Category: Radio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Black Eye/Boxed Ear: Radio Vs. Television, Round One

Well, I’m working myself up to a season finale of sorts. On 20 May, broadcastellan will turn two. And since the anniversary falls smack into the limbo of my (projected) three-week hiatus—during which time I am once again catching the sights and sounds of New York City, my former home—this week’s journal entries are meant to remind me why I love writing about radio, the medium television bullied into submission. Let’s have a sparring contest between video and the wireless. Do we need images to get the picture? Can radio show television how it’s really done? Or might not sight be a welcome, even necessary, adjunct to sound? That kind of debate.

Though I grew up, like fellow webjournalist Brent McKee, being a “Child of Television,” I don’t sample many contemporary programs these days. I generally snatch from satellite TV whatever old movies I see listed in the Radio Times (yes, Britain’s premier TV guide is still called the Radio Times). Perhaps I shouldn’t be pooping on the dish, given that many of the films I have watched so far this year (and am listing in the column on the right) were recorded from television, British channels FilmFour, the four BBC channels, and TCM UK being the main purveyors.

So, what programs have I been watching lately? I confess to an occasional glance at a few early episodes of Ugly Betty, a serial so uneven in tone and unselfconsciously hokey in its storytelling that it makes me think Postmodernism has finally jumped the shark. I’m still following the exploits of those frenetic Housewives, however much the series and I have suffered since Marcia Gross went on maternity leave. This might have been Nicollette Sheridan’s chance to become more than a supporting player; but Edie’s hardened slut-with-a-soft spot turn is as tedious as it is unconvincing. Besides, I still mourn the exit of Valerie Mahaffey, for whose wicked ditziness I fell big time in the early 1990s, when it was on full display in Norman Lear’s too-smart-for-prime time serial The Powers That Be.

Since the gals I have been cheering for are leading the competition, I keep tuning in to the current season American Idol, even if it means turning down the volume when subjected to the song catalogues of mentors like Jon Bon Jovi. Rather an ordeal is Any Dream Will Do, a British song-and-dance contest in which a group of guys vie for the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Largely deficient in ability or charisma, the contestants may very well be the death of the musical’s West End revival later this year—a case of pop culture trash canning itself.

What do these illegitimate children of Major Bowes signify, now that Eurovision fever is once again sweeping the nations (forty-two of them, to be exact)? Small fries, I say (if only to account for my choice of illustration, the above being an image from the early US television program Small Fry Club).

But, to get this match started. Last night, 6 May, I watched “How the Edwardians Spoke,” an the unlikely television documentary shown on BBC4, Britain’s “digital channel of the year.” This seemed to me the ideal subject for a radio program: a dialectician (Joan Washington) in search of lost pieces of shellac holding the voices of Britons imprisoned in Germany during the First World War. The men, of whose days in the camps only few pictures survive, were asked (not forced, apparently), to read or sing some lines in English so that their regional accents could be captured and studied by Austrian Anglophile Alois Brandl.

I was doubtful about the prospect of staring at spinning records from a bygone age; but seeing these “voices” come home to their families after ninety years in the can and witnessing their reception made for inspired television. Imagine hearing your ancestors (in one case, a dead brother of a woman yet living) speak or sing from the grave, as it were. Rather than being merely pleasing, the images of Britain’s landscapes, whose variety Ms. Washington linked to the wide range of accents and dialects, assisted me (still foreign to the British isles) in placing those voices, in tracing their origins on the map of the Kingdom.

Radio voices of the past cannot be trusted to tell the story of all these Englishes. On US radio, the British tended to sound like Alan Mowbray, while the dearth of authentic dialects in Britain was mainly due to the generic BBC English now challenged by regionally diverse newscasters. Like BBC2’s Balderdash and Piffle, which begins its second season this week, “How the Edwardians Spoke” proved to be radio worth watching. Seems that, instead of pummeling it, television is making eyes at the wireless, if only to invade the domain of sound that radio has lost sight of …

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Now on the Air: Charles Dickens, E. F. Benson, and Daphne du Maurier

Well, this is one for the minisodes generation: my weekend’s literary line-up, the CliffsNotes edition. Radio, like television and the movies, has often been accused of serving condensed milk from prize-winning cash cows grazing in the public domain, of chopping up the meat of literature into bite-sized morsels for ready consumption. There’s still plenty of that going on, even though far more than chopping and condensing is involved in the process of adaptation, an art of translation too often dismissed as mere hackwork.

I’ve been scanning the Radio Times for dramatic radio series now or soon playing on BBC Radio 4. As usual, I am woefully late to catch up. Since BBC radio programs are available online for seven days after their original broadcast, I’ve only got a few hours to take in the second and final instalment of the Classic Serial “Down and Out in Paris and London,” based on the autobiographical writings of George Orwell. I missed the first part; but the second one promises to take me to London in the 1920s, with a young Orwell as guide.

Also about to be removed from the archives are the first chapters of Mapp and Lucia, a serial based on E. F. Benson’s 1931 novel, which contains this peculiar exchange about mastering the difficulty of being hard of hearing:

“Mrs. Antrobus’s got a wonderful new apparatus. Not an ear-trumpet at all. She just bites on a small leather pad, and hears everything perfectly. Then she takes it out of her mouth and answers you, and puts it back again to listen.” 

“No!” said Lucia excitedly. “All wet?” 

“Quite dry. Just between her teeth. No wetter anyhow than a pen you put in your mouth, I assure you.”

Then there is Dickens Confidential, a series of six plays fictionalizing the life of the author in his “role of a campaigning newspaper editor.”

Upcoming this weekend is the first of a two-part adaptation of My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (whose “Birds,” migrated to the wireless, I observed here a while ago). The motion picture version of du Maurier’s 1951 thriller was subsequently soundstaged in the Lux Radio Theater and broadcast on 7 September 1953. The author’s 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. She is currently the subject of several radio documentaries in which the settings of her stories are revisited in today’s Cornwall (to which I devoted a few posts last year).

That’s what I’ve got earmarked for the weekend. Time now to trade in the gems of literature for the gams of Betty Grable, whose Pin Up Girl I’m screening tonight. “Don’t Carry Tales Out of School,” indeed.

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The Life of Radio: Norman Corwin Turns 97

Well, I just cast my two votes in the National Election here in Wales. It is the first time I’ve been given such a voice in a country not my own, and the first I am asserting my right to raise it since leaving Germany for New York City back in 1990. It is an important election, too, considering that, beginning this month, the National Assembly for Wales is enjoying new legislative powers and can henceforth pass laws (or assembly measures) affecting everyday living in the principality. Now, I won’t divulge just where I placed that X on the ballot sheets; but—caveat: creaky transition—I am going to tell you who gets my vote for “Most Underrated and Ignored American Poet of the 20th Century.” That would be Norman Corwin, who on this 3 May 2007 celebrates his ninety-seventh birthday.

He has been called the “poet laureate” of American radio, even though that title was never officially bestowed. As writer, director, and producer, he created some of the most eloquent, witty and stirring plays ever conceived for listening. He was the life of the medium at a time when it was alive (if not always well) as an artistic forum, and is ready to reach out to those, including myself, who refuse to turn a deaf ear to it. As The Easy Ace reminds us, he had a profound influence on the lives and careers of creative minds (like the aforementioned Robert Altman) who turned on the radio and turned on to his works.

What is the life of radio? Is it the voice, the word made sound, or sound itself? Are the airwaves the domain of the bard who writes for recital or the journalist who listens and records? When asked (by Douglas Bell, in a published interview titled Years of the Electric Ear) whether he thought of himself as a “creative, imaginative writer or as a sociologist or documentarian,” Corwin declared himself to be “definitely” the former. Perhaps, he was rather too accepting of the dichotomy. After all, many of his most compelling pieces for radio are at once reportage and poetry.

It was not by choice that he assumed the role of a radio documentarian, that he achieved fame for commemorative specials like “On a Note of Triumph” and “We Hold These Truths” or acclaim for series like An American in England and One World Flight). He enjoyed being witty and whimsical, writing satires and fantasies in verse disclosing “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas” or opening the case of “The Undecided Molecule”; but, once his powers of engaging the mind became known, he was being “importuned by radio entities” to speak on behalf of the American people in moments of sorrow, cheer, and sheer confusion.

The height of Corwin’s radio career—the heyday of the medium—coincides with the period of the Second World War; indeed, radio’s influence and status during those years was largely due to that global conflict, as the airwaves connected the home front to the theaters of war, however careful the filtration. For purposes of propaganda, radio recruited a great many authors who otherwise would have had little to do with the commerce-corrupted mass medium. In Corwin, broadcasters and government officials found an artist who not only knew the medium but loved and respected it, who could exploit it (rather than its listeners) while exploring its potentialities.

Corwin never turned his back on broadcasting, even when commercial radio in the US began to abandon the production of dramatic programming, already rendered largely inconsequential during the 1950s as a result of anti-Communist hysteria. Unlike many former radio playwrights, Corwin did not consider the airwaves to be a path to ostensibly bigger and better projects in other media. And if his writings are not nearly as well known today as they once were and deserve to be now, we should fault neither the topicality nor the transient nature of his work in sound, but cite the neglect of the stage on which it had been brought into existence.

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The Doll Who Made Puppets of Men

I won’t be in town in time to celebrate her 100th birthday and join in the festivities currently (if somewhat prematurely) underway at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The celebrated one is Brooklyn-born Barbara Stanwyck, who, on this day, 2 May, in 1943, added a piece of wood to the pile of men she knew how to manage. Charlie McCarthy, that is, a ventriloquist dummy oozing sap after a period of protracted prepubescence. Suddenly, he was sprouting facial hair, some not so hot fuzz with which he hoped to attract “women of the opposite sex.” Yet unlike Marilyn Monroe after her, the Ball of Fire hadn’t come to woo, wow, or wed Charlie. She was going to burn him without having to turn on the heat.

After cutting this log down to size by reminding him that he still worked for a measly salary of 75 cents per week, the shrewd Lady Eve offered Charlie her services as a manager: “Just place yourself in my hands and I’ll put you on a solid basis,” she promised. Apparently, Indemnity wasn’t the only thing this Lady of Burlesque preferred double. And Charlie, eager for a little independence after years of service, promptly rose to the bait.

As he would a few weeks later, when Claudette Colbert invited him to her beach house, Charlie learned another important wartime lesson: not to be too selfish or greedy while Americans were called upon to make sacrifices and lend their support to neighbor and nation alike. As for Ms. Stanwyck, she still walked away with a few extra nickels she had managed to squeeze out of the timbered twerp, who, for once, ended up not having the last word.

Whether or not she had any desire to handle or caress men, she could manage them, all right.

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Dancing with Franchot Tone: Tenth Avenue Girl Gets to Be “Lady for a Day”

Fancy that, Florence Farley! You were one lucky teenager, when, early in March 1939, a photographer from the ever enterprising Hearst paper New York Journal American came to see a fashion show planned by you and the kids in your neighborhood—the none too fashionable Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. Subsequently, you were chosen to go to Hollywood and become a “Lady for a Day.” What’s more, on this day, 1 May, you got to tell millions of Americans about your experience, dutifully marvelling at the “simply swell” Lux toilet soap in return. After all, you were talking to Cecil B. DeMille, nominal producer of the Lux Radio Theater, and there had to be something in it for those who made you over, young lady, and made your day.

Mr. DeMille was in New York City for the premiere of his Union Pacific, while Leslie Howard took over as narrator and host in Hollywood; so, C. B. didn’t really have to go out of his way (or send you back, all expenses paid, to Tinseltown) to meet up with you. You had returned by then from your West Coast adventure, the title of “Lady” being bestowed upon you “with the understanding” that you would return to your “own workaday world.”

“I was just another girl,” you told the famous director, just as the script had it. “Gee,” you exclaimed, as anyone should, having had a break like yours. When prompted to do so, you told listeners of going to your “first nightclub,” where you met Dorothy Lamour and “danced with Franchot Tone.” He probably felt like dancing, too, considering that he was single again, his marriage with Joan Crawford having recently ended in divorce, which might not be as bad as going back to the tenements. By the way, I’m watching Harriet Craig tonight and wonder what it must have been like, living with Crawford. But never mind that now.

While in Hollywood, you also got to make a screentest, go for a “bicycle ride with Bob Hope,” and appear in a Paramount picture. Not that I could find your name anywhere on the Internet Movie Database. Who knows just how much of your dream come true is true, Florence Farley. Tell me, were you really glad to return to the tenements to live with your grandma and go out with boys who only dream of being Errol Flynn? Did you get to keep those “Cinderella slippers,” never having “paid more than $2 for shoes” before?

Yours was another thin slice of Hollywood baloney, a West Coast diversion from the butchery about to commence in the east to the east of you. It’s no coincidence, either, that the Lux Radio Theater presented an adaptation of Damon Runyon’s ”Madame La Gimp” (later aired under original title on the Damon Runyon Theater program and remade as Pocketful of Miracles starring Glenn Ford, who would have celebrated his 91st birthday today, had he not died last August). Nor is it surprising that your fairy tale fits so well into the scheme of selling things, of carving the mess of life into neat bars of soap.

You know, Flo, listening to your voice (more real than the hooey you were asked to repeat) and wondering about the life behind those lines of yours—the life behind the “human interest” story and the publicity act you were that spring—sure beats following the sentimental play on offer that night. Now let’s wash our hands of the whole affair, without so much as thinking about lathering with the sponsor’s product . . .

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"Round and Round Hitler’s Grave"

It took a while before the news got around the world; but on this day, 30 April, in 1945, Adolf Hitler got around facing trial and execution by committing suicide in his bunker. It would take another six decades until that hideout was opened for public inspection, when, in 2004, the Führer’s final days became the subject of a German film Der Untergang (2004). The Great Dictator had often been the subject of caricatures and crude character sketches, which are so much easier to accomplish than a life-size portrait. They are so much easier to take, as well, considering that a realistic image forces us to acknowledge that, far from being super- (or sub-) human, Hitler was one of us.

Throughout the Second World War, parodies and revenge fantasies boosted the morale of the Allies, comforted by way of comic deflation or enraged through violent melodrama. Radio popularized songs like Spike Jones’s previously mentioned “Der Führer’s Face” and Pete Seeger’s “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.” If he could not be assassinated, potshots had to do:

I’m-a going to Berlin
To Mister Hitler’s town
I’m gonna take my forty-four
And blow his playhouse down.

This is how, a few days after the Führer’s death, the Almanac Singers modified those lines of Seeger’s original song when they performed it for a live broadcast of Norman Corwin’s celebrated VE-Day tribute “On a Note of Triumph,” the highest-rated American radio play of all time:

We’re gonna tell the postman,
Next time he comes ’round,
That Mr. Hitler’s new address
Is the Berlin buryin’ ground.

The Führer was dead, all right. Some eager radio writers had already killed him off, in fantasies like the aforementioned “Death Comes for Adolf Hitler.”  And yet, did that “playhouse” of his ever shut down only because its director, its producers, sponsors, and select members of staff were found dead, along with an audience of millions or, as discussed here, tried and executed in the spectacle of Nürnberg?

Corwin cautioned the American public, asking listeners to “fix [their] eyes on the horizons” and swing [their] ears about.” The old regime did not simply expire, no matter how many rounds had been shot to silence the enemy or how loudly one went “Round and Round” the problem of facing the aftermath.

Lately, I have been watching a number of German post-war films that dealt with the recent past of the fallen Reich and were less than sanguine about the Wunder of the nation’s reinvention as a republic. That is, they dealt with the inconvenient truth that the Nazis were not all below ground. Some had gone underground. They went on to make it big during the US-financed Wirtschaftswunder (or economic boom). Both Wir Wunderkinder (1958) and Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (1959) comment on the big fascist business and bureaucracy behind Germany’s capitalist society and its corruption by Nazi big shots who, rehabilitated without remorse, managed to get high up by keeping a low political profile.

It is this sense of a hidden presence, of an unresolved, let alone conquered past, that, many decades after Germany’s surrender, made it difficult for me to face life in that country, a country where fascists old and new still dance round and round Hitler’s grave as if in hopes of a resurrection; where those in denial of the past or in support of its policies still trample on the graves of millions; and where the radical left not only opened wounds, but fire, perpetrating acts of extremist terror.

I have not been back these seventeen years. We all have our baggage, you might say. Sometimes it weighs so heavily on our souls, it keeps us from dancing . . .

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Shutting Private Eyes; or, the Day Spade Kicked the Bucket

When is it ever the right time, the moment to call it a day after all those years and retire that greasy old trenchcoat—or whatever fashion-defying trademark you might have worn out long before your welcome? Who’s to say, or decide? Peter Falk, apparently, is having a tough time convincing executives that he’s still kicking anything but the bucket. He simply can’t get them to greenlight another Columbo mystery, not even one that closes the book on the four-decades old franchise. I was reminded of the booted gumshoe when, walking around Pest (as in Budapest), we came across that dive in the doctored snapshot.

Columbo is a legend, all right; but to those with an eye for fresh blood, that’s just a fancy way of saying “past it.” Those bags under your eyes sure can get you sacked. These days, wrinkles don’t give a guy character; they take it away from him. And unless you can pass yourself off as Miss Marple, your days in the business are numbered if you can still manage facial expressions.

It wasn’t a matter of putting a stud out to pasture, though, when Sam Spade was kicked out of the radio branch of his office on this day, 27 April, in 1951, after solving what those who got paid to put words into his mouth called, “for obvious reasons,” the “Hail and Farewell Caper.”

Spade wasn’t too old, see. Just ask his secretary, Effie, who would have loved to straighten more than his tie. Besides, on radio you’re as old as your voice can make others imagine you are; and tough-talking Spade was a good enough egg to make you think hardboiled rather than rotten. It was his father who got him axed. Dashiell Hammett, I mean, who got blacklisted for being so un-American as to exercise his right to a political position. After Washington started to dig and got red dirt on Hammett, no broadcaster dared to touch his Spade. That’s when they got out the axe.

There was some retooling, initially. But dropping Hammett’s name just wasn’t enough to appease the network, just as giving Spade a new voice (Stephen Dunne taking over for Howard Duff) did little to please prospective sponsors, the old one (Wildroot Cream Oil) having defected. What was left of Spade after the blunt instruments in the business of commercial broadcasting had operated on his larynx just wasn’t enough to convince listeners, who had fought to get their favorite detective back on the air and lift Spade’s two-month suspension in the fall of 1950.

Radio was a queer racket in those days. You could be a a Communist for the FBI, but not a pink private eye. As I said, a new agenda called for a new kind of scouring agent. It mattered little that Hammett had nothing to do with the writing of the show (he just collected the royalties, which is pretty good business sense for a Commie), or that the Spade on the air was about as red as the greenbacks he was after but always short of.

At the close of the “Hail and Farewell Caper,” Spade makes a final sales pitch, a word to prospective advertisers; but, being that it wasn’t yet time for the obligatory summer hiatus, during which executives decided the fate of radio heroes, the plea sounds out of place. If you ask me, it was a ruse intended to quiet listener protest by leaving some hope for a commercially sponsored resurrection, a denial of the politics behind the show’s death warrant. It was the spirit of the age that dug Spade‘s grave.

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Pride of the Luftwaffe: Guernica at 70

“Well, gentlemen, let’s get aboard,” says the pilot in Norman Corwin’s “They Fly Through the Air.” What a “peach” of a morning. “You couldn’t ask for a better day” . . . to blow up a few hundred civilians. The verse play (discussed here previously), was written in commemoration of the air raid on the village of Gernika-Lumo, perpetrated on this day, 26 April, in 1937. In what words, in which ways can one approach such a monstrosity, reproach such a murderous marvel as modern warfare? How to make sense of it? How to keep from becoming numb, insensitive to the atrocities of war that are being committed even today, when our gardens are peaceful and the pavements busy with people consumed with their own cares or the pleasures of consuming? These are the questions poet-journalist Corwin, who will turn 97 in a few days, tackles in his response to the raid. Picasso’s Guernica, which I got to see at last on a visit to Madrid, is a lament for the dead and wounded; Corwin’s “They Fly” is an attack on the machinery of war and the minds that get it running.

“Gee, that’s fascinating,” exclaims the pilot as he looks down upon the havoc and horror he has wrought by dutifully carrying out his mission, which is merely to test the what is hot from the runways of Germany, the latest line of the Luftwaffe: “What a spread! Looks just like a budding rose, unfolding.” That precious simile is an echo of a remark attributed to Mussolini, who is said to have found floral beauty in mass destruction.

“How can we justly celebrate the odysseys / Of demigods who finger destinies upon their trigger tips?” Corwin’s narrator considers. He has a few suggestions, all of which he rejects as unworthy of the deed:

With wreaths of laurel?
Laurel withers fast.
By sculpturing in bronze?
Too cold; too passive;
Also, in emergencies, it may be melted to make other things;
Rechristen with you names a public square?
That’s vulgar.
Furthermore, no single square is big enough.

A poem, perhaps?
Aha, that’s it! A poem!
A verse or two that will contract no rust,
A bombproof ode, whose strophes will stand stout
Against all flood and famine, epidemic war,
And pox and plague and general decay.
Yes, poetry’s the thing.

Is it? The narrator tries to escape the noise of the motors (“Our meter will be influenced”), but is dissatisfied with his lines:

What words can compass glories such as we have seen today?
Our language beats against its limitations.

How do we commemorate Guernica? Perhaps by listening for and to those engines running, the war machinery that is at work today. The past is often conveniently looked at as if from above, from which vantage point it appears distant, clearly patterned, even negligible or quaint. Perhaps it is best to resist the temptations of flight . . .

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Earwitness for the Prosecution

Being that this is the anniversary of the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, a scientist widely, however mistakenly, regarded as the inventor of the wireless, I am once again lending an ear to the medium with whose plays and personalities this journal was meant to be chiefly concerned. Not that I ever abandoned the subject of audio drama or so-called old-time radio; but efforts to reflect more closely my life and experiences at home or abroad have induced me of late to turn a prominent role into what amounts at times to little more than mere cameos. Besides, “Writing for the Ear” is a course I am offering this fall at the local university; so I had better prick ’em up (my auditory organs, I mean) and come at last to that certain one of my senses.

The English lexicon amply documents the western bias against listening, generally “seen” as being secondary to sight. Compared to the commonly used “eyewitness,” for instance, the expression “earwitness” sounds rather unusual. What’s more, it is rejected by my electronic dictionary and, when typed in defiance, promptly marked as a spelling error. That is perhaps the victorious eye thumping its nose at the once superior ear, which, prior to the invention of the printing press, played a greater or at any rate more respected role in the sharing and absorption of information than it does in this our age of gossip and hearsay. If the always favored ocular proof cannot be discovered, it is the eyewitness report that carries more weight than the overheard.

I am going to refrain from channeling McLuhan, however, and concentrate instead on a notable fictional witness whose testimony was brought before an audience in the strictest sense of the word. I am referring to Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom melodrama initially conceived as a short story and subsequently adapted, albeit not by Dame Agatha herself, for US radio, whose early experiments in courtroom dramatics have been previously discussed here.

According to the Wikipedia, the “very first performance of Witness for the Prosecution was in the form of a live telecast which aired on CBS’s Lux Video Theatre on 17 September 1953. Now, this is accurate only if Witness is meant to denote Christie’s stage play, rather than her story. The latter had already been dramatized nearly four and a half years earlier. Produced by NBC’s Radio City Playhouse, it was broadcast on this day, 25 April, in 1949.

Such a hold has visual storytelling on our imagination today that it is difficult to approach this audio performance of Witness without seeing before one’s mind’s eyes the features and the legs of the legendary Marlene Dietrich (of whom I have seen quite a bit this year [see my movie lineup on the right] and to whose voice I intend to devote my next podcast). Then there is that prominent scar in the face of the titular character, more prominent still than Ms. Dietrich’s invaluable German accent. Can a sound-only adaptation without access to Dietrich’s features or voice succeed in rendering Christie’s cheeky deception?

Unlike the character of Leonard Vole, the accused, whose innocence is laid on rather too thickly by David Gothard in the Radio City Playhouse production to escape the listener’s suspicion, the mysterious woman who comes to his aid (ably portrayed by theater actress Lotte Stavisky) might just manage to pull the wool over your ears. The radio dramatization handles the challenges of duping the audience, both the listeners at home and in the fictional courtroom, remarkably well, the scar being made audible in the gasp of its beholder. Like the members of a jury, when called upon to examine accusations and protestations of innocence, the listener deals with interpretations of reality, on someone’s word taken for an otherwise unknowable “it.”

I confess, though, that, as much as I value my hearing, I frequently feel compelled to see for myself; which is why, on the anniversary of Dame Agatha’s birthday, I went up to her room at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul last fall and had a look. There wasn’t much to see, really; not so much as an air of her presence. And, after paying the concierge who escorted us up to room 411, which the enterprising management has shrouded in a mystery of its own, I felt as if I were getting a box on the ear for not having had more sense.