Category: Radio

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Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Eve Arden, Class(room) Act

I am up north for a weekend in Manchester, England, which, for the past twelve months or so, has been some kind of ersatz New York City, a Manhattan in miniature.  Not that the three-and-a-half hour journey from here in Mid-Wales is exactly a subway ride downtown. Before spending an evening among strangers, I am going to listen now to another familiar voice as I continue my tribute to female performers in radio drama. It’s a feature coinciding with the first broadcastellan quiz, which you are herewith encouraged to take. Now, the wireless woman I am commemorating today knew all about quizzes—and smart answers. For about a decade she was America’s schoolteacher: Eve Arden, the mistress of the well-timed one-liners.

Before hitting it big in radio and finding the role with which she became so closely identified thereafter, Arden had been a supporting player in a great many Hollywood films. Nominated for an Academy Award (a small but memorable part in Mildred Pierce), she invested even the sparsest and weakest of lines with caustic wit. On Our Miss Brooks (previously discussed here), Arden got ample opportunities to demonstrate her infallible comedy timing.

With Our Miss Brooks, the situation comedy reached maturity, a sophistication only excelled by the smart, sentimental, and at times socially profound Halls of Ivy. Replacing the rather tired and generic he said/she said routines of vaudeville, the sitcom placed a small group of regular and roughly outlined characters (or caricatures) in more or less outrageous scenes designed to test their clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. Now, Connie Brooks had one prominent weakness: Mr. Boynton, the clueless biology teacher.

Much of the humor in Our Miss Brooks derived from the central character’s attempt to balance her responsibilities as an educator with her not so secret passion and her desire to escape the academic hierarchy, to be as giddy and goofy as a teenager. Mingling with her charge rather than ruling over it, Miss Brooks formed a close bond with one of the students at Madison High, the similarly lovelorn Walter Denton.

However ardent a teacher, Miss Brooks was also Eve; and the apple of her eye was always tantalisingly close. According to sitcom logic, however, she never got very far in her pursuit of Boynton, which, much to our amusement, was destined to go pear-shaped.

Perhaps, Arden identified so closely with her role that she was drawn to a man whose first name matched her on-air persona: fellow actor Brooks West. No need to put Eve on the psychiatrists couch, though. I’m just happy to sit in the back of her class, and listen.

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Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Lurene Tuttle, Disembodied Somebody

Have you taken the broadcastellan quiz yet? I’ve got a few more laudable larynxes lined up to commemorate women in American radio dramatics. There is certainly a renaissance of old-time radio underway, an iPod regeneration infinitely more satisfying than my phrasing here; after all, just how long can a birthing or rebirthing process take? It’s the nurturing that matters now. And while some of those names on my list of leading ladies no longer ring the proverbial bell, they sure spelled “stardom” when radio took center stage in American living rooms. Perhaps, “star” isn’t the word for being it on the radio. Stardom requires visibility, screen close-ups and paparazzi snapshots that define an individual’s status as being removed enough from the crowd to demand admiration and near enough to encourage our approach. A broadcast voice can make an actor; but it is the circulated image that makes a star.

Unlike print and film, radio merely creates a desire to see. Spread long and often enough in magazines or on the screen, the image turns the disembodied speaker, the nobody, into a certified somebody. Quite clearly, the above picture has not remained in wide enough circulation over the past five decades or so to keep alive the memory of the sitter. Her name is Lurene Tuttle; and, however obscure today, she once was the First Lady of American radio drama.

How prominent was Ms. Tuttle in her day? According to the records kept at the RadioGOLDINdex, she was downright ubiquitous. An impressive 722 entries document the broadcasting career of this once highly regarded, stage-trained performer. Her resume includes roles, starring and supporting, on notable drama anthologies like Columbia Workshop, Lux Radio Theatre, and Suspense. She was a regular cast member of comedies like The Great Gildersleeve, Mayor of the Town, and Blondie, as well as episodic melodramas like Dr. Christian.

As an article in the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror sums it up, “there’s scarcely a radio program on which Lurene hasn’t been heard.” She was much sought-after by radio drama producers like William Spier for her “ability to play almost any kind of feminine role. Whenever the script call[ed] for a gun moll, a slinky confidence woman, a grandmother, an adventuress, [or] a Main Line debutante,” Tuttle could be relied upon to fit the role.

On this day, 9 February, in 1951, for instance, she was heard as Effie Perrine, Sam Spade’s trusted secretary. While generally not part of the action, she did more than just type Spade’s reports, as listeners are reminded in “The Sure Thing Caper.” Her occasional malapropisms notwithstanding, she fleshes out each story and reinvests them with the language of crooks and thugs—and probably with greater zing or realism than the censors-wary writers of the program ever dared. She also ends up in Spade’s arms and gets to caress his hair, kept so healthy and shiny by the Wildroot Cream Oil people who footed the bill for the Sam Spade series. It sure adds double meaning to Spade’s “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” the words and serenade that ended each show.

Speaking of meaningful doubles, many radio actors had to double as small casts in cost-cutting productions crowded around studio microphones; but Tuttle could make you believe that she was a double without resorting to vocal trickery or voice-altering filters. As radio historian John Dunning points out, Tuttle was once called upon to portray identical twins—with identical voices—who fight over the same man and confront each other in a deadly struggle (in “Death Sees Double,” a Whistler thriller broadcast on 20 November 1944). The evil twin had even her clueless lover fooled as she assumed her sister’s place.

And just how unwell remembered is Ms. Tuttle today, even by those who ought to know (her) better? A book by a noted radio historian, for instance, refers to the actress as one “Earline Tuttle”—further proof that, no matter how often your voice is heard and your name is pronounced on the air, you’re expected to stay in print to make a proper name for yourself. Yet, whatever the state or nature of her fame, Tuttle’s a great gal to come home to . . .

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Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Mercedes McCambridge, Airwaves Advocate

Last night, I watched The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), a seedy but glamorous rags-to-riches-to-rags melodrama starring Joan Crawford. Crawford was a perfectionist on screen, even though producers like Jerry Wald determined that, by the mid-1940s, her physiognomy was less than ideal and called for that extra layer of gauze in front of the lens to soften her mature looks (because most leading roles in Hollywood are, to this date, a little too young for anyone over forty). No doubt, Crawford’s need for control contributed to what those in the radio business called mike fright.  When Crawford went on the air, starring in dramatic programs like Suspense, she insisted on being recorded for later broadcast rather than going on the air live. Apparently, to someone as protective of her persona as Crawford, any screw-up in radio insinuated something tantamount to crow’s feet on screen. Not to Crawford’s Johnny Guitar (1954) co-star and rival, though, the radio-trained and true Mercedes McCambridge.

Her career in film and on stage notwithstanding, McCambridge was a genuine radio actress; and unlike many aspiring thespians, she would not have objected to the term. Sure, her voice was so distinct that even the hearing impaired could not fail to spot her in any of her many notable radio roles; but, however obvious her vocal disguises, McCambridge, whether performing in night-time thrillers, daytime soap operas, or wartime propaganda plays, rarely did less than throwing herself, larynx and soul, into each and every part she accepted to play.

On this day, 8 February, in 1950, for instance, McCambridge was “Jack Dempsey,” the rambunctious teenage daughter of a prize-fighting crazed rancher. Determined to get married to a man of whom her father does not approve, she convinces a trio of adventurers to defend her rights in what was billed as “The Battle of the Century.” That was just one of the adventures in which McCambridge played a part in 1939—and again a decade later—in a thriller serial called I Love a Mystery. The program, and McCambridge’s role as the maniacal Charity in “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” has been discussed at some length previously in this journal.

She was also heard in many other Chicago-originating drama broadcasts, including episodes of the legendary horror program Lights Out!. My favorite among those is an episode in which McCambridge plays a spoiled teenager on a school trip to Paris. Abducted by a man who claims to know her family, she is dragged into the sewers, where she is forced to make necklaces out of the bones of those killed by her capturer. It’s Grand Guignol, all right—ghastly melodramatics that don’t require images to conjure up unimaginable horrors.

To moviegoers, McCambridge is best known as the demon voice in the The Exorcist, a performance she attributed to a fortuitous bout with childhood bronchitis. McCambridge thought of this role, in which she is never seen, as a radio performance. Until the 1970s, when radio enjoyed a renaissance, she returned to the airwaves with former colleagues, enjoying the freedom that radio afforded the performer, notwithstanding the limitations imposed by producers and sponsors.

“In radio you had to be a tiger or you didn’t last,” McCambridge wrote in her autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, “If you didn’t keep your toes curled under, you would fall of the edge of that marvelous world. For me, nothing in films, or theater, or certainly TV as ever touched the magical kaleidoscope of radio.” Most television and film producers may have been clueless about radio; but you sure got us, tiger! I consider myself mauled.

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Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Gracie Allen, Presidential Candidate

Well, are you ready to tap your toes to the “The Cabinet Shuffle,” sing “The Tory Blues” or stand up for the “Thatcher Anthem”? That’s right, the Iron Lady is back in business. Show business, that is. Thatcher: The Musical is going on tour. Now, as someone who enjoys representing the past (albeit a past I have never experienced as present until its “now” turned to “then”), I don’t seem to be in a position to throw mossy stones. No, I’m not going to argue, as you well might, that the producers of this show are about two decades too late.

Dwelling in the half-forgotten and digging up the misremembered, I am not among those who opine that there is nothing older than yesterday’s news. A musical review of such faded headlines strikes me as being decidedly more quaint and questionable. The only contemporary touch appears to be the politically correct or overly cautious disclaimer attached to the announcement: the show’s producers aim at being “entertaining and provocative,” yet insist that the “politician’s lasting legacy” is being neither “glorified nor denigrated.” Too recent for revisionism, too tired for satire?

I’d much rather join a chorus of “Vote for Gracie.” Now there was a woman ahead of her time—and her man. As early as 1940, Gracie Allen decided to stop knitting sweaters and run for President instead. To the comic relief of millions of New Deal weary Americans, she ran so fast and so wild that her husband and comedy partner, straight man George Burns, could not possibly keep up with her, let alone keep her down.

“I admit that the election of the first woman would let the country in for a flood of corny jokes,” Gracie remarked (in a slim volume you may read online in its entirety). That does not have to be a deterrent, to be sure. Besides, many of those very jokes were told on the Burns and Allen Program, on which Gracie’s campaign started in February 1940.

The vaudeville routine of Burns and Allen was beginning to sound rather creaky; ratings were crumbling, sponsors grumbled. Soon the husband and wife banter would make way for a novel concept in radio comedy—the sitcom. Before their program was thus reinvented in 1942, Burns and Allen were trying to reinvigorate the old formula by heightening Gracie’s nuttiness, by adding currency and topicality to their gags, and by developing a running joke that would encourage repeat listening. The “Vote for Gracie” campaign was such an attempt to salvage their act.

“You’re, you’re running for President?” an incredulous George Burns burst out when he first learned about his wife’s political ambitions on the 28 February 1940 broadcast. “Gracie, how long has this been going on?” “For a hundred and fifty years,” Gracie retorted, “George Washington started it.” To George the whole idea was “preposterous.” “Not only that,” Gracie added, “it pays good money.”

A clever idea it turned out to be—or a quick fix for the ailing show, at any rate. Soon, Gracie was where she’d always been: all over the place. Spreading her outlandish ideas about democracy, the ditzy candidate got to promote the Burns and Allen act on a number of other high-rated radio programs, including those hosted or headlined by fellow vaudevillians Edgar Bergen, Rudy Vallee, and Jack Benny.

At least Roosevelt’s opponents, candidates like Republican Thomas F. Dewey and Democrat John Nance Garner had “political affiliations,” George cautioned. “Well,” replied Gracie undeterred, “maybe that’s because they weren’t vaccinated.” “Have you got a Republican or Democratic machine in back of you?” George cautioned. “No,” Gracie replied nonchalantly, “that’s a bustle.”

Today’s critics, listeners like Leah Lowe, label Gracie’s antics “transgressive,” which is the academy’s validation of playfulness (and of our engagement with it). “One of the greatest problems today is about the people who would rather be right than be President,” Gracie explained in her startling and disarmingly frank simplicity (as it expresses itself in the aforementioned book outlining her campaign). “I have a solution for that. You can be Left and President: that way you can eat your cake and halve it too. Or you can stay in the middle of the road and get run over.”

“Mr. Roosevelt has been President for eight years,” Gracie went on reasoning in her signature non sequitur and pun-driven unreasonableness,

I’m sure he wouldn’t mind getting up and giving his seat to a lady. That old saying about not changing horses in the middle of the stream is ridiculous, when you remember that people have been changing babies in the middle of the afternoon for years and everybody takes it for granted.

Being oracular, the oratrix declared that

women are getting very tired of running a poor second to the Forgotten Man, and with all the practice we’ve had around the house the time is ripe for a woman to sweep the country. I’ll make a prediction with my eyes open: that a woman can and will be elected if she is qualified and gets enough votes.

It sure worked for a lot of clueless men, even those who, unlike Gracie, didn’t have a “Surprise Party Platform” to stand on.

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Last Poll, First Quiz

Well, I said as much yesterday: I am neither a poet nor a psychoanalyst. Such self-awareness does not deter me, however, from getting myself into some metaphorical tangle while going on about old-time radio or from trying my interpretative skills at my last and, as always, altogether unscientific poll. Now, last things first.

In my fifth poll I had invited readers to close their eyes and wander off—an invitation perhaps too readily accepted. “What image,” I had asked, “appears foremost in your mind when you read the term ‘old-time radio’?” The replies were pretty much divided between two responses, just as had I expected.

There are those more likely to picture a radio set and those who imagine a microphone. To borrow some Brechtian terminology, the former look at radio as a “distribution apparatus, as a receiver that spouts out information and entertainment to be appreciated, taken in, disdained, derided, or ignored. Those who imagine a microphone seem to conceive of radio as a site of creation, consider the processes involved in the act of broadcasting.

In McLuhan’s terms, the former seem to look at the message, whereas the latter image forth the medium as a generator of that message. To imagine radio as a microphone suggests to me a willingness to participate and create, to look beyond the contraption (the “furniture that talks”) and toward conception instead; to investigate, question, or challenge the source of what is being received. In short, to imagine the wireless and see a box of wires seems to bespeak the triumph of eye over the ear, the sort of short-sighted literal-mindedness that is the product of visual culture and that ultimately contributed to the demise of radio as a creative force.

I’m not sure what to make of the reply “Nothing at all.” It may signal an indifference or a want of imagination. Yet it also suggests quite the opposite: a thoroughly radiogenic mind—one that does not resort to translating thoughts into pictures, one that conceives of ideas as being non-material, one to whom imagination is not imaged.

Now, onto the first quiz. Over the next few weeks, I am going to pay tribute to some of the dames, gals, and ladies of the airwaves, from the Lux beauties to the “First Lady of Suspense,” from the stars of the American stage to the girls-next-door who went over big on the small screen.

Radio was a stopover for many movie, stage, and television actresses; during the 1930s and ‘40s, it was a welcome source of supplemental income. In the early 1950s, with the emergence of syndication and magnetic transcription, it became a lucrative sideline for actors who appeared in dramatic series or hosted variety programs in order to promote a specific film or remain generally heard and spoken of by potential moviegoers.

Whenever I hear the voice of an actress like Sandra Bullock or Neve Campbell or Scarlett Johansson, I am disappointed at their lack of diction. Their mumbling is not realism; it is a want of craft. Screen actresses are no longer required to hold a tune while parading in glamorous gowns, dancing with Astaire, or leaping into a technicolored pool. Instead, they are expected to have their expressiveness botoxically erased and appear before us in unchanging sameness. Radio, which carried the threat of invisibility and disembodiment, forced actresses to explore the power and pull of their voices, to distinguish themselves in speech and song.

So, if you would like to participate and take the quiz, you may also want to leave your answer in the comments section, along with the name of your favorite actress of the 1930s, ’40s, or ’50s. Whether your answer is correct or not, I will feature your performer of choice—or her voice—in a future installment of this journal. Now, pardon me while I go in search of that lovely larynx, those thespians whose vocal chords ensnared and whose timbres did wonders for the voice box office.

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Sailor Duval Did Not Go Out Into That Big Sleep Last Night

Well, I just got back from a weekend up in Lancaster, a town in the north of England not far from that hotbed of Romanticism known as the Lake District. Perhaps I imbibed rather too copiously from the well of romance, which might account for the strange dreams I had while there. Few things are more tiresome, I know, than someone else’s dreams, unless they are recalled by a poet, a painter, or a psychoanalyst. Being none of the above, I ought to know better than to dabble in such recollections; but this tidbit of mental television so closely relates to my general musings as recorded in this journal—and the plans I have for it—that I deem it worth sharing.

Being removed from a wireless network and the up-to-dateness it affords, I had plenty of time to linger in and dwell on the past, a return trip that began at the Ruskin Library. Exhibited there were sketches and daguerrotypes by the noted Victorian art critic (whom I had just mentioned in my discussion of Quiet Please).

At a second-hand bookstore in Carnforth, I happened on a fine copy of One Year of Grace (1950), a small volume of travel impressions by BBC radio drama producer Val Gielgud, composed while he visited the United States in the late 1940s. A brother of noted stage and screen actor John Gielgud, the author frequently commented on American radio acting and production techniques, deploring commercially sponsored broadcast dramatics and their wastefulness. So, I am looking forward to reading and contradicting his remarks, responses I might share in a future instalment of this journal.

While in Carnforth, I also got to look at the town’s train station. It was here that the location shots were taken for my favorite British film melodrama, the previously discussed Brief Encounter. Unfortunately, I did not recognize the scene as such, even though I arrived at it on a suitably bleak and misty day. Nor does the town seem particularly interested in advertising its landmark.

After visiting a gallery in the town of Kendal, where quite a few painting by erstwhile resident George Romney are on display (though few truly outstanding ones), I was on my way to Lake Windermere, picturesquely shrouded in a haze the feeble winter sun was not able to dispel. My camera refused its services; but I did manage to take the photograph featured in the collage above.

Wordsworth found much to dream and write about on this lake:

There, while through half an afternoon we played
On the smooth platform, whether skill prevailed
Or happy blunder triumphed, bursts of glee
Made all the mountains ring. But ere night-fall,
When in our pinnace we returned, at leisure
Over the shadowy Lake, and to the beach
Of some small Island steered our course with one,
The Minstrel of our Troop, and left him there,
And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock,—Oh then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream!

I went to bed early that night, set my ears for a while on “Library Book,” a Suspense play starring the none-too-phonogenic Myrna Loy, but soon drifted beyond earshot and reason. I was not beyond gossip, however, and awoke with the feeling—the knowledge—that Hollywood had lost someone far grander than good old Grandpa of The Munsters—and someone rather more formidable at that.

Upon my return home, I opened to my laptop and eagerly checked the Internet Movie Database for facts, only to realize that I had merely imagined it all: imagined that I had read a headline pronouncing the death of Ms. Lauren Bacall. As of today, 5 February 2006, Ms. Bacall is alive and, I trust, well. Exhale in relief, and marvel at my murderous revision. “You know how to whistle, don’t you?”

In the murkier recesses of my mind, I had somehow made up this story of her passing and believed it, too, mainly because I saw it all in print, however fictive. Sad to say, my immediate response was that I saw in this imaginary headline ample material for a new journal entry, as well as occasion for some exciting listening. I was prepared to write about Sailor Duval and the Bold Venture, the boat on which Bacall (as “Sailor”) and her husband, Humphrey Bogart (as Slate Shannon, her guardian), took off for some tropical adventure each week in their 1950s radio series of the same name. . . .

Not that I require an obituary to revisit the ladies, dames, and gals of the air, the heroines of old-time radio whom I had planned all along to feature over the next couple of weeks, and to whom my first quiz is dedicated. For now, I am going to close the creaking door on this day (and that vision) like Raymond shutting up the Inner Sanctum: “Good night. Pleasant dreams, hmmmmmmmmm?”

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On This Day in 1948: Quiet Please, There’s a Computer Getting Personal!

Well, t’ain’t funny, McGee! There simply isn’t enough room in that stuffed broom closet I call my brain for all the things I care (or even don’t care) to remember. I just missed a small-screening one of my favorite melodramas, George Cukor’s A Double Life, which aired on BBC 2 this afternoon, perhaps as a belated tribute to Shelley Winters. When I taught Shakespeare, A Double Life was the first pop cultural reference I’d toss into the room to liven up discussions about Othello. Quiet Please, while I compose myself and put what’s left of my grey cells back to work.

Quiet Please! Now there’s a literate radio program you’d expect to throw in the occasional reference to Shakespeare, or Shelley, or Ruskin. I once dug up a 1949 Master’s thesis on radio drama that asserted the program was simply too highbrow to be appreciated by the average thriller audience. Now, Mrs. J. H. G. from New York, NY, wasn’t troubled by that; she thought Quiet Please was the “best” show on the air and told as much to the editors of Radio and Television Mirror (see evidence above). Perhaps she hid her identity behind that acronym because she felt ashamed of her longhair tastes—but she could rely on me to defend them.

Written and directed by Wyllis (or Willis) Cooper, Quiet Please is not your average fare of claptrap. It is somber, brainy, deliberate–with an emphasis on moods and a healthy respect not only for the English language, but for the intelligence of the American listening public. On this day, 2 February, in 1948, for instance, Cooper introduced his audience to a by now familiar theme—the possibility that mankind might be outsmarted by machines. Do computers have a life of their own—a double life, perhaps?

In Cooper’s light-hearted “Pathetic Fallacy,” a newly developed computer (or “differential integrator”) is being introduced to the world as a “mechanical, electronic brain capable of performing mathematical tasks far beyond the comprehension of the human brain.” The sceptics of the press question the use of the word “brain,” doubtful that such a machine is capable of independent thought.

The somewhat irritated scientist (played with a hint of Gale Gordon fussiness by versatile Ernest Chappell) shrugs off the remark by declaring that he was “merely indulging in the Pathetic Fallacy.” It’s a “Philosophical concept of John Ruskin,” he explains, “which derives from the imputation of human qualities or emotions to an inanimate thing. Uh, a figure of speech, let us say.”

Now what intelligent being—artificial or otherwise—could tolerate such a label? “Pathetic Fallacy,” indeed. What follows is a mild-mannered revenge comedy (it isn’t a tragedy, at least). Who knew computers could be this mischievous and possessive? Mine will be left behind this weekend, since I’m going to be away until Sunday.

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On a Note of “Relevance”; or, What I Learn from Fellow Bloggers

Well, I had this particular spot reserved for two; but, as you will see, it got considerably more crowded here. Watching the Joan Crawford melodrama Possessed (1947) last night, I noticed in the opening credits that the screenplay was an adaptation written by playwrights once well known for their work in radio: Ranald McDougall and Silvia Richards.  I had come across McDougall’s name only yesterday, when his propaganda piece “The Boise” reached me by mail (between the covers of Erik Barnouw’s 1945 radio play anthology Radio Drama in Action).

McDougall’s plays for the series The Man Behind the Gun are notable for their effective use of second-person narration, an addressing of the listener as a character in the drama to follow:

You’re a chief bosun’s mate aboard the “Boise”—a gun pointer—the guy that points and fires the fifteen big guns of the cruiser.  Right now you’re standing by for action [. . .].  You’ve sighted the enemy, and your eye is jammed into the telescopic gun sight, searching for a target.  [And] now, very dimly, you see a light-gray spot on the lens . . . then another . . . and another—five of them. It’s them! You can see them plainly.

As those listening to old-time radio shows know, the technique was later used to announce each upcoming episode of Escape). McDougall’s collaborator writing the screenplay for Possessed was Silvia Richards. I assume that is the Sylvia Richards who wrote scripts for the thriller anthology Suspense. At any rate, I was going to discuss the influence of radio writing and technique on the structure of Possessed, a film noir that also makes use of radio’s voice-altering Sonovox, readers interested in which Google occasionally refers to broadcastellan.

The second topic on my mind was the narrative genre of soap opera, which occurred to me after misreading the date marking the demise of four long-running radio serials back in 1959, the anniversary of their silencing having been 2 January, not 1 February. I occasionally contribute a definition to Waking Ambrose and was interested in redefining “soap opera” for myself. It is a word that has become rather too loosely used, but might actually fit certain commercial blogs.

So, this is what I had planned to write about today; but technorati made me reconsider all that. After posting my essays here, I often go in search of other online journals discussing subjects similar to mine. Not infrequently, this leads to some follow up on my part. The other day, for instance, having written about the radio promotion for Cecil B. DeMille’s Four Frightened People, I searched for recent mentions of that title elsewhere. And what did I learn? That the film is going to be released as part of a DeMille DVD anthology. Both the Alternative Film Guide and Trouble in Paradise will tell you as much. That’s another product of popular culture recalled from obscurity. Unfortunately, my similarly obscure journal had little to do with it; but bloggers are doing their share by spreading the word and signalling interest in or demand for such films.

Yesterday, having just mocked the “relevance” of the Academy Awards, I came across an entry in the Popsurfing blog, shared by someone who, unlike me, took time to look at the entire list of nominees. And what is nominated in the documentary (short subject) category? A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, a film honoring the foremost exponent of American radio dramatics. How relevant (to me, the broadcastellan blog, and readers in popular culture) can an Oscar nomination get? The next question on my mind was not a rhetorical one: how can I get my hands on a copy of this film?

By sharing all this I meant to comment on the enriching interactivity of the blogosphere, on the flow of information (correct, false, relevant or not) that can sweep past, engulf, or uplift you, if only you bother to keep surfing. “There will be time later” (to quote a line from Corwin) to retreat into that world between my ears. Right now, I’m eager to look around and partake . . .

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Oscar Announcements: One Supposedly Relevant, the Other Simply Levant

I was among those tuning in live today to catch the announcement of the Academy Award nominations. It was a surprising moment of up-to-date enthusiasm, considering that I have only seen one of the films competing in the major categories (and that being the less-than-timely Mrs. Henderson Presents). Not exactly riveted to the spot after Mira Sorvino had stepped to the podium, I promptly consulted the Internet Movie Database (which also posted my latest review today) to find out whether Ms. Sorvino’s career is now reduced to reading a list of now-factor names from a teleprompter.

I stood corrected (if not entirely convinced of her A-list status), then sat down, caught a glimpse of a butterfly in the garden (in January?), and wandered off again into the generally shrugged-off-as-irrelevant realm of old-time radio. Fellow radio scholar Howard Blue, who wrote an informative book on radio propaganda and left a comment on broadcastellan earlier today, will probably not be among those shrugging.

Unlike in the allegedly relevant motion pictures of today, America’s wartime activities featured prominently on radio, whether in serious drama, juvenile adventures, or on comedy programs. On this day, 31 January, in 1943, radio comedian Fred Allen joked about the power of broadcasting in wartime. For instance, the Russian advance slowed down on account of “some mix-up” through which the “Russians army got four days ahead of [radio news commentator] H. V. Kaltenborn.”

The quiz show Truth or Consequences, Allen quipped, could solve the nation’s debt problem. A contestant on that program had just received thousands of pennies in the mail, sent in by empathetic listeners sorry that she answered a question incorrectly. Now, if only Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau could appear on that show and give the wrong answers! Also discussed was a ruling by the OPA (Office of Price Administration) that dining out constituted an “uplift for morale” and was thus exempt from rationing.

And then there was that other Oscar announcement, made by Oscar Levant (pictured above, in one of my humble attempts at illustration). The noted American composer appeared on Allen’s show that day to declare that he was all washed-up. Levant, who was also a panelist on the celebrity quiz program Information, Please!, complained that his reputation was ruined after he had performed at Carnegie Hall alongside Allen’s archrival, the notoriously dreadful violinist Jack Benny.

“We mustn’t go to itsy-bitsy pieces,” Allen tried to calm the discomposed musician. “You sound like an old kindergarten teacher I once I killed in Syracuse.” So, what kind of jobs were available for an over-the-hill composer and ex-radio celebrity? Leafing through the want ads, Allen finds demand for “steamfitters, plumbers, sandhogs, stevedores.” “You’ve got the wrong column,” Levant sneers, “That’s for women!”

Eventually, Allen suggests that Levant turn radio jingles into symphonies and “clean up” with the sponsors. It’s a living. Sure beats having to read a roster of your honored peers—unless you are too deluded to realize that you are no longer among them.

Going to the pictures is fast disappearing on the public lists of favorite pastimes; so, congratulating yourself on your own supposed relevance—rather than honoring potentially enduring cinematic excellence—is a desperate attempt at concealing your impending obsolescence. Forever keeping up with the out-of-date, I, for one, will never have to stoop to such measures.

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Stripping on Camera, Teasing on Air: Cecil B. DeMille, Four Frightened People, and the It of Radio Trailers

I just returned from the steamy jungle adventure that is Four Frightened People. It is one of the lesser-known—and lesser—melodramas directed by Cecil B. DeMille, maker of epic spectaculars and master of sensational showmanship. Before I compose myself and submit my review of this early 1934 pre-code effort to the Internet Movie Database, I am going to discuss it here in relation to, what else, old-time radio. I was fortunate to have come across an on-air trailer for the film, a rare recording from the archives of WFUV in New York.

Claudette Colbert in Four Frightened People

Introducing his latest motion picture on the Paramount Movie Parade, DeMille began to set up his persona as the swanky pimp of Tinseltown, an image so skillfully exploited during his tenure as host of the well-oiled and powerful advertising engine that was the Lux Radio Theater. DeMille sure knew how to hawk his salacious wares, even as Hollywood was facing the pressure of the Production Code, which was responsible for timed kisses and screwball cheek.

An expert at unwrapping his leading ladies for public display, and at packaging such lowbrow peepshows as high art, DeMille found a great extension to his lure in radio. On the air, he could stimulate his potential audiences to picture in the dirtier recesses of their minds what they just had to go see for themselves at the theaters.

We have “a surprise for you,” the Paramount Movie Parade barker promises the listener. Instead of disembodying another heartthrob, the program brings before us one of Hollywood’s invisible VIPs—”a celebrity never seen in the films, but a man whose artistry nevertheless has been manifested on the screen many times. He’s one of the real pioneers of the motion picture industry, responsible for many of its history-making productions.”

The legendary director expresses his gratitude and is only too glad to seize the microphone: “It isn’t often that we who work behind the cameras have an opportunity to speak to those who view the results of our work on the screen.” That he has “just returned to Hollywood after months spent in the South Seas” where he “underwent many hardships, unexpected thrills, and even dangers” makes this an occasion for exciting storytelling.

What follows is a selection of snippets from the film’s soundtrack (rather than restaged scenes, as those heard on the Lux program) introduced and commented on by the director. We can readily imagine what might happen if four civilized people—two men and two women—get lost in a tropical wilderness. “They reveal just how rapidly the polite mold of civilization disintegrates under the influence of the jungle. These people shed civilization when they shed their clothes. They become like animals of the jungle, fighting and loving, like the beasts who terrify them.”

And shedding her clothes for him as she had done before (in The Sign of the Cross) was that favorite among DeMille’s leading ladies, Ms. Claudette Colbert. This time, however, the director did not use the context of antiquity as a pretext for showcasing her beauty; instead, he dwells on the film’s “authenticity” as a nature study.

DeMille has all the braggadocio of King Kong‘s Carl Denham; but with Colbert as his Ann Darrow, an awakening sex goddess pursued by two none too moral mortals (one married, no less), this Hollywood showman is not in need of a supersized ape to symbolize libido. It’s all in our minds already—and the radio trailer does its darndest to keep it burning within us until we are all fired up to see this Paramount paradise and follow Colbert, along with the boys, to that less than cooling waterfall in the deep woods.