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On This Day in 1953: Business as Bloody Usual on the “gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world”

Well, Broadway is no longer the stuff of romance; having cleaned up its act in the dull spirit of corporate greed, it no longer is the “gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world,” as it was once eulogized in hard-boiled and slightly over-cooked prose on the US radio thriller series Broadway Is My Beat (1949-54). Still, since I am returning to the Big Apple next month, having just booked my flight, I am going to rekindle my own romance with Manhattan by following Detective Danny Clover on his beat somewhere between or around Times Square and Columbus Circle.

On this day, 14 October, in 1953, Clover walked once again past “the hawkers, the gawkers, the ‘hurry up’ boys and the ‘slow down’ girls” to find himself confronted with some suitably sordid business of jealousy and murder—the “Cora Lee” case.

It’s “party time” on East 63rd. The shrill laughter of a drunken woman and the breaking of glass tells us at once that this ain’t a black tie affair. College graduate Cora Lee is in hot water; anyway, her head’s in a tub filled with it. The young woman very nearly drowned, and the bruise on her head suggests that she didn’t take the dive on her own free will. Now, the woman who reported the incident resents being thought of as a suspect. “You’re a stinker,” she tells Clover’s assistant. “And that’s the word I use in mixed company.” Cora comes to, eventually; but everyone around her, including her husband and her father, is too drunk to be of any use to her or the police.

A few days later, the “wild dame” celebrates her recovery with a few drinks in the company of husband and friends, party people who keep living it up while Cora is stretched out dead on the floor with a knife in her heart. Good-natured bunch, ain’t it?

“I was in college with Cora,” one of the drunken guests, a gal with feathers in her hair, tells Clover without a hint of compassion. “I knew her for two weeks, and I said to myself: there’s a classmate who’ll never see thirty. One way or another, she’ll never make it.” The deceased, she claims, was “the most, jealous, vicious, detestable, beautiful girl in the class of 1950.” Who might have killed her? Well, “anyone with a knife,” she sneers, especially the young woman who is so eager now to take Cora’s place as hostess of the merry gathering, offering highballs and sandwiches to the detective while threatening to do “damage” with her “high heel” if the feathered one doesn’t keep her mouth shut.

With all that talk going on, there isn’t time left to weave much of a mystery; but the thrill of listening to realist crime dramas like Gangbusters, Dragnet, or Twenty-first Precinct is not generated by suspense or surprise anyway. The criminal, whoever it happens to be, will in all likelihood be apprehended somehow. The excitement lies in going along for the ride, in the privilege of being in the presence of criminal elements, of witnessing the tawdry and treacherous, the vile and violent from a comforting distance.

With a dash of purple prose and a helping of humor, Broadway Is My Beat is as gaudy and violent as the formerly “lonesomest” mile it evokes in word and sound. As white as the Great White Way is nowadays, you just won’t get that kind of kick out of strolling past the Olive Garden or watching the out-of-towners going around on the Toys “R” Us ferris wheel. Let Detective Clover take you on a tour . . .

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Hoping for More Scandal; or, When the “head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique”

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the pleasure of being lectured on sentiment and sensationalism in one of the back rows of The School for Scandal. It was a lesson conveyed with great wit and delivered without frills by the Northern Broadsides theatre company. I didn’t expect Sheridan’s characters to gossip in marked northern accents and thought Maria was less of a prize now that she was shouting just as angrily as the “odious” and “disagreeable” people around her. Generally, however, the coarseness of tongue lent realism to the idle chatter of the upper crust.

The Radio Guild players in 1930

Gone was the Cowardian disparity between elocution and vulgarity, between high class and mean instincts. Rather than being vocal acrobats in a Wildean vein, the graduates of this School were crass, brazen, and dangerous mudslingers. Only Joseph Surface was given the slick treatment in voice and appearance, a suitable gloss to reflect his falsehood. What might an American radio production do with such caricatures, I wondered, and went in pursuit of more Scandal on the air.

When aiming at respectability, US radio of the 1930s and 1940s not infrequently availed itself of British drama. Soap operas were for the kitchen—but Shakespeare and Pinero were for the parlor. As I put it in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio, Sir Benjamin Backbite’s remark about Mrs. Evergreen is an apt comment on US radio drama, a novel form of production that often exhausted itself in re-productions.”

“[W]hen she has finished her face,” Sir Benjamin quips, the unseen Mrs. Evergreen “joins it on so badly to her neck, that she looks like a mended statue, in which the connoisseur may see at once that the head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique.” Now, radio drama truly was a “mended statue,” a patched-up art form that rarely resembled the genuine article it tried to copy.

In radio, the trunk (the smart console) was modern, but the head, the boardroom of executives in charge of programming, was decidedly “antique,” that is, backward-looking rather than avant-garde when it came to defining wholesome or commercially viable entertainment. To be sure, in the case of Pre-Victorian plays like Sheridan’s Scandal, mending the statue might have required some whitewash to tone down its display of adultery and cover up its hints of abortion.

Unfortunately, the productions of Scandal as heard on the Radio Guild program are no longer extant, since no transcription have been preserved or recovered. Indeed, nearly the entire series seems to have been destroyed, an act as scandalous as the reputation of Sheridan’s characters. This is all the more lamentable considering that the Radio Guild (pictured above, anno 1930) was the first major theater anthology on US network radio. Beginning in 1929, just days after Wall Street laid its infamous egg, it brought free theater into the homes of millions, producing plays ranging from Shakespeare to Wilde, from Goldsmith to Boucicault.

Even if its producers kept their heads mainly in antique trunks, Radio Guild surely sounds like a statue worth mending, if only its pieces had been scattered instead of obliterated. So, if you find a fragment, please fling it my way.

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On This Day in 1937: “Saints preserve us,” Here Comes Mr. Keen

“So shall my theme as far contrasted be, / As saints by fiends, or hymns by calumny.” Well, pardon me, but I just attended a touring production of Sheridan’s comedy The School for Scandal (1777), notes on which will have to wait until tomorrow—because tonight, I feel compelled to acknowledge, however half-heartedly, the anniversary of a radio program preposterous enough to be deemed food for foolery by noted on-air lampoonists Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding (pictured).

I am referring, of course, to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, whose melodramatic excesses—with its strongly contrasted “saints” and “fiends”—were first endured on this day, 12 October, in 1937.

The Mr. Keen parody, “Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons” became a recurring sketch on the Bob and Ray program.

Sure, radio drama chronicler Jim Cox has devoted an entire volume to the story of the “kindly old investigator”; and considering that the series managed to stay on the air for eighteen years, from 1937 to 1955, it must have had its unfair share of followers.

Each week, Mr. Keen was grandiloquently and misleadingly announced as “one of the most famous characters of American fiction” in “one of radio’s most thrilling dramas.” Take that fiction and debunk it, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Nero Wolfe!

The series’ musical theme—the incongruously sentimental strains of “Some Day I’ll Find You,” appropriated from Noel Coward’s Private Lives (1930)—always struck me as a hollow promise at best. Find happiness already, old tracer, and settle down with a woman past the age of … 35! Call it Helen Trent’s last case.

Not that making his last find resulted in Mr. Keen’s retirement. “When Mr. Keen first came on the air as a fifteen-minute evening mystery ‘thriller,” Ohio State University graduate student Charlene Betty Hext observed in a 1949 MA thesis devoted to “Thriller Drama on American Radio Networks,” “he was a tracer of lost persons.

In fact,” Hext pointed out, Mr. Keen remained a tracer of lost persons when the program became a once-a-week half-hour show in the fall season of 1945.” It was a few years after the Second World War, a period when the missing persons theme reverberated particularly, that the plots began to deviate from the premise and Mr. Keen began to solve any case not already handled by the sleuths of the networks’ growing number of competing radio mysteries.  “The present program still uses the old theme music,” Hext noted, and the “announcer regularly refers to Mr. Keen as ‘the kindly old tracer’; but the plots of the radio program bear no witness to that effect.”

Whether retrieving the missing or apprehending miscreants, Mr. Keen’s methods of deduction rarely changed, and they were not of the most sophisticated sort. As Cox points out in his Radio Crime Fighters, Keen’s cases were poorly constructed, their solution relying on “minimal logic,” on coincidence and slip-of-the-tongue-shodness.

None of this bothered me as much as the condescension with which the sanctimonious hero with the soothingly avuncular voice interfered in the lives of those who sought his help or came under his scrutiny. He was an officious, moralizing hound who went about what was often none of his business at all.

I am not usually one to embrace camp, which, to me, is a cavalier act of willful misreading; but I was tickled all the same when a recreation of a Mr. Keen episode—”The Case of the Inherited Fear”—was performed and greeted with refreshing irreverence at the 25th Friends of Old Time Radio Convention in Newark, New Jersey.

The case involved a young naval officer who, as the narrator puts it, “disappeared after he’d been discharged from the navy for medical causes. He was obsessed with a fear of being in confined places.” I could identify with the runaway right away, for what could be more stifling than being clap-trapped by old Mr. Keen?

The unfailing tracer manages to get hold of the claustrophobe in a mining town in Pennsylvania, engaged in an attempt to overcome his anxieties by toiling underground. Just when he is about to make his first descent, an alarm is sounded and his efforts are temporarily thwarted: a cave-in has occurred, endangering the lives of 140 miners.

Keen “seized the occasion” to lecture the fearful man, insisting that he go below to rescue the workers. The old fellow single-handedly (or, make that, single-mindedly) unlocks the mystery of the ex-officer’s phobia by unearthing its true cause: “Your fear is nothing more than a symbol in your subconscious mind, a symbol of what happened the day you were locked in the closet with your mother.”

Such a mother lode of pop-psychological drivel could only trickle from the busy pen of radio melodramatists Anne and Frank Hummert, who decreed that, thanks to Mr. Keen, sanity be restored and social ties mended as the thoroughly rehabilitated young man rushes to the aid of the miners with the “same calm, untroubled expression” his mother has when she turns to her bible.

“Saints preserve us,” indeed, as Mr. Keen’s stereotypical Irish-American sidekick Mike Clancy would put it. The aged tracer had done it again, dispensing another dose of sentiment to which suspense would have been a welcome antidote, or at least a measure of temporary relief.

If only the tracer had gotten stuck in a closet that even the most tenacious grip of nostalgia could not help to unlock and that few friends of Fibber McGee would ever bother to reopen.

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A “revoltin’ development” in The Life of Riley

Complaints about the excesses and irresponsibility of broadcasting are nearly as old as the first broken crystal set. During World War II, producers and sponsors of US radio entertainment were obliged to exercise some restraint for the sake of the ostensibly common good by making room for public service announcements and planting overt propagandistic messages into their melodramatic or comic offerings. Not long after VJ Day, though, it was high time for all in the radio game to accelerate profits and squeeze the most out of a medium that was rumored by some to be obsolete within a few years.

Radio was getting shriller, more vulgar, more profligate by the advertising minute, critics lamented in denunciations no less crass than the purportedly noisome programming. In September 1947, NBC made a token gesture in response to such bad press, half-heartedly vowing to ban thrillers from its early evening line-up. That did not stop NBC censors from permitting a gun to end up in an infant’s mouth, as the man living the Life of Riley (starring William Bender in the title role) turned babysitter in arms on this day, 11 October, in 1947.

“Now we’re in for a crime wave,” the father of Riley’s wife Peg declared when hearing the news about young Chester’s plan to become a copper. The story of this doomed undertaking unfolds in retrospect, as Peg tries to set the record straight for the benefit of a dinner guest who thinks about joining the police force after hearing Riley boast about his past exploits. Not only was Riley incapable of preventing a robbery in the store of Peg’s father, but downright criminal in his community disservice.

As ear-witnesses of Riley’s night beat, we follow the eager rookie as he picks up a few suspicious noises. The first is merely the sound of his own flatfeet on the pavement; but when he hears the bawling and choking of an infant, he decides to put his misplaced authority to some use. Entering the home from whence the wailings wafted, Riley finds himself in charge of a neglected baby. “No, now, now. You mustn’t touch my badge. It will stick you. We don’t want you to get hurt,” he gently admonishes the little one. “Oh, you want something to play with? Well, here. You play with this. Riley-Wiley’s nice pretty gun.”

At this point you can hear the women in the studio audience gasp and wriggle uneasily in their seats. Is this a laughing matter? Should Riley—or the producers of this show—get away with such behavior? “Aww, look at the cute little fellow, puttin’ the barrel in his mouth. He thinks it’s a bottle.” It is a disturbing moment that lasts just a little too long to be ignored, let alone tolerated. “Mustn’t pull the trigger,” Riley keeps cooing, “It’s loaded.” Those words, followed by a burglar alarm going off next door, rouse the doting gun-father and put an end to this disquieting episode.

Riley is forced to surrender his badge in the end and continues his bumbling search for a “permanent position”; only his friend Digby O’Dell, the undertaker, can “guarantee” his ultimate success in the matter. “I generally hit the nail on the head,” brags the morbid pal. Riley is tired of having dirt thrown in his face; but O’Dell assures him that it “happens to everyone, sooner or later.” It happens to sitcoms, too, once their short supply of puerile humor gets a bit long in the tooth—and O’Dell seems to have uttered the gallows humor of overworked, underappreciated radio artists faced with a hostile takeover by television.

Well, I think I’ll saunter over to Duffy’s Tavern. The wit is not quite as dim there. Unless you know of a more cheerful watering hole to which I could kilocycle when I am inclined to while away the odd half-hour . . .

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Avian Flu Threats and “The Birds” on the Wireless

“What’s on the wireless?” he said. “About the birds,” she said. “It’s not only here, it’s everywhere. In London, all over the country. Something has happened to the birds.”—Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952).

Lately I have been eyeing our bird feeder with considerable apprehension. Not because I am anticipating some sort of Tippi Hedren incident while taking care of my feathered charge, but because of the recent news about the deadly avian flu that has been spreading in the east. Some time ago, a UN health official warned that a pandemic “could happen at any time” and might “kill between 5 and 150 million people.” Today, the EU decided to “ban all Turkish live bird and feather imports,” after as many as sixty people had succumbed to the disease in Turkey and Romania. Should I banish the feeder from its prominent spot to some remote corner of the garden? Should I stop treating the local tits and finches to their daily allowance of choice peanuts? Back when Daphne du Maurier conjured up ornithological horrors with her short story “The Birds,” at least, the threat was posed by bills and beaks instead of bacteria.

Long before Alfred Hitchcock trained them for his big-screen spectacular, “The Birds” came to US radio in two noteworthy productions by the Lux Radio Theater (20 July 1953) and Escape (10 July 1954). Unlike Hitchcock’s thriller, both radio versions were remarkably faithful to du Maurier’s simple tale of (wo)man versus nature. The 1953 production, starring Herbert Marshall, was probably one of the most imaginatively soundstaged melodramas ever to be presented on the Lux program. The terror generated by an imaginary army of shrieking birds was a veritable tour de fowl in sound effects engineering. Even Marshall had to admit that he was “scarcely the star of the piece when you consider the gulls and the gannets. Villains that they were, they ran the whole show.”

The story of a family under attack in an avian air raid on a remote farmhouse was rendered more intense by the fact that the terrorized characters, like the listener at home, had only the radio to keep them updated to the minute about the world around them. In du Maurier’s “Birds,” tuning in became disquieting, the wireless a source of anxiety to a public dependent on and attuned to the comforting predictability of the precisely timed broadcast schedule:

. . . they’d been giving directions on the wireless.  People would be told what to do.  And now, in the midst of many problems, he realized that it was dance music only coming over the air.  Not Children’s Hour, as it should have been.  He glanced at the dial. Yes, they were on the Home Service all right.  Dance records.  He switched to the Light programme.  He knew the reason.  The usual programmes had been abandoned.  This only happened at exceptional times.  Elections, and such. . . .

At six o’clock the records ceased.  The time signal was given. . . .  Then the announcer spoke.  His voice was solemn, grave. . . .

“This is London,” he said, “A national Emergency was proclaimed at four o’clock this afternoon.  Measures are being taken to safeguard the lives and property of the population, but it must be understood that these are not easy to effect immediately, owing to the unforeseen and unparalleled nature of the present crisis. . . .  The population is asked to remain calm, and not to panic.  Owing to the exceptional nature of the emergency, there will be no further transmission from any broadcasting station until seven a.m. tomorrow.” 

They played the National Anthem.  Nothing more happened. . . .

Here, as in “The War of the Worlds” (the fictional account of a war won by airborne bacteria, no less), the silencing of the relied-upon media is even more alarming than the tumult and the shouting it carries into our homes. . . .

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Blogging Troubles and British Treats

I was all prepared to talk about today’s television and radio offerings in Britain, something I don’t often do. A new cable TV channel is being launched tomorrow: More4. Of chief interest to me, I have to admit, is that it will air Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, albeit yesterdaily. I’ve also been following this, the second season of the X Factor, which is the only British must-see for me this fall. I have commented on this improvement on American Idol (or Pop Idol) before in this journal. The at times tedious auditions are finally over and the contestants are going head to head each Saturday evening in live telecasts. I don’t have a favorite yet, other than judge and promoter Sharon Osborne. Last season, which I only caught midway (after moving here from the US), it was the wonderfully overwrought Rowetta who, it appears, has become somewhat of a queer icon.

What else was on yesterday? Well, there was Margaret Rutherford, again, on BBC 4, in the delightfully wacky high school farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. And then there was that atrocious documentary about Mae West last Friday on BBC 4 radio, part of a new series of talks celebrating Great Lives.

I have never heard a more off-the-mark impression of that glamorous dame, whose comic allure was so effectively evoked by the stage comedy Dirty Blonde.  The discussion about her conducted by the two supposed experts was tiresomely trite. I had hope for some clips from her films, or for a mention at least of Oboler’s “Adam and Eve” sketch, which got West banned from US radio. I mean, if you’re on radio, talk radio already!

I was prepared to expound on any of these viewing and listening experiences until I realized that many of my prior journal entries were littered with symbols and marks that rendered them, if not illegible, so at least highly unprofessional. It seems that my m-dashes—to which I am partial—are metastasizing into something ghastly once they are being left here for a few weeks.

How irksome this is to someone who knows little about html but makes an effort to adhering to the code of the standard English I cannot begin to express (I guess language fails me there, after all). I have made a few corrections, but some of the previous posts are still in shambles, I fear.

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On This Day in 1950: Our Miss Brooks Tackles Climate Change, Global Media, and Communism

Well, I know, today marks the anniversary of Ozzie and Harriet, whose on-the-air adventures were first heard on this day in 1944. Since a transcription of that broadcast is not known to be extant—and since I am not particularly partial to the exploits of the Nelson clan—I paid a visit to Walter and Harriet instead. High school sweethearts Walter Denton and Harriet Conklin, that is, and their peerless teacher, Our Miss Brooks. On this day, 8 October 1950, Miss Brooks got into quite a “tizzy”—”And I don’t tizz easily,” she assures us.

Being temporarily left in charge of Madison High School after its principal, the irascible Mr. Conklin, is delayed at home awaiting a furniture delivery, Miss Brooks finds herself dealing with a potentially serious crisis: a hurricane with winds up to 150 MPH is fast approaching. At least, that is the news according to the weather bulletin she has picked up with the radio receiver Walter built for his Electrical Shop class.

The bad weather has been on everyone’s mind that morning. “Our climatic conditions are undergoing a slow but steady change,” heartthrob biology teacher Mr. Boynton informed her earlier. “It’s something of a meteorological phenomenon, but do you realize that at this very moment the equatorial belt is slipping slowly southward?” “Well, I’ll turn my back. You tighten it up,” she permitted herself to quip. “It’s entirely possible that in the future our area may be engulfed in icy arctic weather,” Mr. Boynton continued his lecture. Of course, that would take about 10,000 years. “Good, I should be finished knitting my mittens by then,” Miss Brooks sighed in relief.

And now the weather report! “Mr. Boynton said our climate was changing, but this is ridiculous.” Or is it? As acting principal, Miss Brooks decides to follow the advisory and closes the school. Together with Walter, Harriet, and Mr. Boynton, she rushes to the principal’s home to make her report. In the fever of excitement, it escaped all who listened that the bulletin came from “downtown Bombay, India.”

A no-nonsense academic, Mr. Conklin is none too pleased about Miss Brooks’s rash actions, dismissing the reports about the advancing storm as “unmitigated jabberwocky.” After all, he reasons, “How could a hurricane possibly get this far into the United States?” “Smugglers?” Miss Brooks dares to suggest. Yet when Walter turns on the receiver he has brought along, the advisory hits home. Listeners are being told to “board up all windows,” preferably by “using bamboo shoots.”

Convinced by the urgency of the newsflash, Mr. Conklin agrees to take the precautions deemed necessary and the storm watchers are heard cheerfully and noisily chopping up his brand-new garden furniture.

It is only after the damage has been done that the advisories are beginning to sound rather peculiar: “lash down your ox carts,” the radio voice cautions. “Disperse all natives to the hills” and “Be sure to tether your elephants carefully.” The mistake becomes painfully obvious to all. Now it is no longer the hurricane that poses a threat to Our Miss Brooks. It is the frightful wrath of Osgood Conklin. She’d better watch after her priceless porcelain (pictured above)!

I doubt whether such a light-hearted approach to deadly weather phenomena would go over well these days. Now, as I confessed previously, I had a similar experience misreading a radio report about a natural disaster when I came across a fake bulletin on the Jeremy Vine Show. And, as is often the case, the prospect of such horrors heading one’s own way was taken in differently than reports about far-off disasters.

Miss Brooks expressed no concern either for the “natives” in India who hovered in their wind-whipped huts. The weather was really not perceived as that much of a national or global threat back then. In 1950, that threat, Westerners were made to believe, was communism.

Now, Miss Brooks had something to say about communism, or about the dangers faced by those who interpreted their granted freedoms too freely. When subjected to a particularly dull meteorological observation by Mr. Boynton, the hunk oblivious to her charms, she sneers: “You’ll never be investigated for that remark.”

In this one innocuous line, Our Miss Brooks writer Al Lewis communicates the fears of radio artists who found themselves subject to persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet as soon as she had hung up her schoolteacher costume, actress Eve Arden was asked to step before the microphone once more to address all those “concerned about the threat of communism.”

As if in fear of being “investigated for that [aforementioned] remark,” she urged listeners to join the “crusade for freedom” headed by General Lucius Clay and to support . . . Radio Free Europe.

What if Walter Denton had picked up Radio Free Europe on his receiver that rainy October morning? What if Mr. Conklin had dared to make his president responsibility for hurricane emergency mismanagement? What if . . . Well, no such controversy on Our Miss Brooks—but don’t call those dated radio sitcoms apolitical. Tune in some time, won’t you, for some unexpected lessons in American history.

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How the Blind Medium Immaterialized Coward’s Blithe Spirit

I guess I am still too wrapped up in US culture to have given British cinema its due. So, last weekend, while on a DVD shopping spree in Manchester, I made an attempt to rectify this cultural lopsidedness. Among my purchases was a copy of David Lean’s Blithe Spirit. Or is it more appropriate to call it Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, even after a noted director has . . . transubstantiated it? Generally, stage plays are treated like the brainchildren of their authors, while motion pictures are attributed to their directors. How many classic films could you trace back to their screenwriter parentage without resorting to the Internet Movie Database?

Anyway, it is an irksome inconsistency I grappled with when I needed to decide how to present and define radio plays for my dissertation (the aforementioned “Etherized Victorians”). Far from being a dead issue, the question arose anew when I followed up my screening of Blithe Spirit (1945) by taking in two radio disincarnations of Coward’s 1941 play.

The first one, soundstaged for Everything for the Boys on 16 May 1944, preceded the world premier of Lean’s feature by a year. Its adaptor was none other than Arch Oboler, probably the biggest name—and not the smallest ego—in US radio drama. Whether daring Americans to turn their Lights Out! or to put on a pair of 3D glasses, Oboler was hardly a subtle craftsman; he certainly was ill-suited to deliver the wit of Noel Coward.

Not surprisingly, Oboler’s rewrite of Blithe Spirit is a humorless affair, a tepid romance rather than a wicked romp. Presented to a live studio audience, the reconstituted comedy elicited only one laugh and a few mild chuckles; nor did it deserve more. The soundman was permitted to break a few dishes—flung by the two ghostly wives of the “hag-ridden” protagonist—but the damage was done largely by eraser, as hardly any of the play’s celebrated witticisms survived the adaptor’s indiscriminate airbrushing.

The challenge seems a formidable one when the play to be radio-readied involves ghosts visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, as well as the flesh and fancy of a decidedly material psychic. A filter microphone and a few hints from The Shadow will not suffice when wit is what is wanting.

Aside from a clipped and colorless script, the casting of Madame Arcati—the robust medium with a penchant for sandwiches, physical exercise, and dry Martinis—made matters worse: fluttery and frazzled, she lost much of her comic weight when portrayed by Edna Best. The Theatre Guild on the Air, at least, had access to the original New York cast. It also had the benefit of thirty-five extra minutes, and a script that retained much of the sparkle of Coward’s virtual sex comedy.

On 23 February 1947, nearly two years after Oboler’s inept dabbling in Coward’s froth, the Theater Guild revived Blithe Spirit with considerably greater success. It also broke a few dishes too many (to the audible delight of the studio audience to whom following the job of the soundmen had all the relish of an inside joke); but it kept both the spirit-flesh dynamics and civility-vulgarity dialectics relatively intact.

Sure, Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati fudges a few good lines, and the attempt to explain the fact that Elvira, the irreverent revenant, is visible only to the tormented male and not to his second wife is almost as clumsy as my prose here. Still, having missed the recent London revival of the play , this was a more than tolerable substitute.

However much it tickled me to watch the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford (captured above in an ethereal fade) as she throws herself into the role of Madame Arcati, the Theater Guild adaptation brought the wit of Coward’s lines home to me like no coating of Technicolor ever could.

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How Cecil B. DeMille Delivered Air Mail for Hawks’s Angels

Without being aware of it at first, I continued my engagement with the movies of 1939—Hollywood’s greatest year—last night, as I followed up a previously mentioned screening of Drums Along the Mohawk by projecting Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings onto my small big screen. Well, I must agree with cinema critic Ted Sennett, who held that the two leads were unfortunate miscasts. The suave Cary Grant (as flying ace Geoff Carter) does indeed cut a “faintly ludicrous figure, and Jean Arthur [as Bonnie Lee] is nobody’s idea of a showgirl.”

Such sensory obstacles and prejudices are immaterial, of course, when listening to a radio adaptation. So, today I improved upon my viewing experience by listening to the mercifully shorter Lux Radio Theatre production of Angels, which aired 29 May 1939. Clipped and satisfyingly swift, the air treatment added a touch of self-reflexivity to Bonnie’s exclamation “Say, things happen awful fast around here.”

Timing itself, by which I mean the date of the broadcast, is significant for two reasons. Unlike most Lux presentations, the airwaved “Angels” took flight shortly after the 15 May 1939 release of the motion picture upon which it was based. Coinciding with—and thus capable of promoting—Hawks’s aviation melodrama, it boasted no fewer than eight members of the original cast, including Grant, Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, silent screen star Richard Barthelmess, and newcomer Rita Hayworth. Even for the lavishly produced Lux program, such screen presence was unusually extravagant. Yet Lux‘s promotional services for Columbia Studios went even further.

As Cecil B. DeMille, host and ostensible producer of the program pointed out during the show’s second intermission, there was a “real-life parallel” between Hawks’s drama of airmail daredevilry in South America and a recent “history-making flight.” Two days prior to the broadcast, Pan Am inaugurated a regular airmail service to Europe. Its pilot, Captain Arthur E. LaPorte was called before the CBS microphone to tell of the “tremendous strides” in aviation: “We have at last conquered the Atlantic.” After all, the clipper crossed the ocean in a mere twenty-five hours.

Picked up by about twenty-five million listeners each week, Lux was capable of delivering its fan letters to the movies with considerably greater speed and efficiency. Its timeliness dramatically underscored and confirmed, Hawks’s film could hardly have received a more prominent stamp of approval. It’s high time I got my hands on one.

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How Jack Benny’s Gagmen Lost Their Typewriter

As I realized anew last night, watching John Ford’s splendid Technicolor epic Drums Along the Mohawk, you don’t need historical footnotes or extensive background information to appreciate old-fashioned melodrama, even if such fictions claim to be based on verifiable facts. As an informed viewer, you’d probably be distracted and irked by careless inaccuracies or wilful distortions, interacting with the film intellectually rather than permitting yourself to become emotionally engaged—unless, of course, you are happily equipped with a remarkable ability to suspend disbelief. Surely I would never stoop to advocating ignorance, but such alleged bliss is no hindrance to the melodramatic experience. How different is the response to humor, especially when a bit of arcane trivia is called upon to serve as the centerpiece of a punch line.

Looking for a broadcasting event to highlight in my “On This Day” feature, I came across an episode of the Jack Benny Program, presented live from New York City on 5 October 1941. Like the Burns and Allen broadcast discussed previously, it is a rather self-conscious piece of comedy in which Jack returns to the air after his summer hiatus and finds himself unable to get back into his groove. Not even the script for that night’s broadcast is finished.

As Jack discovers, his head writers—two guys who spent a night at Roseland dancing together (and winning a cup for it)—have lost their typewriter by betting on .,. Lou Nova. Lou Nova? The name pops up again later in the program, when Benny’s valet Rochester calls in after finding himself in a tight squeeze with his bookie. Turns out, Lou Nova was a celebrated prizefighter with a supposedly “cosmic punch” who lost to heavyweight Joe Lewis a few days before the broadcast—on 29 September 1941. He had been a sure bet until then.

Although there are a few other topical allusions in this broadcast, including references to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson (pictured above), Benny’s jokes are generally easier to get than the satirical remarks of rival Fred Allen, whose wit was decidedly more topical. 

Explaining a joke is rarely amusing—but rescuing otherwise useless trivia from obscurity is rewarding nonetheless. Now I won’t feel quite so ignorant if ever I come across another “cosmic punch” line.