Category: Radio

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"Endangered Sounds"?

Well, let’s see. No, wait. Let’s listen instead. “Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute / toward it.” Walt Whitman wrote these lines. What are the notes to the song of my self? What are the echoes of my everyday? What do these sounds have to do with me?

When I moved to Wales, far from the hubbub of Manhattan, I had to get used to a whole new soundscape. I haven’t quite gotten used to it yet; particularly not to the howling of the wind. These days, there is a new sound in the living room. Yet it is so old, Whitman might have heard it. It is not a Welsh sound, but one made in Brooklyn. It is the sound of our Ansonia clock, anno 1881 (pictured above), which is now part of the ambiance in which I breathe and move.

I have been listening to the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Endangered Sounds.” What might that be, an endangered sound? In my adolescence, I began to wonder about the perishable fabric of my sonic everday. I began to record noises and voices in an attempt to capture where—and who—I was. I did not trust my archival mind as a storehouse of sonic markers of place and time. We tend to make records of our lives in words and images rather than sound. The image seems to be more desirable as a keepsake—more reliable and persuasive. It dominates our senses. Is it any wonder we feel out of touch with the past if we insist on turning it into graphic objects.

I remember sitting in Central Park one afternoon, thinking how serene my environs were. I recorded the sounds of that afternoon and played them back at home, only to realize how noisy that spot had been. The images were so powerful, they drowned out the sounds of the metropolis—the cars rushing by just behind the trees, the buzz of commerce puncuated by sirens. I took no notice of what was out of sight (though hardly out of earshot); I did not hear what the eye fooled me into believing absent. I listen for them now that I am gone. I miss them more than the sights, stored in my mind, preserved on paper, and displayed in this journal.

“Endangered Sounds” provokes thoughts about our changing environment, about noise pollution, about the loss and luxury of silence: the nostalgia for our silenced past, the awareness that, as technology advances, we lose ourselves soundscapes whose sameness is robbing us of our identity—an alienating, Kmartian sub-urbia, a generic soundtrack as mind-numbing as Muzak. For all this, “Endangered Sounds” frustrates as much as it intrigues, especially since it does not resound with many of the authentic sounds it declares to be on the brink of extinction, some of which were recreated in stock recordings, others crushed in musical beats.

Rather than preserving sound, the program serves as a reminder of loss; it is a memorial service for our silenced past. It suggests that, in the near future, technology will permit us to deaden what we do not wish to hear, to create bubbles of choice sound and tranquility distilled from the din of civilization. Manufacturers of sound are hard at work to sell us back what commerce and progress has robbed us of.

Do we really need highly sophisticated computer technology to create our individual sound spheres? When I lived in Germany and dreamed of New York City, I would listen to the sounds of streets and avenues I had recorded while away from what was not truly home. The sirens, the footsteps on the sidewalks, the babble of the passers-by—they provided more comfort than the electronic tunes I merely consumed. Unlike the artifice of those purchased sounds—a sonic anywhere to take the place of the here and now—the metropolitan noises I had recorded were real and concrete. My feet had touched those steps, my shoulders had brushed against those voices, my nose had taken in the fuel with whose burning the traffic resounded. That was somewhere—a there I felt—and I knew I had to go back there to stay.

These days (owing to the electronic blasts of the past, no doubt) I am somewhat hard of hearing; but instead of deadening my everyday in specious phonics or phoney silences—some New Age orchestrations of an assembly-lined existence—I seek and find comfort in sounds whose source I can identify and take in with my other senses—the fire I feel against my skin, the yawning of our none-too-pleasant smelling dog on the carpet, and the clock on the mantelpiece (which, in the picture above, reflects both me and the dog on its surface); and instead of losing myself in the folds of a custom-made soundcarpet, I wrap myself in this resonant quilt and know myself to be . . . at home.

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For the Love of Lana: Rains on a Snowy Evening

If I had to put it in a nutshell, I’d probably go anaphylaxic. Let’s just say that 2007 is not exactly shaping up to be My Favorite Year (even though it’s looking promising for Academy Award-nominated Peter O’Toole). Spent rurally secluded without phone and internet (still only tentatively restored), slipping off a ladder during an attempt at high-stalks gardening, and seeing my first teaching stint here in Wales come to an unceremonious if not altogether surprisingly abrupt end (considering that I started off well by forgetting to show up for my first class), the past three weeks had about as many highlights as Roy Orbison’s hair seen through a pair of his shades . . .

Speaking of hair (because I could not come up with a smoother transition and it sure is time to move on): today, 8 February, marks the birthday of one of the best-tressed stars of Hollywood’s studio era: Ms. Lana Turner (who died back in 1995). Now, Lana was truly an appalling actress; but that is just what makes star vehicles like Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) such fascinating studies of the Lana persona and the studio system in its declining years.

By that time, Lana had not only negotiated a flexible Universal International contract, giving her approval of script, co-star, and director, but set up her own production company, Lanturn (which produced a single film). As she (or someone writing on her behalf) expressed it in an issue of Britain’s New Film Show Annual, Lana experienced “freedom for the first time” since she started to work in motion pictures back in the 1930s and was looking forward to the joy of being her “own boss.”

Lana never came across as a career woman, even though she looked like a gal who could take care of herself. In Imitation, she succeeds in portraying a selfish, out-of-touch actress desperate to become a star precisely by failing to connect to any of her fellow actors, some of whom—Susan Kohner foremost—were moving toward the 1960s by challenging the conventions of earlier cinematic emoting with a realism of which Lana was incapable.

Playing for the camera rather than interacting with those who shared the screen with her, she was most convincing at playing self-centered and greedy broads, calculating characters toward whom the audience could rarely warm. In turn, this edge rendered her exciting even when her acting lacked the lustre of her bleached curls.

Not that her one-on-ones with the public were dramatically superior; on the radio, her shortcomings as an actress became particularly noticeable, the mike serving as a microscope under which the falsehood and superficiality of a performance are laid bare. Prime examples are Lana’s tepid line deliveries as the narrator of “Fear Paints a Picture” (3 May 1945) and “The Flame Blue Glove” (15 December 1949), plays produced by CBS radio’s award-winning thriller anthology Suspense.

Rather better is her performance in “Doughnut Girl” (4 December 1944), a bit of Cavalcade of America propaganda, in which a vain and spoiled young woman encounters the hardship of serving as Red Cross nurse in the war theater of New Guinea and the boys who act in it. I believed her to be vain and spoiled, but remain suspicious of her transformation.

Tonight, in anticipation of the slushy destiny of the snow presently coating most of Wales (an anomaly for this temperate region), I am making my pilgrimage to the TechnicoLourdes that is 1950s event cinema and commemorate Ms. Turner’s career by immersing myself in The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), a soggy rather than steamy romance-cum-disaster movie co-starring turban-topped Richard Burton, one of Tinseltown’s most memorable Welsh imports.

Once again, Lana is the pampered, self-absorbed anti-heroine whose chance at redemption is suggested rather than acted out. When her character makes her exit after having proven as devastating and fleeting as the titular weather phenomenon, Lana slightly adjusts her blonde coif, brushing aside any sense of character development with a single gesture.

Were I not experiencing a pop-cultural drought—or a tremendous thirst, at any rate—I might not have been caught in The Rains at all; these days, however, I don’t open the umbrella of distinction quite so readily, letting come down on me whatever UK television channels deign to pour out. I don’t mind such indiscriminate dousings, as long as I can take refuge now and again in the vault of our DVD library, which is more representative of my cinematic tastes.

To account for times thus passed (in the absence of any other prominent markers of distinction), I am now putting together a list of all the films I am watching this year (see right). Some of the titles, listed chronologically in the order of my viewings, will link to relevant pages on this site or those maintained by fellow web journalists.

In the days to come, I am going to share my thoughts on some of the films I have taken in—from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse thrillers to Mitchell Leisen’s extravagant Lady in the Dark, with the obligatory references to old-time radio drama and the occasional connections to my private everyday and the world beyond.

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Blandings Waves: Cary Grant’s “Dream House” Annex

Well, glamorous it ain’t! Chasing a runaway trash can down the lane and harvesting stray garbage bags from the hedges—before dawn, no less, with little more than a tiny flashlight to guide me. The storm that has been wreaking havoc across Europe swept over Wales this morning, however accustomed folks here may be to such violent weather conditions. Barring outages of power, as experienced by thousand of households in the wild west of Britain, I am going to get my dose of glamour and sophistication yet, by celebrating the career of Cary Grant, born on this day, 18 January, in 1904.

I regret not to have spotted the statue erected in his honor down in Bristol, England, where Grant (or Archibald Alexander Leach) came into this world. He left it in 1986, which prompted me, a sour-faced and romance-starved youth, to compose a eulogistic piece of poetry (not to be dug up for this or any other occasion). This year, I have already revisited two of Grant’s performances—the one truly Grant (George Cukor’s charming adaptation of Holiday), the other cash-and-Cary (Leo McCarey’s World War II oddity Once Upon a Honeymoon). I very nearly caught a third—Destination Tokyo—which is frequently showing on the very poor cousin of Turner Classic Movies here in Britain. Tonight, I might pair him with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, or Rosalind Russell.

Like so many Hollywood actors of his generation, Grant was frequently heard on US radio; here, for instance, you may listen to Grant singing in a 1936 broadcast trailer for Suzy. On his very birthday, back in 1955, he was once again heard in a Lux Radio Theater adaptation of his screwball hit The Awful Truth. After having been cast opposite Claudette Colbert (in 1939), he was reuniting with his original screen co-star, Irene Dunne.

Yet Grant was also among a number of leading men—including Alan Ladd, Glenn Ford, Humphrey Bogart, and James Stewart—to seize the opportunity of starring in a radio program of his own. Together with wife Betsy Drake, who also wrote some of the scripts, he was heard in Mr. and Mrs. Blandings (1951), a situation comedy based on the novel Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, filmed in 1948 with Grant and Myrna Loy. By the late-1940s, radio shows were no longer performed live, which made the medium attractive to busy film actors interested in making a few thousand bucks on the side, for the comparatively easy assignment of spending a few hours in a recording studio reading (rather than memorizing) a short script.

Radio, in turn, had its influence on Grant’s career in motion pictures. In 1944, he starred in Once Upon a Time, a film based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “My Client Curley.” Yes, once upon a time, radio played a significant role in the lives of actors and audiences who, like ambitious Mr. Blandings, managed to evaporate the humdrum of the everyday by building castles in the air.

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Not Keeping Up with Myself: Still a Bloghead at 300

Well, it “is better than being totally unemployed.” Teaching, I mean. At least that’s what our disgruntled Miss Brooks told herself—and the audience of the situation comedy bearing her name—on this day, January 16, in 1949. She was asked to fill in for a colleague and was tempted respectfully to decline; but, educators being generally treated with less respect than the handouts lavished on their listless charges who promptly doodle themselves out of earshot, dutiful Connie Brooks showed up anyway.

Showing up! That has got to be the easiest and most elementary aspect of fulfilling any job requiring our leaving home. In my case, though, even that seems too much to ask. Apparently, I am too busy these days keeping up with the out-of-date to consult my personal calendar much, at least when appointments involving more than me and the radio are to be kept. At any rate, showing up was something I neglected to do this afternoon, scheduled as I was to start a teaching assignment—in Creative Writing, no less—at the local university.

There is small consolation in listening to absent-minded Dr. Hall of The Halls of Ivy, who, on this day in 1952 suffered the following blackout while hanging up some paintings with his wife:

Mrs. Hall: . . . put this one over the sofa.

Dr. Hall: What is that?

Mrs. Hall: It’s a painting I found up in the attic. Don’t you remember it?

Dr. Hall: No, and please don’t accuse me of having bought it. 

Mrs. Hall: Darling, you painted it!

There was reason for Toddy Hall to suppress the memory. Some fifteen years earlier, the painting had met with the assessment that “hanging is too good for it.”

Unlike Dr. Hall, Dr. Heuser tends to remember nothing more clearly than his past embarrassments, a failing that inevitably leads to further blunders. So, pardon me for not being in the mood to celebrate my three-hundredth entry into the broadcastellan journal and for cuddling up with my Mr. Boynton for a screening of Hitchcock’s Wrong Man (showing today on TCM UK).

Considering that I have fallen into the habit of editing my work online, you might find something new (or even worthwhile) in the previous posts. I am sure this short note will be revised before long. For now, it is rather a sour one, reflecting my current mood. Remind me to snap out of it—perhaps by divulging an incident involving a mental power failure of your own.

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Langston Hughes, Destination Freedom, and the "Funny Things" White Folks Do

A lot was left out of the picture, no matter how vividly it was being painted by the brush of sound on the canvas of the mind. Radio. No other mass medium could create pictures at once so generic and genuine, as invested as they were with the desires and experiences of those tuning in. And yet, in its soundscapes of the nation, in its portraits of the multitude, US broadcasters too often brushed aside or airbrushed what they dared not echo or evoke; too often they resorted to caricature and counterfeit, unless they altogether erased the experiences and memory of millions of citizens on whom broadcasters turned a deaf ear. 

The Southernaires

In the 1930s and ‘40s, when Amos ‘n’ Andy was America’s most popular work of comic serial fiction, commercial radio rarely permitted the minority population mimicked and minstrelized by the program the privilege of a voice, unless to sing gospel music (as delivered by the Southernaires, pictured here) and the hep tunes to which white folks would try to dance. Two notable exceptions to this misrepresentation of, adopting the parlance of the day, the ‘Negro’ experience on American radio were New World A-Coming and Destination Freedom.

On this day, 15 January, in 1950—when Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrated his twenty-first birthday—Destination Freedom presented “Birth of a League,” a dramatization of the exodus of some two million African-Americans from the South to the urban centers of the North—the “greatest internal migration in American history”—as it accelerated in the years just prior to the first World War. As “The Birth of a League” recounts, this led to the formation of the “Urban League” movement. You might say it was the real story behind Amos ‘n’ Andy, the white fiction of two black boys from Georgia who made their way up to Chicago in the late-1920s.

Appended to Richard Durham’s episodic and chronologically somewhat muddled play was an interview with Sidney Williams, the executive secretary of the League’s Chicago branch, with whose co-operation Destination Freedom was presented by station WMAQ, Chicago—the same station that had introduced America to Amos ‘n’ Andy back in 1928.

Williams deplored that “what other Americans expect and get as a matter of right, we Negro workers have to beg and fight for.” The fight, however, was not to be construed as a violent one. The League’s motto—”Not arms, but opportunity”—and the involvement of white businessmen “of good will” in its foundation made this depiction of the segregated South and the struggle for integration in the North more acceptable both to broadcasters and to a larger audience.

The challenge of such broadcasts was to inform and appeal, to protest yet placate. Despite the hope expressed in its title, taken from the book by Roi Ottley), New World A-Coming was at times cynical in its exposure of the injustices suffered by the Negro population. On 16 April 1944, for instance, the series promised the “Story of Negro Humor” as seen through the eyes of Langston Hughes. While it was filled with laughter, the program offered little amusement. Instead, it recalled Hughes’s own experience of Southern inhospitality, which Hughes had previously shared in his article “White Folks Do Some Funny Things.”

Hughes, who at one time was considered for a radio serial project of his own, found little amusement in the treatment the Negro—as character and creator of characters alike—received on American radio (as previously discussed here). In “The Story of Negro Humor,” and its somewhat toned-down reworking a year later (on 8 April 1945) under the article’s original title, Hughes was portrayed by Canada Lee, who acted out various scenes of humiliation personally witnessed or suffered by the American poet and novelist.

The program presented the prejudice and hatred toward black Americans as an American problem, rather than one faced by the minority population alone. Commenting on those who “practice Jim Crow at home and preach democracy abroad,” Hughes expressed himself puzzled at their “lack of humor concerning their own absurdities.” Having “read that Hitler has no sense of humor either,” he concluded that “the greatest killers cannot afford to laugh” and that those “most determined to Jim Crow” were “grimly killing democracy in America.”

Both New World A-Coming and Destination Freedom are rarities in so-called old-time radio. They are programs seldom discussed or traded by those who twist the dial by proxy and distort its history to meet their needs for light or wholesome entertainment. These two programs should not be dug up in defense of the ignorant or indifferent; they should not be aired for the chief purpose of clearing American radio of charges of misrepresentation. Yet, however marginal their role, it would be equally wrong to neglect or dismiss them, and the talent involved in their production, thereby to propagate the image of American radio drama as historically irrelevant and relegate it to the neither-here-nor-there that is nostalgia.

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"Rest in Peace," He Said: Yvonne De Carlo (1922-2007) on the Air

We web journalists are often, and not altogether unjustly, accused of recycling news rather than generating it. I’ve done my share of reprocessing yesterday by reporting the unearthing of Marlene Dietrich’s lost earring at an amusement park in Blackpool; but, recycling being the process of transforming and putting back to use, I turned this tidbit into a hook from which to dangle a reminder of Ms. Dietrich’s lost or rarely recalled career in radio. So, when I now reflect on the passing of actress Yvonne De Carlo, I am trying to avoid mirroring the tributes that appeared elsewhere.

As pop culture maven Ivan Shreve suggests in his ever instructive Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, the role for which Ms. De Carlo is “best remembered” these days should not overshadow the career she enjoyed prior to getting the Lily Munster makeover. And if you can’t recall anything else, the act of commemoration can be an opportunity to get to know a performer all over again. Like most people who wish to refresh their memories of a certain film or television actor, I turned to the Internet Movie Database, according to which, as of 5 PM EST on this Wednesday, 11 January 2007, Ms. De Carlo (who died on Monday) still numbered among the living. I guess, that is where our personal journals come in, spreading the news a little faster than those slow-firing big shots.

Inspecting her resume, I realized how little I have seen of Ms. De Carlo over the years. In fact, the last time I ran into her, I didn’t even notice her at all. That was in November 2006, when I watched So Proudly We Hail, a 1943 wartime drama starring Claudette Colbert (discussed here). Would I be able to spot her in This Gun for Hire, in which the aforementioned Laird Cregar made such an impression on me? Nor have I ever tried on her Sombrero, in which she had Vittorio Gassman at her feet (as pictured above).

So, instead of flaunting my ignorance, it is probably best to let Ms. De Carlo introduce herself, however belatedly. On 24 February 1947, the young actress, no longer the bit player she had been during the early and mid-1940s, appeared on Tom Breneman’s radio program Breakfast in Hollywood—sporting a feather in her hat—to promote her latest picture, Song of Scheherazade, released earlier that month.

You can tell from the reaction of the studio audience—responsive as trained seals to whatever Breneman and his sponsors tossed at them—that Ms. De Carlo was not yet a star. She was getting there—and she was there to get there. “Who are you, honey?” Breneman prompted the unaffected newcomer, whose response was greeted with no more enthusiasm than the names of the many unknowns whom the host granted exposure to the microphone that day. Apart from confessing some embarrassment about the millinery curiosity on her head, the soft-spoken actress did not get to say very much, the garrulous host being too busy reaping whatever laughs he could from the docile crowd.

He presented her with a bouquet of Camellias, named, in honor of her latest role, Scheherazade. So funereal and grand must the corsage have looked that, when Breneman was permitted to pin it on his charming and good-humored guest, he commented on its startling effect with the ominous words “All she needs there is ‘Rest in Peace.'”

When I listened to this exchange today, it struck me as a bit of gallows humor as dark as Lily Munster’s home. It was Breneman who had wreaths thrown at him not long thereafter (he shut up in 1948 at the age of 46), while the dame with the Camellias, who went on to enjoy another five decades in show business, proved more resilient than Scheherazade.

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Where Does The Lady from Shanghai Come From?

Well, my head’s still spinning from last night’s screening of The Lady from Shanghai. You know, that fascinating, pieced together puzzler for the making of which star and director Orson Welles decided to give his celebrated redhead wife Rita Hayworth the old peroxide treatment and turn her Lana. Now, I got lost somewhere in the cross-and-double-cross scenario; but even before the plot unravelled and ultimately revelled in its fun house mirroring of noirish nightmares, my willingness to go along for the ride got deflected by the film’s opening scenes. Although I had never before watched this picture in what now goes for its entirety, l sensed that I had come across it (or something rather like it) before. Trust me, “Where does The Lady from Shanghai come from?” isn’t meant to be one of those “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb” questions.

Welles is known to have borrowed ideas, narrative devices and storylines, from his radio programs and recycled or reworked them for his motion pictures and stage productions. Examples of these trans-mediations are the 1938 Mercury Theater productions of “A Heart of Darkness” (which Welles had hoped to adapt for the movies) and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (with a musical version of which he belly-flopped on Broadway in the late spring of 1946), as well as the 1939 Campbell Playhouse revisitation of the William Archer’s 1921 melodrama The Green Goddess (with which he toured some six months after its initial radio broadcast). Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by one Sherwood King, a book that Welles initially did not bother to read, the troubled Lady might very well might have some roots in radio.

At any rate, The Lady brought to mind the 15 October 1939 Campbell Playhouse update of John Galsworthy’s Escape (1926). Both Lady and “Escape” are initially set in Manhattan and tell the story of a man (played by Welles) who finds himself in Central Park after dark and in trouble thereafter. Both men ride around in that most romantic and impractical means of urban transportation, the horse-drawn carriage, and encounter a seductress whom only the most chivalrous nature would take for a damsel in distress. In each case, the hero comes to the aid of the questionable dame, and thereby implicates himself as he, in the Thirty-Nine Steps tradition of botched heroics, is caught and tried for a violent crime. While on the run from the law, both men manage to extract themselves and set things right at last.

So, just where does The Lady from Shanghai come from? Aside from tracing her origins to the melodramatic tradition—and a mind like mine that is steeped in it—I do not presume to have a conclusive answer. In Welles and Mercury Player Everett Sloane, The Lady has several tangible connections to the world of the wireless, another link being Fletcher Markle, a radio playwright who had a hand in reshaping the material. Approaching this sordid portrait of a The Lady while under the influence of countless pieces of fiction, I cannot help but draw such parallels; getting carried away in my own speculations, I am being drawn in and out of the pictures I thus reframe.

My pursuit having taken me to the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that I am not alone one who’s reframing The Lady these days. After receiving more ill-advised nips, tucks and facelifts than Cher and Joan Rivers combined, The Lady from Shanghai is now being readied for a radical makeover. According to the Internet Movie Database, the titular dame will soon assume the likeness of altogether un-Hayworthy Rachel Weizs, whose transformation into a femme fatale would require more than the services of a daring hairstylist. Thus, another iconic film is being shanghaied by the new and far from improved Hollywood.

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The Man Who Went on a Diet and Didn’t Come Back

Laird Cregar in Heaven Can’t Wait

Well, I did not bother to make any.   New Year’s resolutions, I mean. Once again I let slip by the chance of this calendrical construct—a moment in which our attempts to impose the order of the chronologic on the so-called fourth dimension whose measurable expanse is being commorated with renditions of “Auld Lang Syne”—to bring about changes in the race against time that is my life. Perhaps you made up your mind (or had it made up for you) to put an end to something and start something new, an exchange of habits or a switch in attitude intended to improve life or merely to prolong it. I did resolve nothing more than to account for my everyday, aside from continuing with this journal, by counting the movies I take in this year (so far, Night at the Museum, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Gay Falcon, Gentleman’s Agreement, Gilda and The Man in the White Suit), thereby to get a clearer picture of my actual rate of consumption and to ponder, at year’s end, how much these fictions have informed or impeded my journey.

Though far from being a life-as-artist like Walter Pater, I try to think of my existence in all its failures and shortcomings as an unfinished essay, a half-published and oft edited text of which broadcastellan is both a digest and an extension. A man’s success, comedian Fred Allen remarked, “depends on which wears out first—his pencil or his eraser.” That, like most epigrams, sounds smart enough; but the real trick is to avoid getting those two writerly tools confused. Believe me, it’s not that easy to tell them apart. Here’s a for instance and how I arrived at it.

As I was thinking about a subject for another one of my “On This Day” features, I came across “The Death Laugh,” an episode of the radio thriller anthology Inner Sanctum Mysteries broadcast on this day, 8 January, in 1944. Rummaging through my library, I failed to lay my ears on the play I assumed to be there; many of the Inner Sanctum episodes available online have been mislabeled, their dates and titles inaccurately recorded. Rather than putting an eraser to this futile search and moving on to another subject, my mind lingered instead on Hollywood heavy Laird Cregar, the star of said thriller. It was as if the man demanded to be called to mind today, not content to wait even until tomorrow (which marks Cregar’s anniversary in a 1943 broadcast of the Radio Hall of Fame) or the day after that (in which he played Montezuma in Orson Welles’s propaganda series Hello Americans).  

There was no need for him to get pushy. I have always thought Mr. Cregar a fascinating and devilishly handsome fellow—ever since he first made an impression on me in This Gun for Hire (1942); so much so that I quite forgot—or was only too ready to neglect the by no means negligible performances of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Playing Satan, Cregar brought wit to Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait, an otherwise disappointingly well-mannered and overly sentimental portrait of a scoundrel. Why hadn’t I seen more of Cregar over the years, considering my love for classic Hollywood movies?

Now, I am not in the habit of turning to an artist’s biography to assess his or her performances. Instead, I focus on the works that show people and storytellers are in the business of sharing with us. For that reason, the fact that Cregar practically starved himself to death in order to become a leading man was news to me. It seems that neither heaven nor Hollywood could wait for Mr. Cregar.

According to some sources, Cregar was born in 1913; others claim he came into this world in 1914; others still state 1916 as his date of birth. Certain, however, is that he died in 1944 of an uncommonly early heart attack, apparently brought on by a crash diet, the resulting 100 pound weightloss of which was intended to convince Hollywood to give top billing to a man considered too fat to play the dashing lead.

Even on the air, where he could have gone invisible, Cregar played the fat man when he filled in for Sidney Greenstreet in the Lux Radio Theater adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. Mr. Cregar got his wish eventually, yet only posthumously, in Hangover Square (1945)—a belated nod to a man who conformed to an image and was reduced to one in the process.

After I thought about all this, I flicked through the current issue of the Radio Times and noticed that, just as I was fiddling with computer and camera to capture Cregar’s likeness from hell, the British cable channel Film Four had been screening The Black Swan, in which the actor impersonated Henry Morgan, a Welsh pirate born in the windswept parts I now call home.

Yes, Mr. Cregar seemed adamant to turn me into his medium today. Perhaps he was out to warn anyone with the New Year’s wish of shedding pounds this year to take it easy or, better still, to reconsider whether the eraser we take to our lives is chosen by ourselves or handed to us by those who dictate just how our being ought to be shaped.

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January 4, 1942: What’s On?

I am one of those forward-looking folks who peruse the television and radio listings as if they were stock market reports or racing forms. Determined not to miss a winner of a program, I prepare myself by wielding the ever ready text marker as I wend my way through the weekly offerings. Today, though, I am seriously late in my planning. Before me is the US broadcast schedule from 4 January 1942 as it appeared in an issue of the Radio-Movie Mirror.

Having just watched “Static,” a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone—shared with me by a fellow web journalist and consummate teller of fantastic tales—I am in a time-warped frame of mind. It is not for the sake of self-indulgent nostalgia, mind you, that I am revisiting the past, but in order to reconsider the boundaries of escapism. If the present does not turn us on, how can we, in this multimediated world of ours, expect to switch off entirely?

“Static” does not look kindly on television and the getaways it promises; it suggests that there is no escaping the challenges we dare not face as we stare at that small screen on which Westerns, quiz shows, and commercials flicker while life flashes by. Instead, it romances what, by 1961, was nearly a forgotten or at any rate woefully neglected medium in America; it gives two middle-aged people a second chance at realizing their dreams by transporting them, as if on radio waves, to the early 1940s, when first they met. The radio entertainments of that period—Fred Allen, Major Bowes, and the music of Tommy Dorsey—stand ins for what was presumably a time at once rich in possibilities and free from the mindnumbing influences of that set to which Americans had gotten so attached over the years.

All this romancing aside, the early 1940s were hardly an innocent period in modern history; and rather than coming true, many a dream had to be deferred or abandoned altogether. In this moment of uncertainty, at least one business comforted consumers by attempting to keep business running as usual. Worried or bewildered about the war, wondering what changes it would impose on their everyday existence—from blackouts to rationings, from irritating inconveniences to the loss of lives—those sitting at home could still depend on radio for escapist entertainment.

On 4 January 1942, an “Appointment for Murder” was kept by Raymond, host of The Inner Sanctum, Humphrey Bogart and Claire Trevor were heard in Screen Guild reconstitution of High Sierra, and Sherlock Holmes embarked on the virtually spotless “Adventure of the Second Stain,” first related by Conan Doyle some four decades earlier. Meanwhile, Jack Benny was overhead in a flashback episode recounting his botched New Year’s Eve celebrations, a belatedness indicative of the radio industry’s reluctance to catch up with the times.

Beholden to the sponsors who footed the bills, commercial radio was slow to adjust; and none of the programs broadcast during the weeks immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor appear to have any relation to the realities of war. By comparison, even undemanding and apolitical publications like the Movie-Radio Guide, from which the above schedule was ripped, were quick to recontextualize the entertainments they were designed to bring to the attention of prospective listeners.

“A little over three weeks ago,” the Editors of the Guide commented, “a third-rate power with autocratic, imperialist ambitions and no scruples, attacked the United States as was to be expected—by hitting below the belt.” The propaganda still wanting on the air was already being provided by publications catering to the radio industry.

Responding to the demand for information, the Movie-Radio Guide promised to keep “pace with the nation’s war effort” and the “needs” of its readers by “inaugurated” an “enlarged short-wave department.” To the reader’s inquiry “What’s on?” the Guide replied in no uncertain terms: A war, that’s what was on.

How much does your entertainment guide of choice remind you of the fact that 2007 is by no means shaping up to be a time of peace?

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Daddy Cool Vs. Father Time: Getting the Better of 2006

Well, this isn’t a travel brochure; hence my taking the liberty of adding a question mark to the following: What better place to ring in the new year than in Scotland, where “Auld Lang Syne” is being sung more passionately and the ringing in goes on longer than anywhere else in the world? Having just returned from Glasgow and Edinburgh, I could think of a few alternatives, considering that Scotland’s chief tourist attractions this time of year—the famed Hogmanay festivities, were pretty much wiped out by fierce gales and lashing rains. The British weather! I have mentioned and deplored it often enough in this journal to claim that I was unprepared for its party-pooping force.

Since practically all of Glasgow takes a prolonged New Year’s holiday—including the city’s retailers and its museums, at one of which, the Kelvingrove, I spotted those heads dangling above on the day of Saddam Hussein’s hanging—there was little else to do than to seek shelter in a multiplex, mercifully kept open, and to take in a few double features. Fairly disappointed by the politics and pretensions of The Perfume, yet charmed by the slight Miss Potter and amused by the to me surprisingly bright Night at the Museum, I was enthralled at last by Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), easily the most exciting movie I have seen on the big screen in years, a film unrivalled by any piece of fiction I have come across in 2006.

Not that 2006 was lacking in cultural pearls, many of which I shared and appraised in this journal. I won’t altogether stoop to lining them up, however popular and convenient such an approach to reviewing might be. Indeed, I find it difficult to name the best and worst of the past twelve months; but let me try, anyway.

In a year during which I picked up far too few books to make up a list, my main literary find was H. G. Wells’s aforementioned Ann Veronica, an uneven but compelling portrait of the British suffragette movement. Rewarding as well was Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry, a Kafkaesque exploration of doubt and guilt, while Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, for all its romantic intensity, struck me as dark-aged (and downright fascist) in its vilification of physical otherness.

At the pictures, the most satisfying film of the year may well have been The Illusionist, which I had the fortune to catch during my trip to Istanbul last September. It quietly triumphed over that other vanishing act, Christopher Nolan’s box-office misfire The Prestige; but, as pleased as I was to find James Bond back in form (after decades of discharging tiresome one-liners to demonstrate his cool) and getting to know The Queen in Helen Mirren’s soon-to-be-Academy Award nominated performance, it took a trip to the aforementioned Labyrinth on New Year’s Day to remind me of the magic of the movies, an emotional sway entirely absent in the hackneyed and uninspiring World Trade Center, the most exasperating of my cinematic encounters.

It was a year that convinced me, an inveterate old-time radio aficionado, to pay more attention to BBC radio, having tuned in to provocative (if not always convincing) plays like “Abrogate” (discussed here) and “True West” (reviewed in this post), adaptations like “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (with Ian McKellen) and documentaries like “Down the Wires.” Still available online this first week of January 2007 are Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys” as well as drama by Pinter and Stoppard.

By comparison, I still look upon television chiefly as a purveyor of old movies, of which I must have taken in over a hundred this year. The BBC’s serialization of Jane Eyre felt less than fresh, the second season of Desperate Housewives irritated me with its heavy-handed bathos, while the third round of British reality show X Factor was short on personalities for which to root. More enjoyable was the Andrew Lloyd Webber judged How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, which generated a new West End personality to star in the current revival of The Sound of Music.

While I have no intention to see that show, I had my share of theatrical treats, foremost among them a revival of Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows and an imaginative staging of Mervyn Peake’s imaginative staging of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. The musical Daddy Cool, which I caught at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, was not among them. Stringing together the songs of German pop-crafter Frank Farian (the man behind the late-1970s phenomenon Boney M. and the early-1990s lip-synch duo Milli Vanilli) and forcing them into a narrative that borrows from West Side Story, Romeo and Juliet, and Bollywood, Daddy is a Mamma Mia of a musical that will make even those who fondly remember some of the featured tunes go “Oh, brother!” That said, I still came out humming and, having gone backstage to see fictional gunmoll Ma Baker turn into the affable Michelle Collins, I hardly regret the experience.

Whatever I see, read, or hear this year I shall take in with glee, cheered by the thought of having in broadcastellan a journal in which to document nothing more plainly than the extent of my own folly.