Category: Radio Plays

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Beyond the Walk of Fame: A Monument for Madeleine Carroll

I don’t quite understand the concept; nor do I approve of such an abuse of the medium. The radio alarm clock, I mean. It accosts me with tunes and blather when I am least able or inclined to listen appreciatively. I much prefer being turned on by the radio rather than being roused by it to the point of turning it off or wishing it dead and getting on with the conscious side of life. This morning, however, BBC Radio 2—our daybreaker of choice—managed both to surprise and delight me with the following less-than-timely newsitem. Twenty years after her death, British-born Hollywood actress Madeleine Carroll (whose life and career are documented in this website maintained by her cousin) returns to the place of her birth as the English town of West Bromwich unveils a monument erected in her honor.

Film stars are perhaps least deserving of monuments—not merely because their off-screen antics rarely warrant praise, but because the celluloid on which their contributions to humanity are preserved are fitting enough testimonies to their achievements. Unless, that is, the achievements lie beyond those captured on film. In Carroll’s case, this translates into a return to Britain to serve as a Red Cross nurse during the Second World War.

The star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent put her film career on hold following the death of her sister during the London blitz in October 1940. Just days prior to this personal loss she had already signalled her intentions by contributing to a Canadian Red Cross Emergency Appeal, which aired on 29 September.

Subsequent parts in American radio dramas echoed her new career. In the late 1930s, Carroll had starred in frothy comedies and sensational melodramas produced by the Campbell Playhouse and the Lux Radio Theater; during the war, by comparison, she was most often heard in propaganda plays written for and produced by the aforementioned Cavalcade of America. On 5 October 1942, for instance, she played an army nurse in “I Was Married on Bataan,” scripted by reluctant radio playwright Arthur Miller. Two weeks later, on 19 October, she portrayed a pioneering female doctor in “That They Might Live”; and on 30 November 1942, she played the title character in “Sister Kenny.”

Unlike so many of her glamorous colleagues, Carroll truly inhabited these roles. It is her humanitarian work that is being remembered today.

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"Ancient Sorceries" and New: Wales, Witchcraft, and the Wireless

I can’t say that I knew much about Wales before I moved here from New York City. Undoubtedly, I still do not know as much as I ought to by now, well over two years later. Yet, however much I remain attached to America and its 20th-century popular culture, there is no getting away from what is now becoming home. On this day, 15 February, in 1948, for instance, the East Coast edition of the US radio series Escape presented “Ancient Sorceries,” a fantastic tale set in a remote town on the Welsh border, a town “between two worlds.” Having felt torn between two (or more) worlds myself, I felt compelled to listen in . . .

“Ancient Sorceries” was adapted by the aforementioned Les Crutchfield from a short story by Algernon Blackwood. It opens with what has been called the most romantic of radio sounds, the whistle of a locomotive. Aboard the train is Arthur Llewellyn, a Londoner who relates the strange occurrences during a weeklong—and unexpected—visit to a stay on the border to that wild country west of England.

He describes the countryside as “singularly empty, deserted of life.” There is a haze hanging over “the soft hills and the valleys between,” giving the “whole landscape a feeling of enchantment and unreality.” It is a haze I have often seen from our living room window, as illustrated by the above photograph of that very view, a scene that initially filled a staunch urbanite like myself with sensations not altogether pleasant.

Captivated nonetheless by this air of mystery, the Englishman alights, deciding to spend a night in “this peaceful spot,” despite the advice from a fellow passenger not to linger—not, that is, if he places “any value” on his soul. Heedless of this warning, Llewellyn leaves the train and, inquiring about a room for the night, is welcomed by the local innkeeper. Indeed, he appears to have been expected, as if returned to the village rather than visiting it for the first time.

Nor are the innkeeper and his wife the only ones to treat him like this. Who is the beautiful woman who asks him to come back to her? “You belonged to us once,” she insists. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Or loss of memory, perhaps? Can this mystery be explained away by science? However terrified, Llewellyn is determined to find out . . .

Aside from mentions of Swansea and the English town of Hereford near the Welsh border, there is little Welsh spirit in this dramatization of “Ancient Sorceries.” Dramatized in a perfunctory manner and delivered without accents to lend it character and authenticity, this is one of Escape’s lesser efforts. It is peculiar, however, that Crutchfield should have chosen to impose this relocation, considering that the original story was set in France. Was there, perhaps, more mystery to him in the wild of Wales, so little of which he managed to capture. Indeed, the strength of his play lies in what it suggests, rather than tells or enacts.

The awareness that the narrator has yet to find out—to live out—the end of his own story encourages the listener to become seer. The limitations of the storyteller turn us into tellers of his fortune. Having been conducted by a slight sketch and a few aural signposts, our trains of thought are railroaded to that place “between two worlds,” a misty and indistinct border region in which to conjure and scheme like the fates of the ancients. Such are the sorceries of radio.

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Up to Scratch; or, Giving the Voice the Finger

I guess we have all been exposed to them, no matter how quickly our fingers move to stop our ears. Sounds that drive us up the wall and get us to scream, shiver, and wince. For some, it is the screeching of a piece of chalk on a blackboard (perhaps already one of the “endangered” sounds aforementioned; for others it might be a creaking door swinging on rusty hinges. Fiddlesticks (however annoying they might be), that’s nothing compared to the noise Agnes Moorehead has to endure in the Suspense thriller “The Thirteenth Sound,” first broadcast on this day, 13 February, in 1947.

It is a battle of sounds, mind, considering that Moorehead had one of the most grating voices in the business, which is just what makes “The Thirteenth Sound” (written by writer-actor team Cathy and Elliot Lewis) such a frightfully clever—and cleverly frightful—vehicle for the “First Lady of Suspense (previously mentioned here).

Crime dramas can be divided into head-scratchers and nail-biters; the former being the whodunit, the latter the kind of thriller I shall call the will-they-won’t-they, in which a character, hero or villain, is placed in a shaky situation or shown to be in an unstable frame of mind. Will they get out of it, or won’t they. This is stuff in which Suspense, which started out as a series of detective mysteries written by the aforementioned John Dickson Carr, came to specialize after the success of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” also starring Ms. Moorehead (and featured in one of my podcasts. Improving on both the head-scratcher and the nail-biter, “The Thirteenth Sound” might justly be called a nail-scratcher.

It gets under our skin with a goose bumps inducing sound, a sound that could be the undoing of the play’s central character, slyly named Mrs. Skinner. She—and this is no mystery since we’re in on the act—has bumped off her husband, who doesn’t get a word in, but whose loud snoring and “nervous habit of grinding his teeth in his sleep,” the good woman claims, used to keep her up at night. Upon doing him in, she sleeps soundly for the first time in years.

And yet, in the effort of keeping a guilty secret, Mrs. Skinner’s nerves may not be up to scratch, old or otherwise. However strident, her voice may have met its match in the finger of suspicion pointing from beyond the grave. Like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” before it, “The Thirteenth Sound” presses a stethoscope on a guilty conscience. It is the microphone that makes a public hearing out of the ordeal.

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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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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.

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Being Here: Living Reconciled to Virtuality

Well, it has been two weeks since my last entry in the broadcastellan journal. I have been on trips to England’s two largest cities, London and Birmingham (pictured, in my rather futuristic snapshot), spending time with friends, taking in culture high and low. I rarely stay away that long from this virtual nook I call home. Whenever there is living to be done, I tend to fall behind with the chronicling of same; and when I finally catch up with myself in writing, the reporting seems pointless, the moment past. Perhaps it is this inability to reconcile actuality to virtuality that convinced me to keep a journal devoted to the presumably out-of-date.

Instead of summing up the fortnight that was, I am looking ahead, announcing the pieces I am going to share in the days to come. For what remains of the year (and of my time online), I shall file a few belated reports from the theaters, virtual and otherwise.

For the most part, it has been “otherwise” rather than otherwise. After my short trip to Birmingham, where I was introduced to Patrick Hughes’s mind-teasing “Superduperspective” (on view, free of charge, at the Waterhall until 17 February 2007), I went to see the aged Ron Moody as Scrooge in a touring production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. While in London, I took in A Moon for the Misbegotten starring Kevin Spacey (whose career I have been following ever since I was introduced to his work by a mutual friend); an irreverent adaptation of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, performed by a cast of four; and the musical Daddy Cool, based on the once hugely popular songs of Frank Farian (of Milli Vanilli infamy), many of which provided a soundtrack for my childhood in Germany. I am going to devote one essay each to these diverse stage entertainments, and am likely to toss in the occasional reference to American radio dramatics, the formerly free theater for the multitude.

There isn’t much “free” theater to be had these days; and, judging from the American accents I picked up only infrequently while in the UK capital, London is rather too expensive to attract many Western travelers, particularly at this time of year, when many forgo culture for commerce in their search of bargains. Although I moved from the US to Britain quite some time ago, I still think in dollars and convert pounds into US currency to assess costs. It is a habit that made the ticket prices at London’s movie theaters seem all the more outrageous. I guess we laughed more at our folly than at the penguin antics when we found ourselves paying $25 per person to see Happy Feet. Somewhat less pricey were screenings of Casino Royale (an antemeridian matinee at London’s premier movie house, the Odeon Leicester Square) and Stranger Than Fiction, playing at a much smaller venue.

Going to the pictures has gotten pricey; and that applies not only to those in motion: the current exhibition of paintings by Velasques at the National Gallery requires the forking over of an eyepopping £12. As price tags raise expectations, the paintings seemed to lose some of their lustre when considered in the light losing itself in empty pockets. No wonder I keep turning to the comparatively cheap thrills of old-time radio drama for my day-to-day amusement.

Though no longer free, there was much on offer at home, if only I had been listening to the radio. Still to be enjoyed are Sir Ian McKellen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, both aired on BBC radio The BBC makes programming available online for a week, and I am now trying to catch up with some of the outstanding or noteworthy dramas presented in recent days—from the gay wedding at The Archers to the five-part adaptation of A Room to Let, a story collaboratively conceived by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elisabeth Gaskell—broadcasts I missed while wirelessly away in England.

Mind you, I could have enjoyed wireless access at our hotel—for the price of £15 a week; but, more than the cost itself, I resented being prompted to provide personal data in order to be granted a privilege that ought to be free like the air itself. Paying for air charged with the particles of commerce? Being charged yet again for exposing myself to a deluge of online advertising while depriving myself of an opportunity to recharge? Progress? Bah, humbug!

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“These Three”: Gay Lovers Straightened through Air-conditioning

The history of taboos sure is shocking. I mean, it is shocking to realize what, over the years, has been hidden from view and banned from our discourse. Interracial marriages. Same sex unions. Gender reassignments. While denial can be as harmful as our tendency to designate, you would have to have been living under that proverbial mineral formation or petrified by the religious fundamentalism that passes for faith these days to regard such realities as unmentionable. They may not be widely understood or tolerated, let alone embraced, but as the facts of life in all its complexities they are too much in the public eye to be ignored.

Simeon Solomon, The Sleepers and the One who Watcheth (1870; detail)

Often argued to be responsible for foisting a liberal education on the masses, Hollywood has, in fact, played an important role in keeping quiet about many aspects of our everyday lives. Beginning in the mid-1930s, and for several decades thereafter, the Production Code curtailed what could be shown or talked about in motion pictures.

It was on this day, 6 December, in 1933, that James Joyce’s Ulysses was ruled to be “not obscene,” lifting the ban on its sale in the US; but that, aside from its narrative structure, hardly made Ulysses ( 1922; previously serialised 1918-20) a hot property in Tinseltown. Writers who wanted a share of the profits to be made by selling stories or streamlining them for the silver screen had to deal with the strictures of the code and learn to rework their material accordingly.

One playwright who accepted this challenge was Lillian Hellman, whose 1934 stage success The Children’s Hour was brought to the ears of American radio listeners on this day in 1937.

The Children’s Hour tells the story of two women whose teaching careers and personal lives are wrecked when one of their pupils alleges that they are having an intimate relationship.  Like Hellman’s 1936 screen version of The Children’s Hour, titled These Three, George Wells’s radio adaptation for the Lux Radio Theatre drowns out the unspeakable by suggesting instead a triangulated relationship with a virile heterosexual male at its center.  Wedged between Stanwyck and Mary Astor that night was the presumably irresistible Errol Flynn.

Hollywood had long thrived on love triangles, although they were rarely as ambiguous as in the above painting by the aforementioned queer artist Simeon Solomon.  Indeed, the three-cornered plot is key to the first new genre of production-coded cinema—the screwball comedy, in which heterosexual marriage is challenged by old flames or new rivals until it is ultimately reaffirmed. Although—or perhaps because—These Three is more concerned with libel than with forbidden love, with allegations rather than physical acts, the revision eliminates the unmentionable to make room for a rumor that can be talked about.

As if determined to remove any doubts as to the straightness of the radio adaptation and all those associated with the production, Lux host Cecil B. DeMille opens the program by letting listeners in on a “secret,” a story that had “completely escaped the headlines.” The unheard-of item amounted to little more than the announcement of a recent marriage. According to DeMille’s anecdote, the unconventional Ms. Stanwyck had just attended the wedding of her stableboy, danced with the hired hands, and “made them all forget” that she was the “groom’s boss.” The Lux program presented itself as clean entertainment without wanting to appear stuffy.

What is more stuffy—and objectionable—than the codes governing radio and motion pictures is the subsequent silencing of the history of such hush-ups. A description of the Lux broadcast in a 1995 reference text, for instance, keeps mum about the pedigree of the adaptation by alluding vaguely to “[c]ertain aspects of the stage production’s plot” that “made a straight film version out of the question.” Phobic histories like these not only contribute to our ignorance of past inequalities. They keep us from moving beyond them.

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Many Happy Reruns: John Dickson Carr

Well, it has long been an ambition of mine to write a whodunit. Red herrings, fishy alibis, a murky pool of slippery suspects, and a case so deep it would have kept even the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Hercule Poirot angling for clues, chapter after chapter, much to the delight of an equally confounded readership. Take my word for it, I have tried. Otherwise, I submit to you this piece of evidence, which I dug up from where it rightly belongs and promptly edited for the occasion:

“I am going to kill somebody, tonight,” was written on the invitations. Glossy, who had sent them, was dressed for the part, greeting the crowd that had come for the killing. She looked marvelous, her dress and body the result of careful design, a shrewd calculation in fabric and flesh [. . .]. 

It was my sister Veronica who had arranged the party. I had stayed out of it. After all, I am merely a party chronicler. Or so I thought.

“Why, it’s simply deranged,” I heard Glossy squealing, surrounded by a throng of professed admirers; it was a favored expression of hers, which she employed almost universally, except to describe her own behavior. She was sober enough to observe the crowd of friends and colleagues she had drawn toward her in an effort to gain control in a moment of crisis. Tonight, she wanted to be seen in order to see for herself. To see them all, at once. She scrutinized the scene as carefully as her condition allowed. I, for one, knew that her noisy enthusiasm was nothing but an act. Glossy had confessed as much to my sister: she feared that the days of her reign as the queen of daytime drama were numbered and suspected that someone had already planned a ruthless regicide. So, being the center of attention was not just vital for her ego, but for her alter ego as well. Glossy was on the lookout for the conspirators, and I guess the fact that she knew most of the guests provided hardly any comfort at all. . . .”

Perhaps you should have taken my word for it. It’s best to leave such murderous plots to the masters and mistresses of the craft. Experts like John Dickson Carr, for instance, who was born on this day, 30 November, in 1906. Throughout the 1940s, his plays were often heard on American and British radio, on series like Suspense, Cabin B-13 and Appointment with Fear, all of which were designed to showcase his writing. He also served as host and narrator of the mystery anthology Murder by Experts, for which services his latest novels were being duly promoted.

“Mr. Carr brings to his radio work the same superlative craftsmanship and high integrity that distinguish all his novels and short stories,” Messrs. Ellery Queen contended in their anthology Rogues’ Gallery (pictured above), prefacing Carr’s play “Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer,” which was produced by Suspense and broadcast on 11 May 1943.

Having discussed Carr’s work at length in my dissertation and on several occasions in this journal, I have come to the conclusion that the whodunit, especially when combined with the “how’sitdone”—the locked room puzzle in which Carr specialized—was best suited to the printed page, where it can unfold gradually and be appreciated at a pace determined by the reader, rather than the merciless clock of the broadcast studio.

Now, clocks feature prominently in “Mr. Markham.” One of these old-fashioned chronometers is set up to hold a clue, but their ticking is more effective in setting the scene, creating the atmosphere of the antique dealer’s establishment, and reminding the listener that time might be running out for at least one of the characters. In the one-dimensional, that is time-only medium of aural storytelling, suspense is far more effective than surprise. While not devoid of suspense, Carr’s plays attempt—and often fail to—startle the audience with a final twist that, rather than being dramatized, is tagged on in a cumbersome and less than thrilling epilogue.

Is Carr’s brand of whodunit a radiogenic genre? You may judge for yourself by listening to the British as well as the American version of “Mr. Markham.” It is hardly fitting to celebrate someone’s birthday by opening fire. Then again, there’s Glossy, lying in a pool of blood.