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On This Day in 1944: Jack Benny, Urging Americans to Keep Their Wartime Jobs, Catches Rochester Moonlighting in Allen’s Alley

Well, last night I finally sat down to watch the first two episodes of the BBC’s current fifteen-part adaptation of Bleak House. While I certainly miss Dickens’s omniscient narrator, the intricacies of the plot and the interweaving of destinies are effectively translated into swiftly edited images and bathetic cuts. Most characters are quite as I recalled them or imagined them to be, with the notable exception of Lady Dedlock, who comes across as rather too contemporary. Saints, sufferers, or scatterbrains, Dickens’s women are notoriously two-dimensional and are most in need of a revision to suit today’s audiences.

As a result, however, they are no longer Dickensian, and bear more resemblance to the far more compelling women in the fictions of Dickens’s fellow novelist and friend, Wilkie Collins. So, when I caught my first glimpse of the secret-harboring and quietly scheming Lady Dedlock as played, icy and aloof, by Gillian Anderson, I felt that she was a potential Collins heroine trapped in a Dickensian plot. I sensed this to be an odd mixture of the sentimental (Dickens) and the sensational (Collins), not unlike, say, a clash between the humor of Jack Benny and the wit of Fred Allen—which is just what American radio listeners experienced on this day, 29 October, in 1944.

For years, comedian Jack Benny and satirist Fred Allen (pictured above, in my own humble attempt at portraiture) engaged in a mock rivalry, acted out on their respective programs, in print, on stage and screen. It was a well-orchestrated multi-media sparring match, fought with insults, wisecracks, and violins, which did much to further the success of both performers.

On said evening, the Jack Benny Program, whose comedy was increasingly serial and situational, slipped quite comfortably into the format that was a defining feature of the Fred Allen Show,: the topical, topsy-survey world of Allen’s Alley. Each week, Allen asked the denizens of his fictional alley a “question of the day.” Benny’s most urgent question was which singing talent should become the featured entertainer on his weekly program. On his way to the NBC studios, Benny runs into Allen, who invites his rival to take a poll in his famed Alley, the “cross section of public opinion.”

Among those answering Benny’s question that night are the huffy, opinionated Mrs. Nussbaum, who offers little assistance by insisting that there is no talent greater than a certain John Charles Shapiro, a crooner performing at Goldberg’s Delicatessen, “by appointment only.” His rendition of “Was You Is or Couldn’t You Possibly Be My Baby” made her swoon like no Sinatra tune ever would.

Somewhat more helpful is her neighbor, the pompous poet Falstaff Openshaw.  After delivering a few of his choice verses (“The rose has gone from your cheeks darling, but your neck still looks like a stem” and “The Siamese twins are going screwy, one’s voting for Roosevelt, the other’s for Dewey”), Allen’s resident bard puts the reason for Benny’s difficulties into rhyme: “The reason you can’t get a singer, I’ll be frank, Mr. B., here is why: / A singer won’t just work for L-S-M-F-T [“Lucky Strikes means fine tobacco,” the slogan of Benny’s sponsor], you gotta pay M-O-N-E-Y.”

Allen and Benny are about to leave the Alley when the ode-toting Openshaw offers them a cup of tea. Whom did the two encounter in the poet’s abode but Benny’s butler, Rochester, who is supplementing his paltry salary by secretly churning out verse for Benny’s rival. Wit and humor blend well in this episode; escapism and reality, however, are once again at odds.

Having just caught one of his employees making some money on the side and having been unable to find a new regular for his program, Benny delivers a curtain speech in honor of Navy Day (27 October): “Our men are out there fighting while I’m talking to you now,” Benny addresses his audience, reminding them that “we here at home we must continue to back those men up by sticking to our wartime jobs and giving through the many channels at our disposal.”

Neither the stingy Benny nor his moonlighting valet Rochester were particularly good role models in that respect; but I’m sure their encounter in Allen’s Alley that night brightened the spirits in many a bleak house.

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That Sarong Way to Do It, Ms. Lamour; or, When Sound Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Eyes

Well, it was time to close the first broadcastellan poll. The question I asked was: “If you had to give up one of your five senses, which one would it be?” Here are the results (25 votes): Sight (12% / 3 votes); Hearing (12% / 3 votes); Touch (4% / 1 vote); Smell (40% / 10 votes); and Taste (16% / 4 votes). Since I always insist on the opportunity to question a question, rather than accepting it outright, I added the (to me) facetious “So what, I’ve got a sixth sense,” a way out taken four times (16% / 4 votes). As I said before, I chose to give up my sense of vision; but last night, when it came to choosing an anniversary to go on about, I was reminded of the havoc the sound of a voice can wreak on a vision of beauty. Dorothy Lamour’s, for instance.

On this day, 28 October, in 1948, Ms. Lamour was heard as host and star of the Sealtest Variety Theater, chatting with Jack Carson, singing a few chirpy tunes, and camping it up with Boris Karloff in a pre-Halloween sketch. Only a few days earlier, Karloff had been given a chance to prove his versatility to the American radio audience by playing the lead in an NBC University Theatre adaptation of H. G. Wells’s comic novel The History of Mr. Polly. Now he found himself reduced once more to parodying his monster image, even though his avuncular voice was not the least bit intimidating. Nor, for that matter, did the famous lady in the sarong sound to me anything like her screen image.

Coming across as an efficiently cheerful salesperson or a routine-hardened night club performer putting on a pair of comfortable shoes while waiting in line to cash her paycheck, Lamour did not get her timbre into temptress mode and, aside from a few charming if not always genuine laughs, made few efforts to enhance a clunky script littered with more or less appalling gags. Her voice sure took the G out of Glamour that night.

The “sarong formula” (mocked above in a 1942 Movie-Radio Guide cartoon by Jimmy Caborn), did not work on the air. Some screen sirens or Hollywood hunks are decidedly less rousing when forced to rely solely on their vocal chords to make us swoon or convince us to buy whatever product the radio show in which they starred was peddling.

Such a smelly chestnut of a radio show should overwhelm the sense of nostalgia lingering in anyone’s nostrils, I thought, and aired my listening disappointment in a new poll. Say, when would you rather be, if not today?

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On This Day in 1938: Broadcast “Air Raid” Assaults Like Sontag’s 9/11 Tirade

Sunlight and shadows across my
copy of MacLeish’s Air Raid

Well, only yesterday I wrote about the potentialities of broadcasting and blogging as means and modes of connecting with the world. Today I am going to mark the anniversary of an execrable “disconnect” by relating it to a disturbing episode in my life, a moment of outrage in a period of confusion and despair. Ready?

On this day, 27 October, in 1938, the Columbia Workshop laid an intellectual egg of such poor taste that I sometimes felt the only proper way of connecting to it would be to hurl it right back at its author, the American poet-pamphleteer Archibald MacLeish. The play produced by and broadcast over the US radio network CBS was “Air Raid,” an exercise in propagandist verse. Like “The War of the Worlds”, which aired a few days later over the same network, “Air Raid” entered the anti-fascist debate and commented on the political tensions then mounting in Europe by exploiting and fueling the anxieties of an American public divided between battle cries and isolationism. The nation’s enemies, such plays told in the abstract language to which pre-war radio playwrights were bound to adhere, were not quite so distant as to render their attacks futile.

In “Air Raid,” MacLeish went so far as to hold civilians whose lives were threatened or lost in fascist offensives responsible for their inaction. As in the previously discussed “Fall of the City,” the audience is taken to the scene of terror, listening in as carefree women, heedless of the warnings they receive, ar e going about their daily affairs until blown to bits by machine guns fired from above. The announcer, observing the raid from a secure post, reports and comments on the execution:

There’s the signal: the dip: they’ll
Dive: they’re ready to dive:
They’re steady: they’re heading down:
They’re dead on the town: they’re nosing:
They’re easing over: they’re over:
There they go: there they—

His coverage of the event is cut short by the stammering guns and the shrieking of women and ends in a boy’s calling of my name: “Harry! Harry! Harry!” I did not require such a prompt to feel personally offended.

MacLeish intellectualizing of terror and patronizing of the terrorized is the kind of disastrous argument that reminded me of Susan Sontag’s words shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center. In an article published in the New Yorker, Sontag lamented the “disconnect” between the “monstrous dose of reality” that was 9/11 and the “self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators.”

Sontag opined that the “voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public,” a public lacking in “historical awareness” and subjected instead to the “psychotherapy” of “confidence-building and grief management.” Arguing the insistence on America’s strength to be not “entirely consoling,” Sontag concluded: “Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.”

In retrospect, I find these words unremarkable; they have been uttered many times since. Living through the terror of those days in New York City, however, I was infuriated by such ill-timed chastising from afar (Sontag lived in Paris at the time). I sat down and cried and wrote a lengthy response to let out my anger, shared with the German friend who brought Sontag’s commentary to my attention:

Sie mag aus der Ferne spotten; sähe, fühlte, spürte sie die Stadt würde sie den New Yorkern kaum “Dummheit” vorwerfen.  Wenn ich ihr aus der Ferne auch weder Feigheit noch Dummheit unterstellen will, so muss ich doch feststellen, dass Abstand auch eine Freiheit von Anstand bedeuten kann.  Sontag schrieb einmal ein erfolgreiches, vielzitiertes, und feines Buch mit dem Titel Against Interpretation.  Sie täte gut daran, sich gegen ihre eigenen ‘Interpretationen’ zu sträuben.

In essence, I argued that Sontag should heed the words that formed the title of her book Against Interpretation, that she should have reserved her distant and distancing intellectualizing and her attacks on the supposedly infantile public and the media that pampered it for a period in which a bewildered public was more likely to stomach further humiliation and to respond with a kindness and dignity lacking in Sontag’s words to the unwise.

Attacking both the medium it employs and the masses it engages (that is, attempting to appeal to the latter by questioning the former), MacLeish’s “Air Raid,” like Sontag’s tirade, is a prime example of how not to connect.

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On This Day in 1947: Fred Allen Drops a Name

Well, it has been over five months now since I launched broadcastellan and began to broadcast my assorted musings to a potentially vast if largely abstract public. I am still doing what I set out to do, which is to dig up discarded pieces of western popular culture and return what has been drowned in or washed away by the busy mainstream of commerce to the multitude that owns and defines the popular.

The first principle of popularity, after all, is presence; and even though universal accessibility alone is no guarantor of prominence (a fact to which my humble efforts are mute testimony), there’s nothing like a blog to keep alive what might otherwise rot in some cranial nook or linger in the obscurity of a private library.

My awareness of the promotional opportunities within the web notwithstanding, I have had to learn—and am learning still—that a blog is not merely a medium but a mode of communicating, a way of writing and sharing that has qualities distinct from other forms of publishing and follows different sets of conventions. So, like radio comedian Fred Allen, I would like to acknowledge a few of the individuals who have influenced the evolution of broadcastellan.

Where does Fred Allen fit into all this? Not that I need any particular reason or pretext to drop his name. Namedropping! That’s it. On this day, October 26, in 1947, Allen mentioned one of his former writers, one of those nameless if rather well remunerated gagmen of radio. That man was novelist Herman Wouk, who had just given up writing for Allen.

With his first novel in print (a Book-of-the-Month Club recommendation, no less), Wouk was ready to announce his retirement from broadcasting. He did just that in an article that appeared in the November issue of the magazine ’47, as Allen and partner Portland Hoffa told their audience in their joke routine at the beginning of the Fred Allen Show.

When I heard this remark, I went in search of the article, found it, and found it quite interesting, too. This is what bloggers do, I realized at last. They not only post and recycle material, but share and comment by linking and tagging, by renting their blogs and surfing for credits, thereby contributing to the dissemination of thought while all along promoting themselves and others. Like today’s blogger, the pioneers of radio had to learn that the medium is not just a distribution apparatus but a distributive art.

So, I am no longer posting a series of essays. I have begun to open up the discourse, to make my blog more interactive. I no longer hide behind “The Magnificent Montague,” and, having quietly dropped my nominal cloak now feel at ease writing and mingling in the forum without donning such disguises. I am more comfortable now leaving comments on other sites, always, I hope in the spirit of sharing rather than blatant self-promotion.

I have edited my writing after receiving comments from Jim Widner, the host of Radio Days, for instance. I have added a reader poll (an idea I got from Brent McKee’s site) and have made attempts to encourage participation (something I noticed being done with some success by Cavan Terrill). Like Gertrude Stein, “I am writing for myself and strangers.” I am also writing with strangers and am being rewritten by them.

So, the initial confusion about blogging is pretty much gone and I continue this interactivity with greater confidence and considerable joy. Say, how interactive are you?

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On This Day in 1993: Exit of Vincent Price Delayed by Diary Entry

Like Gwendolen Fairfax, I am wont to consult my diary. After all, “one should always have something sensational to read.” I will no doubt hear this line again very soon, when the Ridiculusmus production of The Importance of Being Earnest comes to town on 7 November. But I digress. Aside from being compelled by a desire to revel in the “sensational,” I stuck my nose into one of my old journals today to find out whether I had taken any notice of the passing of Vincent Price back on 25 October 1993. Though not particularly impressed by his acting in 1950s or ’60s horror films, I have always had an eager ear for the tone of his sophisticated, suave, and slightly sardonic voice.

Now, according to the notoriously selective and inaccurate accounts of the world’s goings-on and departures I scribbled into a series of black volumes over a decade prior to this my first public and somewhat more thoroughly fact-checked journal, Price gave up the ghost on 26 October 1993. My delayed response (or flawed chronicling) led me to remark upon the “uncannily” timed television broadcast of a Price biography on that day, a documentary that was part of the regular schedule, rather than one of those hastily squeezed in tributes. It was as if the obituary had been anticipated by some clairvoyant programming executive in the broadcasting house on haunted hill. Accuracy can be so soberingly unromantic.

Not so an exposure to Mr. Price’s voice. To this day, the mannered speech of the man who laughed to the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” rings in my ears whenever I am in the mood for another adventure of The Saint; and, as this item in the broadcastellan archive attests, I am not infrequently drawn that way. The father of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, may have thought little of Price’s interpretation of Simon Templar (alias the “Robin Hood of modern crime”) and, aside from collecting royalties, had no involvement in the radio series when Price took over the role. It is still Price (rather than, say, Roger Moore) whom I identify most with the part.

These days, UK television viewers may take a gander at George Sanders in the Saint movies of the late 1930s (The Saint Strikes Back, for instance, was shown only last Sunday); but I keep missing them. No matter. In case you have checked out (or, thank you very much, participated in) the first broadcastellan poll and wondered who would rather give up the ocular than the olfactory sense—one of those benighted creatures was yours truly.

So, now that I have the calendric confusions cleared up and my senses prioritized, I shall recall Price to life tonight by listening to another one of his many radio performances. Say, which voice has been haunting you lately?

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Loving Mysteries: Between the Martin Mansion and Bleak House

Well, I am still hoping other internet tourists will join me in rediscovering I Love a Mystery beginning this Halloween (see previous post for details). I know, it might seem sacrilegious to ignore the anniversary of that most famous of all Halloween pranks, “The War of the Worlds,” in favor of Carlton E. Morse’s serial thriller. Actually, “The War” was waged on the night before Halloween (30 October 1938), which means that I can listen forward without remorse to reviewing the first installment of “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a neo-gothic mystery starring Mercedes McCambridge (as the tortured Charity Martin) and Tony Randall (as Reggie Yorke, one of the three intrepid investigators, pictured above, who are called upon to examine the Martin’s rotten family tree). So, consider tuning in and coming along for the ride.

In the meantime, I am also looking forward to the new adaptation of Bleak House starring Charles Dance (as Mr. Tulkinghorn) and Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock). It has been nearly ten years since last I read the novel, my favorite among Dickens’s works; so perhaps I won’t notice the liberties taken with the original. Beginning this Thursday on BBC One, the complex melodrama will be played out in fifteen parts, just like Morse’s “Thing.”

Not that the comparisons end there. There are deadly secrets, the proverbial skeletons in the closet, and a curse on both of those decidedly bleak houses, the Martin mansion and Dickens’s eponymous edifice. The overused label “soap opera” has been attached to the BBC production, along with other disclaimers, such as the introduction of new characters; whatever the terminology, serialization and bowdlerization are quite in keeping with Victorian practices.

I might put aside my copy of Don Quixote for the duration and reread Bleak House, now that the days are getting shorter and the winds are a-wuthering, if only to re-encounter the carefree Harold Skimpole and the careworn Richard Carstone, two characters of whom I once fancied myself some kind of composite.

Perhaps I’m someone else among the dramatis personae now; that’s one of the pleasures of rereading. As long as I won’t turn into Mr. Turveydrop. . . . Say, what kind of Dickensian character are you?

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An Invitation to Murder by Installments!

Last night I was in on Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936). If somewhat deficient in atmosphere, this old whodunit has many of the key elements of early twentieth-century mystery melodramas like Seven Keys to Baldpate and The Cat and the Canary. Let’s see: there’s a large family fortune and plenty of heirs who’d like to lay claim to it; bogus visitations from the realm the dead; murders ingeniously plotted but thwarted; and a wealthy elderly matriarch in a neo-gothic mansion who is in desperate need of a detective to sort out the family closet.

Come to think of it, that sounds rather a lot like “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” one of the sequences of Carlton E. Morse’s radio thriller I Love a Mystery. Now, there’s a serial I wouldn’t mind reviewing . . . again.As I said previously, I don’t have anything against radio serials, if only they did not insist on such a commitment on my part to be intelligible, let alone enjoyable. Of course, I Love a Mystery is not one of those open-ended daytime serials that go anywhere, and nowhere fast. By the way, I did follow up what happened to Mrs. Goldberg and her chicken venture, but still couldn’t make much sense of the not-going-ons over at Molly’s house.

Morse’s storytelling is byzantine, to be sure, but it is not interminable; each cliffhanger takes you closer to a solution, even though the inevitable conclusion is never as satisfying as our journey and gradual advancement toward it.

On 31 October 1949, the East Coast revival of I Love a Mystery began its investigation of “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” For fifteen nights, listeners were invited to follow the bizarre adventures of three soldiers of fortune—Jack, Doc and Reggie—in an old house whose closets were filled with the proverbial family skeletons. Even though I devoted a lengthy chapter to it in my dissertation, I have never enjoyed this serial as it was offered to the radio audience—as a mystery whose solution is purchased on an installment plan.

So, inspired by the shared viewings going on over at the Charlie Chan Family Home, I am proposing a shared listening experience of “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” It would require little more than ten minutes each day to listen to each of the fifteen episodes (available online here) and a few minutes more to exchange ideas about it on this blog. If you miss an episode, you can always catch up with the convoluted plot here. I will even continue my reviews while away for a visit to my former home, the Big Apple.

Anyway, let me know whether you accept my invitation to go in search of the mysterious “Thing,” starting this Halloween . . .

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On This Day in 1930: Old Sleuth Re-emerges in New Medium

Well, before taking a moment to give my page a bit of a makeover and getting all gimmicky by setting up a poll to encourage reader participation (despite my own difficulties with such surveys), I tuned in again to BBC 4 last night and watched another fine British thriller: Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949). Sufficiently motivated by the experience, I promptly cast my vote at IMDb, which is something I am just getting into the habit of doing.

Obsession is told mainly from the perspective of the criminal, a jealous husband determined to do away with his wife’s lover; eventually, Scotland Yard is on his case, and the storytelling loses some of its focus as the inspector keeps calling and occasionally takes the camera along with him. Still, with its emphasis on the execution and prevention rather than the detection of a crime, Obsession is a psychological thriller as opposed to a whodunit, the genre revolutionized in the 1880s by Conan Doyle and his famed Sherlock Holmes stories.

I have always enjoyed a solid whodunit, even though I prefer them in print instead of visualized on the screen or dramatized for radio, as I explained previously. I nonetheless put aside my copy of Agatha Christie’s Poirot puzzler The Clocks to commemorate a milestone in radio mystery drama. It was on this day, 20 October, in 1930, that master detective Holmes and his sidekick-chronicler, the logic-deficient Dr. Watson solved their first mystery on the air.

The mystery, “The Speckled Band,” was a familiar one, to be sure, as was the actor who assumed the role of the brilliant if conceited armchair detective. The performer before the microphone that night was none other than William Gillette, who had not only played Holmes more than a thousand times before but had rewritten some of his adventures to create a stage melodrama that was to serve as his star vehicle for over three decades.

As a Theatre Magazine critic pointed out, Gillette “himself cut the radio score, arranged by Edith Meiser [. . .], directed his cast, and spoke into the microphone from the special glass-curtained stage of the National Broadcasting Company’s Times Square studio” atop the theater that had been “the scene of Gillette’s farewell return to the footlights” earlier that year.

Gillette was already in his late 70s and did not return to the microphone for subsequent episodes; but, being described by a New York Times reviewer as standing “erect and unbending” and as having a “clear, precise, vibrant” voice, the aged thespian was lured out of retirement now and again to play the part for several years longer, returning to the airwaves once more for the 18 November 1935 Lux Radio Theatre production of his stage success.

Holmes survived Gillette’s death in 1937 and continued for another decade to solve mysteries on US radio, even though he had to face plenty of competition on the blood-speckled bandwidths. Like the motion picture series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the Holmes adventures on the air also played an important role in home front motivation, endearing Americans to their at times veddy peculiar and snobby sounding allies in Britain. After the war, the British reclaimed Holmes and continued to dramatize his adventures on BBC radio.

Although I was not immediately taken by such pastiche, the American dramatizations eventually won me over with their charm. Retaining Watson as the narrator added much to the cozy atmosphere of these miniature mysteries; the banter between Holmes and his friend supplied the wit; and the thrills were not wanting either, as aforementioned writer-adaptor Meiser managed to keep the guessing game going despite the challenge of making the short plays intelligible by reducing the number of suspects and dropping fairly conspicuous hints.

So, as the sun is setting earlier or refuses to appear altogether on these gray autumn days, I will sit back more often to join Dr. Watson at his fireside, listening attentively to his tales of intrigue and murder. Just don’t call it an obsession . . .

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Loving (and Judging) Harold Lloyd

Well, thanks to a much needed and greatly appreciated contribution to our DVD library (courtesy of my nostalgic pal Danny), I had the good fortune of screening Harold Lloyd’s Movie Crazy (1932) last night. I know, Lloyd did not direct this film, but calling it Clyde Bruckman’s Movie Crazy hardly clarifies matters. In most cases, the ultimate and highest credit is given to the director; but just as often it rightly belongs to the actors, writers, or cinematographers who hold a film together and make it worth watching.

I have always preferred the middle-class milquetoast portrayed by Lloyd over the melancholy tramp created by Chaplin. Perhaps it is Chaplin’s ego that has shattered my belief in his sincerity. Perhaps, being partial to old-time radio, it irked me that Chaplin, unlike Lloyd, kept his eyes closed to broadcast drama. Perhaps, and more likely, it is easier for me to identify with Lloyd’s bespectacled fool coping with modern times than to ingest foolish spectacles steeped in pseudo-Dickensian treacle.

It is tiresome to explain one’s predilections. “What is there to say about what one loves except: I love it, and to keep on saying it?” This is how Roland Barthes expressed the difficulty of writing intelligently—and intelligibly—about our passions. I might flaunt my tastes yet by sharing some of my top-ten lists on this blog, whenever my fount of ideas dries out. Anyway, I decided to cast my vote for Movie Crazy over at the Internet Movie Database. My voting history is on public display for anyone registered at the IMDb.

So, how do I rate motion pictures? It sure is easier to review them than to determine how many stars (or thumbs up or rotten tomatoes) a film warrants (ten stars being the highest rating on IMDb, which I have given only once thus far, in recognition of this previously discussed masterpiece). Supposedly, we are to judge the entire picture, not some aspect of it. Am I to boost or lower a film’s overall ratings if I find it unfairly appraised? Am I to root for my favorite actress? And how do I rate a comedy on a melodrama day?

I have always had difficulties with such seemingly simple tasks as voting by numbers or grading by letters; for the same reason, I have done poorly when being put to the multiple choice test. I would rather share my thoughts about a work of art than declare my approval by adding numbers to a graph. Still, I am going to cast my vote, remembering Harold’s awkward courting of Mary and her alter ego (Constance Cummings, whom I had just seen in Blithe Spirit and, like Lloyd’s character, did not recognize in another role); bearing in mind a few slapstick routines that did not quite come off; recalling the superbly executed finale of the film; and unwilling to dismiss that I watched it with someone I love.

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On This Day in 1942: Orson Welles Lures Fred Allen into the Sewers

Last night, watching BBC 4, I was in for a cinematic treat: Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Cinematographically stunning and compellingly told, it is not unlike Reed’s best-known film, The Third Man, particularly in its investigation of that most dangerous game, the manhunt. Both films are 20th-century updates of novels like Caleb Williams or Les Miserables, stories of pursuit that challenge readers to distinguish between what is right and what is just, between law and ethics. The backdrops are often dark and seedy—the slums, dumps, the sewers. Contrasted with the dwellings of the elite, they serve as reminders that the dregs of society are not commoners but discarded ideals.

Welles found himself trapped in the sewers in both Les Miserables and The Third Man; and both stories were adapted for radio, starring Welles. On this day, 18 October, in 1942. Welles made another descent into the muck of humanity, this time to have his revenge on Fred Allen, the radio wit who had mocked him once too often.

The confrontation between Hugo’s Javert and Jean Valjean, that clash between ethics and law, was reduced to a mismatch of lowbrow and highbrow art as played out by two quintessential middlebrow artists, radio comedian Fred Allen and Shadow graduate-turned-thespian Wunderkind Orson Welles. Could radio and literature be reconciled? Could the airwaves be a fount of high culture?

Presumably, Welles had come to the realization that he was “getting along in years” and that he could “no longer carry on alone.” In search of a co-star “with a flair for the buskin,” he turned to Allen and offered him the role of Javert in Les Miserables.

As it turns out, however, Welles was not prepared to share the stage. He had to remain in charge of every aspect of the production and could not bring himself to letting Allen utter even a single line. Flattery soon turned into humiliation, and Allen began to protest:

ALLEN. Now look, Orson, I don’t want to hog the whole thing.  But in two acts all I’ve done so far is knock on a door and blow a whistle.  Now, after all, I’m an actor, not a soundman.  When do I get to read some lines?

WELLES.  The next scene is all yours, Fred. Your speech is the climax of the entire play.

ALLEN.  Well now we’re getting some place. What’s next?

WELLES.  In this final scene you trail me through the sewers of Paris.

ALLEN.  Oh, the sewers.

WELLES.  You finally corner me single-handed.  There we stand, face to face.  I have just a few words and then you speak.

ALLEN.  I speak.  Well, that sounds good.  Let’s go.

(Music: heavy, then fades.)

WELLES.  Mon Doo! Alone in this sewer! Trapped like a rat who nightly crawls through this hideous muck of the city.  The gloomy darkness, this narrow archway above my head, these two slimy corridor walls.  (Hysteric laugh.) Oh, but hark! That sloshing through the muck. Javert! At last you’ve cornered me, Javert! Don’t talk, Javert! Before you seal my doom, I would speak for the last time. You will never take Jean Valjean alive, Javert. (Laughs.)  The water in this sewer is rising, Javert.  I am six feet nine.  You, Javert, are five feet two.  The water rises, Javert.  There is no turning back.  The water! Higher, higher.  Now, Javert, you have Jean Valjean at your mercy.  Pronounce my doom.  Speak, Javert.  Speak.

ALLEN.  (Gargles.)

Thus, the wit of Fred Allen, radio’s smartest satirist, is drowned in a display of misguided aspirations. As I put it in Etherized Victorians, the promise of radio as a purveyor of great literature is “exposed as so much hogwash.” US radio artists were often called upon to ridicule that which neither sponsors nor network executives were willing to touch: so-called high art (including popular literature of the past that, like Hugo’s novel, had just enough patina to appear precious).

It was easier for producers and audiences alike to deride and dismiss as affected anything that might effectively challenge the status quo or the intellect. In the best games of pursuit, the lines between wrong and right become blurred; in the radio game, at its commercial best, the distinctions between what is wrong and right for the greater American public were always made with comforting clarity.