lawton, Claudia, Today’s Children, Light of the World, Life Can Be Beautiful, Ma Perkins, Pepper Young’s Family, Right to Happiness, Backstage Wife, Stella Dallas, Lorenzo Jones, Young Widder Brown, When a Girl Marries, Just Plain Bill, and Front Page Farrell.

CBS began airing its line-up of serials at 11:45 AM; by 3:15 PM, listeners could tune in to Rosemary, Wendy Warren, Aunt Jenny, Helen Trent, Our Gal Sunday, Big Sister, Ma Perkins, Young Doctor Malone, Guiding Light, Second Mrs. Burton, Perry Mason, This Is Nora Drake, Evelyn Winters, David Harum, and Hilltop House.

Now, why would anyone be willingly subjected to such programs? Why, to have something to say about them, of course. Stating his “reason for wanting to listen to all the serials,” Rowe explained:

First, I hoped to have as many examples as possible to substantiate and illustrate any conclusions I reached; and also, I wished to be able to write authoritatively about all the serials offered on a nation-wide network and determine the range and variety they represented. Far too much criticism is made of radio which is based on too little actual knowledge of the medium and its programs. In auditing all the radio serials, I hoped to be able to avoid sweeping generalizations which overlooked significant exceptions.

Yes, this is how writing about radio needs to start: with listening. Which, alas, is precisely why I have to remain silent about poor Stella Dallas and her sudsy sisterhood . . .

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Pop-cultural Auscultations: Dr. Poggioli in the Murder Clinic

I am wont, in these posts, to drop the kinds of names few of my contemporaries would bother to pick up—at least not here, in this cobwebbed corner of the net, so unlikely to restore luster to the no longer illustrious. Who, though, is concerned with luminaries these days? Luster does not denote excellence; it merely means to have a reflective surface, one in which the nameless try to find themselves as they glide toward oblivion. Ignominy is to have no name; for the purposes of today’s fame claiming, even a bad one will do.

A good name, in turn, is worthless if it is not on the tongues of the multitude whose gossipy repetitions translate into the notorious business of celebrification. What kind of name, then, is Dr. Poggioli? What kind of place is the Murder Clinic, where I came across it first?

Dr. Poggioli in my library

You don’t need to check into a Clinic to find out that Dr. Henry Poggioli is the name and title of an American psychologist with a penchant for solving crimes committed in places rather more exotic than Ohio, where he earned his PhD. T. S. Stribling came up with the name, the man, and all that befell him. Stribling. Now, there’s another name not much talked of these days. Apparently, even a Pulitzer Prize is no guarantor of a lasting reputation or a prolonged lifespan in print.

On this day, 11 August, 1942, the name Poggioli reverberated in the halls of the Mutual network’s Murder Clinic, itself a by now forgotten institution set aside for the keeping alive of fictional criminologists, if only in the memory of the public. Owing to the efforts of Mssrs. Ellery Queen, who kept publishing Stribling’s stories, Dr. Poggioli still had the benefit of a pulse; but his circulation had been healthier in the 1920s. In the Clinic, Poggioli was somewhat feebly resuscitated by one Herbert Yost, an actor known as Barry O’Moore before pictures and radio began to talk. During his encounter with “The Governor of Cap-Haïtien,” Yost kept stumbling over his lines as if he had come across them for the first time in the very moment they crossed his lips.

His name notwithstanding, the Clinic‘s Poggioli is equipped with little amounting to personality. Heard in the more memorable title role, a black governor beleaguered by the practitioners and believers in voodoo, is character actor Juano Hernandez (whom I recently saw in Trial and Ransom!, two thrillers starring Glenn Ford).

The governor was “quite a guy,” the host of Murder Clinic commented at the conclusion of the broadcast, set aside for a brief interview with the “Voodoo inspector.” “If you don’t mind my saying so,” the man from the Clinic remarked, “I think we should have had him here instead of you.”

Now, I’m not sure whether that trip to the Clinic did Poggioli any good; but a mere six weeks later he was back on the air in ”A Passage to Benares” as dramatized on Suspense (23 September 1942). On that occasion, Paul Stewart infuses him with some vigor, even though Stribling insisted on drugging him and had something altogether different in mind than the character’s well-being, as becomes apparent in the story’s startling conclusion.

As is often the case, the radio served as an introduction, however dubious, to an author and his creation. I followed up the listening experience with the perusal of the first Poggioli story I could lay my hands on. Originally published in 1932, “The Cablegram” was reprinted in the aforementioned anthology Rogues’ Gallery, which previously introduced me to another forgotten pulp hero by the name of Thubway Tham. It was while reading “The Cablegram” that I appreciated Stribling’s creation, his irony and humanity: “[T]here is no tyranny so inescapable and so difficult to prove as that of the police department,” Stribling permits the ostensible villain to proclaim as he outsmarts Poggioli and gets away with it, along with his crime.

Radio did not exactly give detective fiction a bad name, even though it was often accused of doing just that. It was more successful at heralding and advertising than in creating well-crafted whodunits. Provided those amateur sleuths and private eyes had made a name for themselves in print, radio could do much to keep it (or its author’s) in the public ear.

Stribling’s own voice was heard at least once on the air, as you may glean from this clipping. Such promotional efforts are more effective than any good word I could put in here for anyone or thing. Even so, I shall go on flinging those slippery handles into the air, the very element that once turned them into household names. In the days and weeks to come, I am going to concern myself with the more obscure titles in my newly restored library of recordings; that is, with plays, playwrights and personalities as yet unnamed in this journal.

Meanwhile, for another one of Stribling’s radio-readied tales, I refer you to ”Green Splotches,” as adapted for Escape and broadcast on 31 March 1950.

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A Fine Kettle of Fish

My visit to Canajoharie

These past few days, I’ve been trying to keep my eyes shut—as if the medication had not already made it well-nigh impossible to keep them open. The more they are watering, the more inflamed they get. And what with all this gasping for air, I hardly feel in my element. Allergies. My mother used tell me they are just a state of mind as she insisted that I mow the lawn—which is one reason I have not laid eyes on her in about two decades. State of mind, my bloodshot eye! Anyway. If I am not reaching for tissues or fishing for the inhaler, I am digging into my library of radio recordings, which I am spending an inordinate amount of time cataloguing. Otherwise, I would simply lose sight of what I have yet to hear.

Our Freedom’s Blessings was one of the titles to which I never gave a thought, let alone lend an ear. Lending a hand in its return to the air—or its turning up on the internet—turned out to be somewhat of a headache. So be it. After all, there is little use and less joy in going on about something without giving anyone else at least half a chance to follow.

My visit to Canajoharie

Little is known about Our Freedom’s Blessings, other than that it was produced by the New York State Department of Commerce. No recordings of it are currently available online. So, I set up a new site for the sharing of programs [now defunct].

Since the crash of my last Mac back in November 2007, I have been unable to edit my old pages; and, itchy eyes notwithstanding, it is only now that I can face the prospect of starting from scratch. You might well argue that an episode of Our Freedom’s Blessings titled “The Little Jars of Canajoharie” was not worth all this effort. Ah, but have you been to Canajoharie?

As Uncle York, the narrator of Our Freedom’s Blessings tells us, Canajoharie is an Indian name meaning “the kettle that washes itself.” The “little town with the funny name,” we learn,

lies smack in the middle of the Mohawk valley.  In 1890, Canajoharie was hardly more than a crossroads, still half country.  Well, it was a leisurely kind of life, quiet days of wagon wheels on dirt streets, the tingling smell of hickory smoke in a cow crossing in the main part of the town.  But Canajoharie folks wasn’t asleep.  Far from it.  Couple of fellas that smoked their own hams and bacon started to sell them to other folk.  And before you knew it, there was a full-fledged little company operating, one that took for itself a homespun kind of name: Beechnut.

Well, we did not listen to Uncle York on our travels through upstate New York when we happened upon Canajoharie—after an unwelcome detour—and that despite the fact that the Mac on which the recording is stored went along for the ride. Had we done so, we might have learned a little something about the fortunes of the town. We did insist on seeing the “kettle,” not heeding the warnings of a local that it was little more than a hole in the ground.

Equipped though we were with hand-drawn map handed to us at a tourist information booth that suggested we were not the only ones eager to seize the opportunity to gawk at a pothole, we did not encounter anyone else on along the way on that warm June morning. We got lost, passing derelict factory buildings and warehouses that bespeak the town’s heyday, the days of which Uncle York speaks.

When I came across the name of “Canajoharie” in my recordings library, I just had to tune in. Never mind that “Little Jars” turned out to be little more than a juvenile infomercial about the makers of baby food. Somehow, whatever flotsam drifts toward me on the airwaves seems to belong in my life. It is never an altogether different kettle of fish.

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The Earl Next Door

Montague, our Jack Russell terrier, had a visitor this morning. A sheepdog from the neighboring farm took time off from her daily chores and made her way up the lane to our cottage. A mere quarter of a mile—but what a giant leap into the lap of relative luxury. I wonder about the old lass. You can tell by her coat that she isn’t a pet; she’s strictly the below-stairs kind of gal. And that would be the front steps. No lounging around in the conservatory at all hours of the day, no ball games in the garden, no treats from the table, no trips to the beach. If she weren’t dead tired from doing her work, she might be daydreaming about how the other half lives. Perhaps, that is what did in the last dog who held the job. The poor thing was run over by the tractor under whose wheels it rested. Shades of Thomas Hardy.

I was reminded, too, of Norman Corwin’s “association” with Nick, an English setter who “lived down the hill,” but, having had a “falling out with his owners,” insisted on being taken care of and paid attention to elsewhere. That same “Grand Hotel of fleas” achieved the next best thing to immortality in Corwin’s radio play “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones.” Our neighbor’s sheepdog, on the other paw, was rather less demanding. After an hour’s visit, she went dutifully back down the hill. Now it is Montague’s turn to dream about that life beyond the fence. . . .

Entire industries are devoted to reminding us that the grass is greener elsewhere, to sowing the seeds of discontent and to suggesting we’d settle for a pair of binoculars and a box of weed killer to improve our lot. In this racket of showing us the other half and telling us that, with some slight and low-priced adjustments, our own ain’t half bad, the quarter-hours known as soap operas take the booby prize. Some fifty, sixty years ago—but at just about the time of day that Montague was entertaining his not-a-lady friend—a string of tangled yarns like Our Gal Sunday would roll into America’s kitchens and living rooms, or wherever radio sets were positioned and tuned in for that chance at a ready-made getaway.

“Sunday,” as James Thurber put it, “started life as a foundling dumped in the laps of two old Western miners” but managed to move on up to become the “proud and daggered wife” of “England’s wealthiest and handsomest young nobleman.” Was it safe on the other side? Was it wise to make that leap? According to Thurber, that was a question asked by most of the so-called washboard weepers:

Can a good, clean Iowa girl find happiness as the wife of New York’s most famous matinee idol? Can a beautiful young stepmother, can a widow with two children, can a restless woman married to a preoccupied doctor, can a mountain girl in love with a millionaire, can a woman married to a hopeless cripple, can a girl who married an amnesia case—can they find soap-opera happiness and the good, soap-opera way of life?

The answer, of course, was a resounding “no.” The denizens of “Soapland” remained “up to their ears in inner struggle, soul searching, and everlasting frustration.”

Sure, we’ve all got those. I’m never sure, though, just what the other half might be for me. It’s not that I know my place; I just came to know a lot of places. What is the use of an elusive realm of otherness to a squarely queer working-class boy with a PhD, a cottage in the country, and a suitcase that is always half full (or half empty)? I am either here or there, and the elsewhere is neither here nor there to me. I guess I’m just not prone to nostalgia.

Meanwhile, on this partly cloudy afternoon, my better half and I are off to spend a night at Powis Castle. We won’t flop in the recently restored state bedroom, mind you, but in the timbered cottage to the right of the Welsh fortress once known as “Y Castell Coch” (“The Red Castle”). Further to the right is where the present Earl of Powis resides. So, I am spending the night between the riches amassed by the aforementioned Clive of India and the home of a demoted nobleman. Our Gal Sunday and her kind can take a half-day . . .

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Twice Behind the High Wall; or, It’s Not the Sane on the Radio

Every once in a while I catch a sound and solid studio era thriller that has heretofore escaped me. One such welcome find is the Curtis Bernhardt-directed High Wall (1947) starring the dark and deadly serious Robert Taylor as an amnesic who finds himself in an asylum for the criminally insane for a murder he may or may not have committed. Initially refusing treatment for fear of having his guilt confirmed along with a sanity that could prove the death of him, he is soon faced with evidence convincing him that he is not beyond hope and sets out to mount the titular structure and leave no stone unturned in an attempt to emerge a free, upright man and levelheaded parent.

In this process of tearing down the wall that silences him, Taylor’s character is supported by a member of the staff (Audrey Totter), but all the while impeded by the to him unknown schemer who laid those bricks and is determined to make them insurmountable (Herbert Marshall).

In the architecture of High Wall, the three figures operate with the predictability of trained mice. We know—and are meant to know—that Taylor is innocent, that Totter will be so unprofessional as to confess her love for him, and that Marshall has erected the High Wall to cover up his own guilt. Knowing as much makes us the privileged observers of a neat and well-staged rehabilitation drama, a character study of the three mice in a maze that begins to crumble and lose some of its high tension only after the wall has been taken. A solid suspense drama, nonetheless.

Suspense. That is precisely where I had previously hit upon this High Wall, or, as it turned out, some rudiments thereof. The title rang a bell loudly enough to make me check for such a radio connection. Produced on 6 June 1946, eighteen months prior to the release of the film, “High Wall” presents a similar situation but an altogether different outcome.

Both radio version and screen adaptation were based on a story and play by one Bradbury Foote (the motion picture also credits Alan R. Clark). Subsequently, the film that was a radio play that was a stage play and story was reworked anew as a radio play. Starring Van Heflin and Janet Leigh, the remake was soundstaged in Lux Radio Theater on 7 November 1949.

Unlike, say, Sorry, Wrong Number, the property remains sound whether it is thrown onto the big screen or pulverized into thin air. Nothing about the motion picture suggests that what we see has been remodeled from a stage set; likewise, the radio play is so much in keeping with the Suspense formula that it might well have been an original radio drama, written especially for the series.

Those at work in structuring and reconstructing both High Wall, the film, and “High Wall,” the radio play, clearly understood the limitations and potentialities of the media for which the product was headed. Whatever his initial idea, Foote did not insist that his words were written in stone.

So, rather than arguing which version is superior, I noted the differences between the Suspense drama and the screen thriller. On the air, the story is decidedly more noir than on the screen. It is more concerned with the demoralizing than with morals; less involved in the cure than in the kill. It draws us in, behind that wall, without signaling a way out. No outline of romance and redemption; no hope foreshadowed. Just the shadow of which we are puppets.

Whereas High Wall is concerned with a man’s struggle to clear his name, “High Wall” deals with a man who barely remembers it. That he is telling us his own story does not make him any less suspicious. Why did he end up in an asylum? Or is he merely stonewalling? We need to know that before we can feel at ease about taking his side.

The omniscient film narrative provides us with a villain whose workings are clear to us before they become known to the main character. In the radio play, we don’t know any more than an apparent amnesiac whose mental state and progress are uncertain. As it turns out, what he doesn’t know might just kill you!