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A Bell for . . . Talafar?

It is the fuel that keeps the search engines humming. It is fodder for loudmouthed if often unintelligible webjournalists thriving on the divisive. It is the foundation of many a rashly erected platform by means of which the invisible make a display of themselves. The so-called war on terror, I mean, and the time, the shape, and the lives it is taking in Iraq. My position becomes sufficiently clear in those words, as tenuous as it sometimes seems to myself. Experiencing the uncertainty, the turmoil and sorrow that was New York City during the days following the destruction of the World Trade Center, I was anxious to see prevented what then felt like an out and out war against the democratic West; but as a descendant of Nazi sympathizers who is convinced that putting an end to thralldom is a noble cause and conflicted about the use of military force to achieve this end, I could only work myself up to a restrained fervor, which soon gave way to bewilderment, anger, and frustration.

Presented as a success story of the US led invasion of Iraq, the town of Talafar is once again in the news this week, shown in the unfavorable light of exploding bombs and insurgent violence. It has (or ought to have) become obvious that the US and its allies (reluctant or otherwise) are failing in their professed mission against terror and tyranny not because they lack military expertise or international support but because they engaged in this operation with an insufficient awareness and understanding of the different and differing cultures in a region they presumed, hoped, or misrepresented to be a unified (or at any rate unifiable) nation.

I was reminded of all this, if any reminders were required, while watching the wartime parable-turned-Hollywood romance A Bell for Adano (1945), a movie depicting the occupation of an Italian village by American forces toward the close of the Second World War. I generally dislike and avoid war pictures; at least those that reduce history to well-staged action sequences interspersed with scenes of map-pointing generals exchanging remarks about strategies and objectives as if contemplating a game of checkers. A Bell is not that kind of movie.

Based on a 1944 Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller by John Hersey (a Time correspondent and former secretary to Sinclair Lewis), it tells of the struggle for peace, order and community in a battle-scarred town whose lack of pride, hope, and unity is symbolized by the missing bell in the town square, weaponized by Italian’s fascist regime. Realizing the significance of this communal centerpiece, a New York Italian major disregards military orders to find and install an adequate replacement.

On this day, 28 March, in 1944—well over a year before the movie version premiered in US cinemas—NBC radio, in cooperation with the Council on Books in Wartime, presented an adaptation of Hersey’s novel as part of a series titled Words at War. Henry King’s film would attempt to shape parts of Hersey’s narrative into the romance of a lost “Belle” from Adano by casting Gene Tierney as John Hodiak’s Italian love interest, considerably downplaying the ugly Americans his character is up against.

The radio dramatization dispenses with such heartstringings-along to concentrate on the heart of the story: the failings of military strategy and the imperative of cultural sensitivity in the treatment of liberated civilians as exemplified by the response of one Italian-American to the challenges of ideological reorientation, his efforts to understand and assist his ancestral people after the removal of the enemy force that possessed, intimidated and estranged them.

On the radio, A Bell for Adano was announced as a story about “thoughtful Americans, and Americans not so thoughtful.” The very suggestion of America’s humanitarian blunders in an essentially propagandist series like Words at War renders this broadcast “Bell” altogether more compelling than those backlot scenes in which all-American he-fighters show the Axis what what is. The “what” here is “What to do with occupied territory?” once it appears to be under the control of the ostensible victor.

The war in Iraq has yet to deliver a bell ringing loudly enough to convince the world (or me, at any rate) that the freedom, stability, and opportunity it meant to bring about were worth all those local blasts and their global repercussions. Romancing a cracked one just won’t do.

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Mining Culture: The Welsh in Hollywood

It was too pleasant an afternoon not to be warming to it. The outdoors, I mean. Though all thumbs (and not one of them green), I nonetheless tried my hands at gardening again, transplanting English-grown Californian Lilac into Welsh soil. Unless deterred by the vagaries of what goes for “vernal” here in Wales, I shall probably spend more time tending to the plants than to this journal next week, when the storm-frayed and patched-up telephone lines to our house are scheduled to be cut down and replaced, a spring renewal of telecommunications during which service is likely to be suspended.

No internet, no landline, and no traffic along the already quiet lane leading to this hermitage I call home—it’s “a proper place for a murder.” That is how the setting of Night Must Fall was described when on this day, 27 March, in 1948, the famous and oft revived thriller by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams was performed on the US radio thriller anthology Suspense.

Along with two members of the original (1935) London cast—Dame May Whitty (as Mrs. Bramson) and Matthew Boulton (as the inspector)—Robert Montgomery was heard in the role of Dan, the lady killer he had played in the 1937 film adaptation. As I realized after seeing it on stage, Night Must Fall is not your common crop of a crime melodrama. It goes beyond the question of whether or not the victim will die by asking us whether she ought to, by making us eager for the “must” of her demise and examine the decline and “fall” of our own civilized morality. As a psychological and ethical puzzler, it translates well into other languages and media.

Now, Night falls in Essex, England, rather than the wild west of Britain; but according to Williams’s stage directions, the character of “Baby-face” Dan “speaks with a rough accent” that, unlike Montgomery’s, is “more Welsh than anything else.” On Broadway as on the London stage, this “sort of Welsh” Dan (as his girlfriend describes him) was voiced by the very Welshman who created him.

In an acting career spanning six decades, Williams was a frequent player in (mainly British) film, on stage and television; on US radio, he was heard in one of Norman Corwin’s plays for the United Nations. I recently spotted him in The Citadel (1938), his voice lending authenticity to the depiction of life in a Welsh mining town rendered unconvincing by the casting of Hollywood productions like John Ford’s Academy Award-winning How Green Was My Valley (another cinema classic I caught up with this year) or The Corn Is Green. The latter is based on an autobiographical play by Williams; but with stars like Bette Davis (on screen) and Claudette Colbert (on radio, nearly a decade later) taking on the role of a Welsh schoolteacher, it is the audience who is expected to be green.

Having lived in this country for well over two years now, I am all ears for representations and representatives of Wales in popular culture, whether in British cinema or American radio drama. What remains of this country once its landscape, language, and lore are forced through the filter of the camera or microphone, once it is translated by a popular medium like film and transferred to an international audience? During the next few months, leading up to a Welsh film festival hosted by the National Screen and Sound Archive here in Aberystwyth, I am going to mull over such matters from time to time.

To be sure, the landscape and culture of Wales have changed considerably since A. J. Cronyn’s Citadel and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley were bestsellers in the US back in 1937-38 and 1940, respectively. Prominently featured in 20th-century popular culture (including the previously discussed “Comedy of Danger,” reputedly the first play written for radio), the mines have been shut down years ago and wind farms have replaced collieries. Today, however, the BBC reported that coal mining is making a comeback here, as the first “deep mine” is set to open in over three decades. Could this mean that Ms. Zeta-Jones is going back to her Welsh roots for a Hollywood returns to the Citadel, the Valley or other recycled Corn?

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"What monstrous place is this?": Hardy, Holmes, and the Secrets of Stonehenge

I’ve returned from my weekend excursion to Sussex, England, which took us to the market town of Chichester. Considering that Patricia Routledge will soon perform there in two short plays by Alan Bennett, I would not mind a return visit. Even the local cinema can boast a distinguished cast of supporting players, Kenneth Branagh and Maggie Smith being among its vice presidents. The hilarious For Your Consideration aside, we only got to dunk our heads into Darren Aronofsky’s murky Fountain, which might as well have been scored by Yanni for all its new-aged bubbleheadedness.

On to things more solid—and more intriguing to boot. Yesterday, on our drive home to Wales, we made a little detour to Stonehenge where, dodging hordes of tourists, I managed to take the above picture. The sun was just breaking through the clouds on that cold March afternoon, as I, along with dozens of sightseers, walked round the fabled circle. Some of the mighty bluestones were transported here from Mynydd Preseli, Welsh hills lying 240 miles to the west. By whom? And why? Which fallen heroes or forgotten deities were being commemorated or worshipped here?

Perhaps, the legendary Sherlock Holmes was able to solve these mysteries, when, on 19 March 1945, he tackled the “Secret of Stonehenge” as one of radio’s New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, Dr. Watson has long been silent about this particular case, transcription disks proving fragile by comparison to the stones from which such popular fictions are being ground by the sheer force of ingenuity and imagination.

As Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles reminded me, those rocks are not silent, even though it might take rather more effort these days to hear them amid travelers’ prattle or the traffic on the road. No matter how muffled the motors might be by the wind or how muted the multitudes by the audio tour guides they press to their ears, the place looks less than serene.

How different it must have been for Tess when she and Angel Clare, running from the law under cover of night “almost struck themselves against” this “heathen temple” in the “open loneliness and black solitude” in which it once stood, unfenced and unguarded:

“What monstrous place is this?” said Angel. 

“It hums,” said she. “Hearken!” 

He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said— 

“What can it be?”

While Clare would no doubt be able to recognize this “Temple of the Winds” today, well signposted as it is, the surrounding landscape has changed considerably, as has its soundscape. Currently, plans are under way to remove or conceal two of the roads leading to and past the site, in an effort once again to place Stonehenge in a grassland setting, free from present-day visual and aural distractions. However grateful I am for the roads that led us to this place, its secrets and solitude should not be sacrificed on the altar of convenience.

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“. . . only a crude little glass baby”: The “Father of Radio” Remembers

Well, I am off this instant on a short and none-too-well planned trip to the south of England, to which quick exit you owe the uncommon brevity and, what is more irregular still, the antemeridian dispatch of this entry in the broadcastellan journal. However inconvenient this last-minute post might be for my traveling companions, I simply could not wait another year to share this anniversary. True, I excite easily when it comes to the old wireless; but in this case the enthusiasm is not altogether unwarranted.

On this day, 23 March, in 1941, Dr. Lee de Forest was called upon to address the American public through a means and medium for the creation of which he was largely responsible.

“Most people believe Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio,” Tom Lewis states in the Prologue of his study Empire of the Air (1991, immediately to make the necessary correction: “he did not.” Among those who did was said Dr. de Forest, once acknowledged to be the “Father of Radio,” due in part to his tireless self-promotion.

To mark the 34th anniversary of the invention of the wireless telephone in 1907 (it is thus the 100 anniversary this year), CBS radio caught up with this daddy of the dial for another edition of Behind the Mike, a CBS program billed as “radio’s own show.”

Based on accounts furnished by his assistant, Frank Butler (present in the broadcasting studio), Behind the Story dramatization of de Forest’s story, his initial struggle, his failure to interest the navy in his invention, the destruction of his New York laboratory by fire, and his indictment for fraud.

After this fictionalized sketch, a cheerful de Forest, by then “almost the sole living survivor of the old guard,” spoke from Los Angeles to his former assistant, to the audience gathered in an East Coast studio, and to the listening public tuning in across the United States:

In 1907, no one could possibly have foreseen what is occurring right now between Los Angeles and New York because then the amplifier, which has since made possible the transcontinental telephone, was only a crude little glass baby lying in swaddling cotton in that little old shoebox in our laboratory.  How well I remember those first audion tubes [. . .].  How difficult they were to construct.  How great our chagrin when one of them burned out.  And what headaches we suffered to keep those first radio telephone transmitters on the air.  Bittersweet are those old memories.

More bitter than sweet, as it turns out. In the 1941 broadcast, de Forest expressed the wish to “live until the 21st century, just to observe the state of radio and television then.” He died in 1961; but not long after he made that unfulfilled wish, so well suited to a radio broadcast designed to celebrate the medium, he all but disowned his invention. In an open letter to the National Association of Broadcasters that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 28 October 1946 and was reprinted in de Forests 1950 autobiography, Father of Radio, he exclaimed, after years of expressing similar misgivings:

What have you […] done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America’s mass intelligence.  You have debased this child [to] collect money from all and sundry [..].  You have made of him a laughing stock to the intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere […].

While lamenting the “bedtime stories” that “ruled the waves” and “rendered children psychopathic,” he nonetheless remained “proud” of his “child,” as “[h]ere and there from every station come each day some brief flashes worth the hearing, some symphony, some intelligent debate, some playlet worth the wattage.”

Not one to throw out the baby with the airwaves, I shall return anon to discuss some “playlet,” to debate whether such “brief flashes” were “worth the wattage” or just curious enough to catch my attention.

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Acid Tongues in Wilted Cheeks: Hollywood and the "Older" Woman

Well, she’s being teased quite a bit this season about her obsolescence, about being too old for her former job, too old to start dating again after her marriage fell apart, too old for any excitement greater than awaiting the arrival of the latest issue of Cat Fancy. The superannuated one is Gabrielle Solis, one of those supposedly Desperate Housewives. She’s a mere 31, mind you; but that’s just about a quarter to finished on the watch of a supermodel. It’s Hollywood poking fun at its obsession with youth, an obsession I never shared even while I stilled possessed it. It is pointless to shout “Grow up!” these days, since that is exactly what is feared most.

If fifty is the new thirty, does it follow that thirty is the new pre-pubescence? Perhaps that is why Gabrielle is asked to prep hideous little Miss Sunshines for a short career of runway sashaying or paired with an even more hideous Ritchie Rich of a teenager who seriously undermines her chances of landing a man. Gabrielle is not so much robbing the cradle than sinking back into it.

Men like birthday boy William Shatner (born on this day in 1931) never had it quite as tough to stay employed, even though they might experience their own aging anxieties, drowned sorrows untraceable in their bloated or botoxed visages. If Desperate Housewives can be claimed to succeed in making mature women appear desirable it is only by making them look and act less than mature. At least they are spared for a while longer from the fate of being assigned nothing more glamorous or challenging than a low budget sequel to Trog.

Joan Crawford, who did exit with that movie on her resume, made a career out of playing formidable women past forty just until she passed fifty, at which untender moment the formidable was twisted into the berserk. According to Hollywood, the line between fierce and frantic is as thin as a wrinkle behind a layer of gauze; and even in the make-believe of radio, where no gauze is required to assist those incapable of suspending their disbelief at the sight of crow’s feet, Crawford was asked to walk and cross it.

In “Three Lethal Words”, a tongue in less-than-rosy cheek Suspense thriller that aired on this day, 22 March, back in 1951, Crawford is heard as Jane Winters (read: well past spring or about to enter the second childhood of a Jane Withers), a woman who confesses to being, gasp, 43! You know the old gal has a problem (according to Hollywood logic, that is) when she also confesses to having been “ill” and walks into a film studio with a bottle of nitric acid in her pocket.

“It’s amazingly powerful,” she tells her former colleague, now head of the studio’s story department, to whom she is trying to pitch a story of a woman not unlike herself. As it turns out, that is an understatement, considering that the parallels are melodramatically overstated by Ms. Winters choice of character: Sally Summers, a screenwriter who tries to make herself believe that “43 isn’t very old,” but who is constantly reminded of her relative antiquity by her marriage to an actor 19 years her junior, especially when that young man leaves her after being told to send his wife Mother’s Day cards and is teased about not only having seen Sunset Boulevard, but “living it”!

“Three Lethal Words” throws acid into the wrinkle-free face of Hollywood; but the woman who gets to do the throwing is not looking any better for having dreamed up the deed.

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Fidelity Be Hanged; or, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Moll Flanders?

Now there’s a dame with a past—so much of one that it is difficult to imagine a future for her. Moll Flanders, I mean. The question of her past, path, and purpose was raised anew last night by Keiron Self’s stage adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 narrative (now touring Wales as a co-production of Mappa Mundi, Theatr Mwldan, and Creu Cymru). Adultery, bigamy, incest, theft. What could possibly be next? Hold on! Theft? That’s already somewhat of an anticlimax, isn’t it? How about a happy ending?

In his anticipation of censure, Defoe insisted that “[n]one can, without being guilty of manifest Injustice, cast any Reproach upon [Moll Flanders], or upon our Design in publishing it.” Positioning himself within the tradition of storytelling for moral uplift, he continued his defense by stating that the “Advocates for the Stage have in all Ages made this the great Argument to persuade People that their Plays are useful, and that they ought to be allow’d in the most civiliz’d, and the most religious Government”; that they are “applied to virtuous Purposes, and that by the most lively Representations, they fail not to recommend Virtue and generous Principles, and to discourage all sorts of Vice and Corruption of Manners [. . .].”

“To give the History of a wicked Life repented of,” Defoe remarked, “necessarily requires that the wicked Part should be made as wicked as the real History of it will bear, to illustrate and give a Beauty to the Penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal Spirit and Life.” Is Moll being made a spectacle and example of for the sole purpose of our edification? Or is penitence thrust upon her to justify the sensational come hither that draws us in?

Moll’s moral lapses are cumulative; but instead of suffocating her under piled-up offenses, Defoe determined to put her to the test by having her locked up at last. He threatens Moll with execution to play out what he promised his audience all along: a final act of repentance and virtue rewarded. About whether she is deserving of forgiveness, Defoe’s portrait does not leave much doubt; but is someone like Moll still capable of atonement after a life of debauchery?

Mappa Mundi’s stage adaptation departs from Defoe’s “blueprint” (as Self calls his literary source) by avoiding the contemplation of Moll’s life after crime, let alone her afterlife. She does not get to reap the rewards either of her none-too-good deeds or her subsequent atonement. Whereas Defoe has her telling us of establishing a future for herself and a loving husband in penal-colonial Virginia, Self’s Moll wanders in ever seedier circles and dies where her flashback-dramatized life story began: Newgate prison, in whose confines the play is set.

“How do you reconcile the happy ending of Moll Flanders after such a life of sin and wickedness?” novelist Katherine Anne Porter was asked in a literary panel discussion broadcast on CBS radio in the early 1940s, a time when a dramatization of Defoe’s story was not to be thought of. “How do you reconcile that happy ending with the morality he is preaching in the book?” To which Porter replied: “She repented, don’t you see? That her past weighs more heavily on than against Moll becomes even more difficult to “see” once the criminality of her acts is called into question.

According to Self’s revision of Defoe’s story, Moll is wronged by the society that criminalized her existence. This Newgate Calendar Girl has done no harm not already inflicted upon her: meeting the challenge of securing a husband, trying to make a living, and holding on to her livelihood in old age (that is, turning to thievery when her body is robbed of its attractions). In such a social reading of her life, there is no point in—no need for—penitence. The penitentiary takes its place.

In the stage bill for the Mappa Mundi production, Self expressed his hope of having given Moll a “voice” of which Defoe might approve. Instead, he makes us question the veracity of her words by suggesting her insanity (in a psychedelic finale) and then shuts her up by condemning her to be hanged, however loudly he condemns those who hang her. After all, there is no spectacle in quiet remorse.

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It Happened Another Night: A Return Trip for Colbert and Gable

Well, you can’t go home again; but that sure doesn’t stop a lot of folks from getting a return ticket or from being taken for a ride in the same rickety vehicle. And with pleasure! Before I head out to the theater for another meeting with Moll Flanders, who’s been around the block plenty, I am going to hop on the old “Night Bus” that took Colbert and Gable places—and all the way to the Academy Awards besides.  On this day, 20 March, in 1939, the Depression era transport was fixed up for a Lux Radio Theater presentation of It Happened One Night. Whereas Orson Welles would try to shove Miriam Hopkins and William Powell into their seats for the Campbell Playhouse adaptation of Robert Riskin’s screenplay, Colbert and Gable (as Peter Warne) were brought back for Lux, reprising their Oscar-winning roles of runaway socialite Ellie Andrews and the reporter on her trail.

Also on board that night were Walter Connelly as Ellie’s father and, “believe you me,” Roscoe Karns as the fellow traveler Ellie can stand even less than the arrogant newshound—”Yessir. Shapeley’s the name, and that’s the way I like ’em.”

Of course, if you like ’em like Shapeley, George Wells’s rewrite of the Production-Coded tease that is It Happened One Night will be a disappointment. For starters, you won’t get to admire Colbert’s traffic-stopping gams or Gable’s retailer-headache of a bare chest. Capra’s down-to-earth comedy suffers badly from becoming airborne—if, indeed, it ever does.

On the airwaves, you won’t get to hear Ellie’s liberating plunge into the ocean; her story picks up at the bus terminal, with Peter getting fired while the “Extra, Extra” of a newsboy alerts him to the scoop that could revive his career. Before we quite get why Ellie is out of her element, Peter is already in his, as the elements of screwball are beaten to the pulp of romance.

The old bus sputters along as if someone had slashed its tires. Gone, too, are many of Riskin’s censors-defying innuendos. Still, if you got a mischievous mind, you can tear down the Walls of Jericho or any barrier that might keep you from imagining what is really happening between Ellie and Peter. “You haven’t got a trumpet by any chance, have you?” Luckily, I always carry a spare.

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Lance Sieveking, “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth”

Let me be the first to admit my ignorance. The world being largely ignorant of me, I simply cannot depend on anyone else to do so. That said, I might as well turn the keeping of this journal (complicated as it was today by internet-disrupting hailstorms) into occasions to pick up a little something rather than disperse whatever scraps of knowledge I may already lay claim to after years of study (or intellectual loafing).

One such occasion might be the birthday of British radio and television pioneer Lancelot Sieveking, born, as the Internet Movie Database informed me, on this day, 19 March, back in 1896. Sure, I had come across his name during my research for Etherized Victorians; but, concentrating my efforts on American radio dramatics, I had conveniently overlooked Sieveking’s accomplishments. Even the folks over at the Database have yet to catch up with this man of all media; at least, his death (back in 1972) has thus far escaped them.

It is no overstatement to say that the author of The Stuff of Radio (1934) is a neglected figure today; his name has most recently been dropped in connection to Disney’s first entry in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Narnia author C. S. Lewis had approved of Sieveking’s radio dramatization but dismissed the idea of a film adaptation. During the first season of BBC2 television’s Oxford English Dictionary challenge Balderdash and Piffle, there was some debate about the origin of the phrase “back to square one,” which was argued to lie in an eight-squared drawing meant to assist BBC radio’s football commentators back in 1927. That design, as it turns out, was Sieveking’s.

Fellow BBC radio drama producer Val Gielgud had this to say about the “not altogether fortunate” Sieveking: “He was perhaps over much influenced during his most impressionable years by G. K. Chesterton, and by the theory of that master of paradox that because some things were better looked at inside out or upside down such a viewpoint should invariably be adopted. Talented and imaginative beyond the ordinary, his eyes gazing towards distant horizons, he was liable to neglect what lay immediately before his feet.”

In other words, Sieveking was an audio-visionary, a trier of radiogenic techniques at whom actors and colleagues would “gaze with a certain dumb bewilderment” as he “exhorted them to play ‘in a deep-green mood,’ or spoke with fluent enthusiasm of ‘playing the dramatic-control panel, as one plays an organ.'” There was not much use for such an one in radio. As Gielgud put it, even British radio broadcasting, “provided him with no laboratory in which experiments could be carried out.”

In 1930, when radio drama was still in its protracted infancy (despite earlier trials-by-air like the aforementioned “Comedy of Danger”), Sieveking found a “laboratory” in the still newer medium of television. He collaborated with Gielgud in bringing to British television “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth.” An adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s short play L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (1923), it aired on 14 July 1930.

Little remains today of Sieveking’s work in sound and images, aside from its blueprints—long-out-of-print scripts and theories. Now, I live in a town with a five-million-volume copyright library (which celebrated its 100th anniversary today); but for a snippet of sound, you might as well saunter over to tvdawn, where you may hear Sieveking’s spoken introduction to “The Man.”

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Of “Past and Paste”: Rereading (Myself on) Mildred Pierce

The generally reliable and greatly appreciated Blogger has been given me quite a headache these past twenty-four hours. I was unable to upload any images; and although this journal is primarily concerned with the spoken word, I was irritated to the point of name-calling it a day. In the meantime, I dug up one of my undergraduate essays on Mildred Pierce, one of the movies (listed, right) I screened again recently. Say, how many motion pictures do you consume over a twelve-month period? That is the question I am posing in my current poll (a feature I resurrect herewith).

As if to account for time spent, whether well or otherwise, I try to keep track of what I experience, see or do. Sometimes, only the title of a movie remains; I remembered very little about Prick Up Your Ears, for instance, a copy of which I picked up a few weeks ago, some two decades after watching it during its initial release (in Germany, mind you). Back then, the fact that playwright Joe Orton, whose life is the subject of Frears’s biopic, began his short career by submitting a radio play to the BBC would not have meant much to me. About what the film did mean to me my diary is disappointingly mum, aside from the rather astonishing remark that I deemed it enjoyable. While I tend to summon up feelings far better than facts, my initial impressions were beyond recall.

Not so with Michael Curtiz’s crowd-pleasing gem, about which I once penned a trifle titled “The Loathsome Scent of Low Descent: Of Past and Paste in Mildred Pierce.” In it, I comment, without much originality, on the role of the “past, its influence and irrevocability,” in this shadow play of “a mother’s struggle to shed her past in order to secure the happiness of her daughter.” The opening credits, “washed ashore and wiped away by the surf,” suggest that the “past, though carefully concealed, may suddenly resurface, and that time itself, like the tides of the sea, is an element beyond our control.”

Since I require something more stimulating to enter into an argument with anyone, including myself, I pricked up my ears instead and took on the 24 June 1954 Lux Radio Theater adaptation starring Claire Trevor, in the title role originated by Joan Crawford, and Crawford’s co-star Zachary Scott as Monte. In an earlier Lux broadcast, Rosalind Russell had impersonated the fierce Mrs. Pierce, Academy Award-winning Ms. Crawford having been (as Louella Parsons reminded me) a less-than-confident radio performer (her notorious Christmas special notwithstanding).

The final screenplay for Mildred Pierce was written by one of radio’s better writers, Ranald MacDougall (previously mentioned here). Yet little of Curtiz’s noirish vision, James M. Cain’s rags-to-wretchedness design, or MacDougall’s smart revision remains in Sandy Barnett’s audio version, which not only cleans up Veda’s act (by refraining from mentioning her feigned pregnancy) but sidelines the central figure of her mother by opening with a dramatization of Wally’s arrest at the beach house rather than Monte’s call of “Mildred,” the dying word of a murder victim that implicates the named one from the get-go.

Since we are not encouraged to think of her as a suspect (her suicide attempt is not even mentioned), Mildred’s subsequent storytelling loses much of its ambiguity. From her reaction to the police inspector, the listener senses that she is uneasy about the fact that her first husband is the prime suspect; but it is unclear whether her narrative is designed to shelter him (or anyone else). Without those scenes at the beach house and the pier, there is little reason to distrust Mildred, who comes across here as a hard-working, suffering parent abandoned by her husband and stuck with an ungrateful child.

The radio adaptation seems determined to take literally the famous tagline of the movie—”don’t tell anyone what she did”—by keeping quiet about what Mildred might have done and suggesting that she didn’t do much at all aside from baking pies to do well by ne’er-do-well Veda. Lux sure got the stains out of Mildred’s past.

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That Box in the Corner: Are You Still Watching?

Well, there it stands gathering dust in the corner. Our television set, I mean. It’s not one of those svelte (or puny) supermodels, mind you, but the burly variety that reminds you of all the weight you put on sitting in front of it. An elephant in the room, you might say, taking up space instead of demanding—let alone warranting—much of my time. During the last few weeks, while our phone line was down and I had no access to the internet, I came to rely on it again, for company and up-to-date news; but it only confirmed what I already knew: television as I grew up with and was raised by it (posing, as I am here in front of my old black-and-white set) is dead.

Sure, Wednesday is Desperate Housewives day here in the United Kingdom (the only television serial I follow regularly and with pleasure); but I rarely sit through an episode while it actually airs. Since it is canned entertainment anyway, there is no need to be subjected to the commercials that once sustained broadcasting but now seem largely responsible for the demise of the medium. These days, you might as well wait and pay handsomely for the DVD box set, consumer reasoning that Channel Four now attempts to counter by selling online the expensive programs they purchased overseas.

Live (or almost live) entertainment still attracts millions of viewers. Shows like American Idol (which is shown here on Fridays, in an edited, spin-throughable omnibus version hosted by the pretty if pretty superfluous Cat Deeley) are undoubtedly popular with advertisers since their find-out-after-the-break cliffhanger design very nearly succeeds in gluing you to the tube. To be given a chance to watch even the inconsequential happen as it unfolds is a shrewd exploitation of our longing for immediacy, for being in the (k)now. To some, like me, a yearning for community might be an even greater pull; but I suspect that the on-demand culture and its manufacturing of exclusivity has done much to kill the democratic urge of communal watching.

While cut off from the web, I even resorted to watching Fox news—the ambassadorial embarrassment responsible for giving Europe wrong ideas about an imperialist, see-if-I-care America—just to get that old feeling of being right there (however much to the right there) with the rest of the Western world or some sizeable portion thereof. It is the sense of belonging I just don’t experience fishing for clips on YouTube. As much as I, in the connective failure that is broadcastellan, go on about the wonders of old-time radio (the kind of live entertainment that was compromised by the advent of tape-recording), I do miss the old tube . . .