Tag: Claudette Colbert

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“Boom Bang a Bang”: Mae West, Eurovision, and the Re-education of Charlie McCarthy

Well, it’s one of those drab and dispiriting whatever-happened-to-summer kind of days on which even morale-boosting Carmen Miranda might have thrown in the technicolored towel. Yesterday, the house was shrouded in mist; and now, as if to mock the recently announced drought warning and water restrictions, the slow-moving clouds across the Welsh hills have assumed a washed-out shade of gray that looks about as cheerful as the fur of a middle-aged rat trying to waddle off with your last piece of cheese. Not that there was any more merriment to be had last night when I lowered the blind to screen the less-than-classic Mae West vehicle The Heat’s On (1943).

Watching West’s caricature of back-alley “come hither” cut the rug with dithering Victor Moore, whose hairpiece had just fallen off while hers remained as conspicuous as a comb-over, had all the gayety of a fancy dress party at a retirement home in a northern suburb of Minsk.

To be sure, West was already past her prime in the mid-1930s, an obsolescence determined not so much by biology than by the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code, the same code that made similarly cartoonish Betty Boop lower her skirts. Such strictures notwithstanding, West continued to keep censors busy by causing the greatest sex scandal on US radio, when, in 1937, she impersonated the original lady Eve in a Garden of Eden sketch presented on the Chase and Sanborn Hour (as previously mentioned here). West’s delivery was so suggestive that she was subsequently deemed too hot for radio.

Now, the star of the Chase and Sanborn Hour, ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, got away with considerably more verbal tease and naughtiness than anyone else on the air. Saved by his image—the picture of a wooden chap on Bergen’s knee, that is—Charlie didn’t have to worry much about his reputation. Without such widely circulated likenesses, Charlie would undoubtedly have come across as a rather more adult toy—a stunted youth Peter-Pandering to the randy fantasies of the frustrated heterosexual middle-aged male.

While The Heat’s On made a farce out of censorship in the theaters, Charlie was amusing himself with many a leading lady of the silver screen—and a few misleading ones. On this day, 16 May, in 1943, for instance, Charlie’s heart went a-racing at the sight of Claudette Colbert, who invited the lucky log to spend his summer on her island farm. (At this point, I usually refer readers to my collection of Colbert memorabilia; but one of the finest sets of Claudette images are now on display at the glamour sanctuary known as Trouble in Paradise, a treat not to be missed.)

Charlie was soon disillusioned, however, when it became clear that Ms. Colbert had something other than romance in mind. He was to get busy on the farm, rather than enjoying the fruits without labor. There was a war on, and the Pinocchio among Romeos had to learn to be a little less selfish and irresponsible. As a piece of carved wood, he was certainly expendable—unless his antics could both delight and teach. After all, even old Victor Moore was seen promoting Victory Gardens in The Heat’s On, while Hazel Scott—the only performer to get The Heat up to temperature—tickled the ivories in an attempt to appease disenfranchised African-Americans, racial harmony being essential to the war effort.

On the same evening Charlie learned that flirting with Colbert was futile, Jack Benny’s valet Rochester took center stage singing a number from Cabin in the Sky on his boss’s program; meanwhile, Benny’s rival Fred Allen tried to sell a pan-American ditty to singing sensation Frank Sinatra. Like pleasure-seeking Charlie McCarthy, America’s musical entertainers had all become recruits in the fight against the Axis.

A decidedly more frivolous war will be waged all over Europe this weekend, when the Eurovision Song Contest, responsible for tunes like “Volare,” “Waterloo” and the abovementioned “Boom Bang a Bang” (also the title of a Eurovision documentary to air on UK television tonight) gets underway for the fifty-first time. Assault weapons include rap from the UK, Country from Germany, and Death Metal from Finland. It’s the showdown of the year on European television; and the US, slow to catch on for once, is planning to copy the concept.

And why not? As Shakespeare might have put it (had he not said otherwise): “If music be the [fuel of war], play on; / Give [us] excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

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Many Happy Reruns: Katharine Hepburn and Leslie Charteris

Well, I prefer doing it slowly, in narrow, dusty aisles, surrounded by strangers. Browsing for second-hand books, I mean. Nowadays, it is so much easier, and often cheaper, to pick up that elusive volume by going online, rather than making a day of it in out-of-the-way bookstores, antique shops, or flea markets. I’m not giving up on that experience, though—on the thrill of the hunt and the triumph of the catch. Hay-on-Wye, where I went yesterday, is the very place for such a literati safari. It is a tiny Welsh village with a population of about 1500; but its narrow streets are lined with about forty bookstores, some of which specialize in Hollywood cinema and crime fiction. That’s where Hepburn and Charteris, both born on this day in 1907, will come in . . . eventually.

Yesterday, I came home with a little something for my Claudette Colbert collection (pictured), with another copy of Norman Corwin’s Thirteen by Corwin (a fine one with dust jacket, previously owned by the BBC research department), and a title from the Directors Guild of America Oral History series, an interview with television pioneer Worthington Miner.

Prior to entering television in the late 1930s (yes, NBC did have a television schedule back then, even though only a few thousand Americans owned a set), Miner had been a theatrical producer in the 1930s; and, in March 1937, his leading lady was none other than Ms. Hepburn, who starred in an adaptation of Jane Eyre (previously discussed here).

According to Miner,

Katie was a wonderful Jane; it was her cup of tea, and she sparkled. But we had a dreadful Rochester and an even worse last act. [. . .] As a result, we decided to book it on the road for a few months and not risk bringing it into New York. For weeks on end it battled the elements, storms and tornados, floods and disasters, without an empty seat in the house. Katie’s name was already a prodigious drawn in the hinterlands. Jane Eyre made a tidy profit, but the kudos was nil for any of us, even Katie herself.

Years, later, Miner was involved in securing the rights Long Day’s Journey Into Night for another producer, with whom Miner strongly disagreed about Hepburn in the role of Mary Tyrone. Miner believed that Hepburn—a “mercurial, unpredictable performer”—was utterly “wrong” for the part. In the “right” role (Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, for instance, which she reprised in several radio productions) she was “incomparable, a class unto herself.” When miscast, however, she could be “aggressively, monstrously bad.” To me, Undercurrent comes to mind; Hepburn was just not cut out to be the victim, even when permitted to fight back.

Someone very much angered by Hollywood casting was Saint creator Leslie Charteris, who shares Hepburn’s birthday. I have mentioned previously (and have been corrected on some muddled facts by Saint expert Burl Barer), that Charteris was not at all pleased when George Sanders took over the role of his Robin Hood of Modern Crime. He much preferred Louis Hayward, who had portrayed Simon Templar in The Saint in New York.

Now, one of the writers involved in adapting Charteris’s novel for the screen was Irwin Shaw, whose play Bury the Dead Miner had produced on Broadway and whose final radio play, “Supply and Demand,” he directed for the Columbia Workshop in the spring of 1937, when Hepburn was touring with Jane Eyre.

Perhaps I am overly fond of such six-degrees-of-separation games; but with some Miner assistance, I could almost send Hepburn and Charteris on a dinner date, discussing a role that might have been swell as a follow-up for Bringing Up Baby: a sophisticated screwball-mystery of The Thin Man variety.

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On This Day in 1942: Marlene Dietrich Receives Some Sound Advice

Well, they aren’t quite done with me yet. Yesterday’s remarks about barbarity and journalism, that is. The problem with expository writing, when approached in the conventional, western sense, is that essays are expected to make ideas fall into place even when the subject is utterly chaotic. This is the very paper logic I was going on about only to get trapped in it. There is something troublesome about getting frustrated by a long-winded “I don’t know” when a purposeful “That’s that” should strike us as so much more suspicious.

Anyway. Ending my day with the customary late-night movie, I was all prepared for a smallscreening of The Bad and the Beautiful, which aired last week on UK channel BBC2. Instead, I never got past the film to which it had been hastily and haphazardly appended: I Cover the Waterfront. So, I quite inadvertently—but rather fittingly—followed up The Front Page (and Are You Listening?) with another sordid tale of big news and small scruples. Like Hildy Johnson, no-name reporter Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) is torn between a girl and a story; but in this case, the girl (Claudette Colbert) is the ticket to that byline-worthy scoop—and the determined newshound manages to get them both, even if it means doing away with his sweetheart’s father. How’s that for a lucky break!

Now, I’m not sure whether it was either a matter of luck or much of a break when, on this day, 10 May, in 1942, radio comedian Fred Allen announced: “[T]onight we have a scoop. One of Hollywood’s greatest stars.” The great one was German-born Marlene Dietrich, a leading lady willing to work hard—but being none-too successful—at remaining a favorite in the public’s eye. Stepping behind the microphone to prove her American patriotism was one of those attempts at salvaging her endangered career.

“You mean you brought me here to do a show just for you?” Dietrich confronted Allen, showing herself offended at his unpatriotic selfishness. “Where are the troops?” Dutifully pointing out that the star had been “touring the country for the Hollywood Victory Committee, giving shows at the various army camps and naval training stations,” Allen showed his appreciation by offering his guest “some fatherly advice about [her] movie career.” It wasn’t an offer the hits-missing actress could afford to ignore.

Dietrich assured Allen that she was perfectly “happy out in Hollywood,” to which the comedian replied: “Oh, but how long can it last, with those rough-and-tumble pictures you’ve been making?” During the shoot of her latest picture, The Lady Is Willing (released two-and-a-half months prior to the broadcast), Dietrich had tripped over some props and injured her leg; but Allen was referring to the star’s online slappings, administered by leading men like James Stewart, Broderick Crawford, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson.

“Give up pictures in Hollywood, Marlene. Come to radio,” Allen suggested, where you “can get beaten up and kicked around [. . .] and not even feel it”—the sound effects man “does everything.” Some noisy demonstrations of the soundman’s business followed. “Radio is wonderful,” Dietrich agreed and was promptly handed a script for a radio serial titled “Brave Betty Birnbaum.”

“Your part starts on page twenty-eight,” Allen informed his guest, who flicked through it in bewilderment: “But the whole script is only thirty pages.” “Well, I know,” Allen explained, “the first twenty-seven pages are a commercial.” At least the soundman was at hand when Dietrich was called upon to kiss her less-than-dashing co-star. “That’s radio, Fred,” she summed up her lesson.

Luckily for Dietrich, the big screen offers did not run out during the 1940s. Only a decade later, when she was getting rather too unsteady on her celebrated gams to keep kicking her screen partners around in scenes of rough-and-tumble glamour, she heeded Allen’s advice at last. It wasn’t exactly an act of desperation, considering that she was in the company of many Hollywood A-listers who found syndicated radio drama to be lucrative and convenient.

Still sultry and seductive in her 50s, Dietrich worked the magic of her vocal chords in the episodic adventure series Café Istanbul and Time for Love, proving that, with a little help from the soundman, it’s never too late for radio romance.

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On This Day in 1937: Claudette Colbert Gets Her “Hands” on Lombard’s Part

Well, we’ve all got them, I guess. Those lists of favorite books, or blogs, or breakfast cereals, or some such itemized accounts of our current predilections. They are supposed to tell others something we deem important about ourselves at some point of our lives; but, looked upon in retrospect, they can become a revelation to us, confronting us with time capsules of our likes, longings, and limitations. Here, for instance, are the top three entries on a list of all-time favorite movies as I compiled it back in 1986:

  1. Holiday (George Cukor; 1938)
  2. Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen; 1935)
  3. Fade to Black (Vernon Zimmerman; 1980)

Now, I have not seen Fade to Black since the 1980s. It is a slasher movie for cinemaniacs, which is why I could identify with it back then. For reasons I did not yet fully comprehend, I was drawn, fairly early in my life, to the films and figure of Mitchell Leisen, a tremendously successful designer-director, but not a particularly well-remembered or highly regarded craftsman nowadays.

Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea
on Lux Radio Theatre

Hands Across the Table is a simple you-can-have-your-beefcake-and-eat-it romance starring Carole Lombard as a penniless manicurist, Ralph Bellamy as a rich invalid who’d like to get his hands on her, and Fred MacMurray as a carefree man-about-town with dubious work ethics who eventually sweeps her off her feet. That pretty much sums it up—unless, of course, I’d have to explain the feeling of being torn between having my nails polished by gorgeous Lombard and running my fingers through MacMurray’s hair.

On this day, 3 May, in 1937, Hands Across the Table went on the air in an adaptation produced by that most prestigious and popular of radio theatricals, the Cecil B. DeMille hosted Lux Radio Theatre. It was this series, along with my love for 1930s and early 1940s screwball comedies that got me interested in old-time radio.

Once you have exhausted the classics, you will find a worthwhile substitute in American radio programs like Lux, which give you not only an opportunity to catch a different reading of films so familiar to you that they play before your mind’s eye, but also allow you to re-imagine them with alternate casts.

What, for instance, if Suspicion had starred Olivia de Havilland, rather than her sister, Joan Fontaine? How would Barbara Stanwyck or Ida Lupino fare in Merle Oberon’s role as Cathy in Wuthering Heights [thanks to André Soares for editing]? And what, if anything, could Loretta Young do when called upon to take over for Bette Davis in Jezebel? It all happened on the Lux program.

In Lux‘s audio version of Hands Across the Table, Carole Lombard’s role was performed by Claudette Colbert, who would later be Leisen’s leading lady in Midnight (1939). It was Colbert’s fourth appearance on the show, whose sponsors not only paid handsomely for such brief encounters with the microphone (up to $5000 for top-notchers), but also promoted the stars’ movie careers (by mentioning, in Colbert’s case, the upcoming releases I Met Him in Paris and Tovarich).

Heard in the Fred MacMurray part is Colbert’s Palm Beach Story co-star Joel McCrea (pictured above, with Colbert, reading the “Hands Across” script). Introducing the two leads, showman DeMille credited himself with their discovery:

Greetings from Hollywood.  Tonight’s event, with its glittering stage, its scientific wizardry that carries our voices to all corners of the earth and its audience of millions is a thing that I couldn’t have predicted when I first knew Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea.  The Lux Radio Theater was then as remote from Hollywood as the moon.  But I predicted the eventual triumph of these two young people and was privileged to contribute to it.  I gave Joel McCrea his first motion picture contract.  Claudette was not then the favorite of millions, allowed to choose her stories, directors, and writers. The studio insisted I give her a dialogue test before casting her.  I did—and starred her in The Sign of the Cross and Cleopatra.

For the privilege of putting her hands on Lombard’s part—and the generous remuneration on the table—Colbert was obliged to declare that they had touched nothing but Lux toilet soap ever since her first appearance on the New York stage (in the 1920s). As I put it in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on old-time radio, it was all a matter of one hand washing the other.

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"This . . . is London": Getting Ready to Take in the Sounds Again

Broadcasting House, London

Well, it has been a rather gloomy weekend, a few hours of which were spent finding a publishing house and home for Etherized, my doctoral study on old-time radio. I have been slow to send out proposals but am aware that I cannot rest on my laurels until they begin to smell. The fresh air being too damp, cold, and swiftly circulated, I sought shelter by the fire and found pleasant company in an unflappable adventuress by the name of Eve Peabody. Surely you’ve met Eve Peabody, the blues singer whose voice, by her own admission, is strictly of the “bathtub” variety? You know, the gal who once crashed a ritzy social gathering with a pawn ticket for an invitation. Yes, that Eve Peabody—the gold-lamé garbed, Bronx Local-hardened heroine of Mitchell Leisen’s deucedly clever screwball comedy Midnight (1939).

There’s much to be learned from an urbane charmer like Eve (as portrayed with pitch-perfection by Ms. Claudette Colbert). Lessons in picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and starting all over again, I mean. Having escaped a Monte Carlo disaster—a failed system that left her practically penniless at the roulette table, with the exception of that one French coin with a hole in it—Eve takes a gamble by hopping on a train to not so gay Paris.

Alighting none too delightedly with damp and dreary prospects before her, she inquires with sarcasm, rather than incredulity: “So this, as they say, is Paris?” Not altogether reassured by the conductor, she wryly remarks: “Well, from here it looks an awful lot like a rainy night in Kokomo, Indiana.” I might find myself saying something not unlike this when I step out of the train in London this Wednesday. The forecast is not promising; but, like Eve, I am determined to make the most of my stay.

Perhaps, my idea of a good time differs from that of most visitors, but, aside from the shops and a West End show or two, Edward R. Murrow’s house in Hallam Street is right up there on my list of must-see attractions. As I reported a few weeks ago, a blue plaque has been placed on the façade of Weymouth House earlier this year, commemorating the contributions of its former resident, Murrow, to bringing the terrors of the London blitz home to American radio listeners, many of whom may have otherwise been indifferent or downright hostile to the British, quite willing even to let my Nazi ancestors have their way with them.

“This . . . is London,” of course, was Murrow’s famous introduction to his blitz broadcasts. His reports made a distant fight for survival seem real and urgent—unlike that picturesque firework display that stood in for the air raids in the recent Judy Dench-starrer Mrs. Henderson Presents. After all, radio can produce terrors far more immediate than video or photography, provided you have mind, heart, and guts enough to translate dreadful sounds into horrible images.

Walking through London again, I might do what I used to do when I first came to New York City, which is, besides taking in the sights, to take in the sounds as well. When the broadcastellan journal was still in its infancy, rather than its present adolescence, I contemplated the soundscape of Britain. For, surely, London has one of the most distinct sonic designs of any Western metropolis, the chiming of Big Ben being its most memorable earmark. So, as an exercise in getting in tune with said town, I will tune in again to “A Portrait of London” (20 July 1956), a CBS Radio Workshop tour conducted by Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah, who took American listeners right into the bell tower of Big Ben.

“So this, as they say, is London, huh?” I might find myself saying on Wednesday as I step out onto the platform at Euston Station: but, hearing the inimitable sounds of the big city, I am unlikely to add “Well, to me it sounds an awful lot like a rainy night in the Welsh hills.”

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Wireless Women, Clueless Men: Joan Davis, Vallee Girl

I was inclined to put the “wireless women” on hold for today. I have been feeling rather poorly as a result of an exposure to noxious fumes emanating from a fresh coat of paint in our conservatory. My evening with Claudette Colbert, starred in the rarely screened melodrama The Man from Yesterday (1932) was utterly spoiled. I also missed the BAFTAs, the new Marple (controversially, not a mystery in which the old sleuth was placed by her creator), and found little enjoyment in Crack Up (1946), a noirish thriller directed by radio dramatist Irving Reis, which aired on BBC Two early last Saturday. Dizziness, mood swings, fatigue and nausea are my mental and bodily responses to a thankfully small number of chemical solutions including household cleaners, varnishes, and insecticides.

Having spent some time in the crisp winter air this afternoon, I am ready to carry on about those fabulous radio ladies. I was thrilled to hear from a relative of Ms. Minerva Pious, one of the “wireless women” I have been commemorating here over the past few weeks. Her rags-to-riches-to-rags story sure seems worth exploring, particularly by someone who has ready access to personal correspondences and can draw on childhood memories.

The series will come to an end this Friday, when the (to the best of my knowledge) correct answer to the quiz will be disclosed in a tribute to radio playwright Lucille Fletcher. The “microphonic men” will be honored in the fullness of time (meaning, the emptiness of my schedule).

Earlier today, after a few exchanges via email, I was pleased to send off excerpts from my doctoral study to one of those old-time radio greats: none other than poet-journalist Norman Corwin, who will be very much a man of the hour come Oscar night, considering that a documentary about his work is up for an award. Now, on to the current column.

Judging from above picture, I seem to have quite a bit in common with ditzy dame Joan Davis. I am lousy at housework (particularly after taking a whiff of those detergents), tend to break things around the house (even when not intoxicated), and am inclined to sweep many of my mishaps under the proverbial carpet. Of course, Davis merely “enacts a housecleaning drama for Tune In,” a 1940s broadcasting magazine. According to that periodical (an issue of which I picked up years ago at a Chicago memorabilia store), Davis’s career was a “New Example of Rudy [Vallee]’s ability to Pick and Make Stars.”

No “clueless men” here, so far (except for me, of course). Certainly not Vallée, whose oleaginous radio persona I never found particularly prepossessing (give me John D. Hackensacker III anytime). He was a poor reader of lines, and his singing, too, had an air of carelessness about it. I gather he relied rather too much on the superstardom to which he became accustomed and used it to propel others instead of making any further efforts to push himself. Among those who came out of Vallée’s star factory were Carmen Miranda, Milton Berle, Edgar Bergen and Beatrice Lillie, the article claims.

Joan Davis, anno 1943, was hailed as Vallée’s “newest discovery,” notwithstanding the fact that she had already appeared on the screen in comedies like Sally, Irene, and Mary (1938) and Sun Valley Serenade (1941). “To many who have seen her in films,” the article continues, “Miss Davis may not seem a new discovery. But it was Vallee who lifted her out of a medium in which she was but little known, a minor success, and built her into the radio’s outstanding find of the season.”

When Vallee left his show to join the Coast Guard in the summer of 1943, he chose Joan to mind the Store. Here you can tune in to Joan’s remodelled Sealtest Village Store. It becomes clear just who took care of business, even though clueless executives thought for a while they needed to throw in Jack Haley for support. Davis, in fact, slightly improved on Vallee’s Hooper ratings, outscreeching competitors like Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, Fred Allen, and Jimmy Durante. Obviously, his time was her time—and America made time for it.

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

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

Claudette Colbert in Four Frightened People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On This Day in 1949: The Radio Tells Americans All About “Eve”

Well, before I make an appointment with The Phantom President, another one of the lesser known motion pictures starring my favorite actress, Ms. Claudette Colbert, I am going to listen again to a radio adaptation of a story that was initially considered as a vehicle for Colbert, but fell into the lap of lucky Bette Davis instead. I am referring of course to “The Wisdom of Eve,” a dramatization of which was broadcast on this day, 24 January, in 1949—thus nearly two years prior to the general US release of the celebrated movie version known as All About Eve.

This is another adventure in recycling, an exploration of radio’s mediating position in the every widening web of multimediacy. Like Eve Harrington, radio was a spider—a yarn-spinning upstart snatching a principal role from its respected elders. Talking itself into the confidence of promoters and audiences alike, radio not only surpassed the theatre and the press in influence and mass appeal, but continued to take advantage of the talent it lured away from those competing media.

“Radio, of itself, has developed almost no writers. It has appropriated almost all of them, at least all of those who could tell a good story.” This assessment of the so-called writer’s medium was made in 1939 by Max Wylie, a former director of script and continuity at US network CBS; he went on to work for the radio department of a major advertising agency and wrote several handbooks for writers or producers of radio drama and edited a number of radio play anthologies.

Wylie knew what he was talking about. Although original plays became more prevalent during the Second World War, when radio served as a major purveyor of propaganda packaged as entertainment, this observation remained essentially an accurate one and does much to explain the gradual decline of radio dramatics in the US during the 1950s, when television assumed this mediating, central position in American culture. Proving the infinite adaptability of popular culture, radio programmed its own redundancy.

“The Wisdom of Eve” first appeared as a short story in the May 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan; before it became All About Eve, author Mary Orr adapted her nearly forgotten piece of magazine fiction for the airwaves. And quite a radiogenic production it turned out to be when it was presented on NBC’s Radio City Playhouse.

“If you were listening to the radio last night,” a female voice addresses the audience, “perhaps you heard what [a certain] radio commentator had to say about Eve Harrington.” On a filter microphone, a device often used to recreate the distortion of voices on the wire or the wireless, the enthusiastic commentator spreads the word about the meteoric rise of one Eve Harrington, “the most-loved, most sought-after, most talented actress Hollywood has seen in a generation.”

Without contradicting or mocking this statement, the narrator takes over again, and her encounter with the “hauntingly lovely” Eve is played out for us in dramatic flashbacks. The speaker is not the bitter and disillusioned Margo, the aging diva, but her friend, Karen Richards, wife of the playwright of Margo’s latest stage success.

What unfolds is the familiar story of Eve’s progress, her seeming innocence, her ambition, and her successful scheming. For the sake of her husband, a man being “made miserable by a temperamental actress,” Karen sides with Eve, too late undeceived about the young woman’s character.

In this play, the radio (the voice of the gossip columnist) is complicit in the world’s deception about Eve. Forever the snake in the make-believe garden west of Eden, it tells us what we want to hear, rather than what we ought to know. Luckily, the listeners of the Radio City Playhouse got just what they wanted that day: a darn good story. What’s more, the motion picture people tuned in as well, and the little piece Orr had trouble selling for years was turned into box-office gold.

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On This Day in 1937: Dickens’s "Signal-Man" Is Interviewed on the Air

Well, my first review for the Internet Movie Database has gone online this weekend. I sincerely hope that no one will be led astray by my remarks about The Misleading Lady (previously discussed here). Unlike the rating, writing the short piece was a joy. As fascinated as I am by numbers (provided I don’t have to add them up), I have never been able to express myself satisfactorily in this supposedly succinct way. I also tend to be rather stingy with my stars or points or other such statistical thumbs, whether I share my opinions on the database or grade a student paper.

Five stars out of ten (as bestowed on aforementioned Lady) is meant to denote mediocrity; but to others it might spell “plain awful.” To me, two means “awful,” which is just what Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen merits, had I cast my vote. That insult to the memory of the famed detective, which aired on LivingTV in the UK this weekend, is so insufferable, however, that I could not sit through it. So, I willingly, gladly surrendered my right to vote, at least according to my own ethics of re-viewing. Luckily, I don’t have to deal with numerical expressions of (dis)approval in my ruminations about American radio drama.

On this day, 23 January, in 1937, the Columbia Workshop presented Charles Tazewell’s dramatization of Charles Dickens’s ghost story “The Signal-Man.” Too many American drama anthologies for radio tackled longer novels, rather than short stories, resulting in cut-rate digests and bloodless storytelling. In early radio drama, the narrator was the first to get the axe; gone with him or her were descriptive passages, character assessments, and an access to a speaker’s inner thoughts.

As I argue in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on the subject, the prejudice against narration in radio plays (a more inclusive term I prefer over radio drama), is related to the early failure in presenting stage plays straight from Broadway, a lack of adaptive skill that made it necessary to install a translator in the wings, a voice describing the gestures of the actors and the inaudible goings-on known as “business.” The challenge of proper radio form was to do without this awkward voice, to convey actions and thoughts in dialogue.

Another reason serious radio playwrights objected to—and producers did not encourage—the use of narration was the fact that the single voice on commercial radio was linked to the announcer, the peddler of a sponsor’s wares. The single voice stood out, disrupted the conversation—and thus drew attention to the business at hand: the business of selling things.

Over the years, radio plays and the techniques of broadcast hawkers became considerably more sophisticated; but the narrator was still frowned upon by many playwrights and listeners. Now, Charles Dickens’s “Signal-Man,” as reworked for the Columbia Workshop by actor-writer Charles Tazewell, is a fine example for the use of full dramatization.

In Dickens’s narrative, the plight of the titular character—a lonely railroad employee haunted by a death-foretelling “Thing in the Tunnel” (as the story was also called when adapted for radio)—is expressed by the man who observes him:

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see.  It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.

Tazewell’s script called for the actor to convey this sense of dread and anxiety through changes in tone of voice as Braxton, the Signal-Man, responds to the questions of Darkin, a journalist interviewing him in hopes of a serviceable human interest story. Reading instructions include “almost hysterical,” “becoming hysterical,” or “with growing hysteria,” as Braxton relates his encounters with a specter warning him of impending disaster.

Generally known as a laboratory of sound effects techniques, the Workshop here relied on dialogue, rather than effects. The result is that the ghost story very nearly becomes a study of insanity; the ambiguities fade as the adaptor decides not to deal in noise. The warning bell, ringing in Braxton’s ears is not heard by the journalist or the play’s audience:

Darkin: It’s your imagination.  The bell is not ringing—and probably, it has never rung at any other time except when some station wishes to communicate with you. 

Braxton: Listen! 

Darkin: I tell you, the bell . . .

Braxton: Not the bell—outside—the ghost’s calling.

Darkin: I hear nothing—save the moan of the wind in the wires.

And so do we, the wireless audience. In Tazewell’s dramatization, the specter is all but explained away, drowned in the airwaves without as much as a ghost of a chance to rise before us. What haunts me now is the fact that, just after listening to this play, I came across the headlines about the deadly train crash in the Balkans. I’m sure Tazewell’s journalist would term it a coincidence, as dull and comfortless as such reasoning might be.

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The First to Take Her Out; or, My Date with a Misleading Lady

It is increasingly rare these days to come across a star-powered American movie of the 1930s that hasn’t already been reviewed by at least one person submitting a review to the Internet Movie Database. I did not set out to dig up such an unexamined rarity, but was rather surprised—and pleased—to have unearthed one by dusting off The Misleading Lady, a 1932 comedy starring my favorite leading lady, Ms. .

Now, as those who have indulged me in sharing my passions and foibles may already be too keenly aware, I enjoy gathering and gazing at the likenesses of this sophisticated comedienne on posters, magazine covers, and, yes, paper dolls. As an undergraduate, I wrote a speech about her, which I sent to her home in Barbados—and received her autograph. Later, she became the subject of an honors paper titled “Ladies in Loco-Motion.” And later still, thoughts of her got me started on what turned into my doctoral study on radio drama (Etherized Victorians), which has its origin in my joyous discovery that Colbert not infrequently performed on the air.

Come Christmas time, I go so far as to insist on dangling cardboard replicas of the good woman from our tree—but that’s about as fanatical as I get. Still, there is nothing more gratifying than the real thing: to watch or hear Colbert act. Having missed the opportunity to see her perform on the Broadway or London stage, I find great consolation in the fact that she had starring roles in about sixty motion pictures.

While in New York City last, I packed a few more videos in my trunk; but there remained—and still remain—gaps in my knowledge of Colbert’s cinematic achievements (and occasional misfires). So, how wonderful was it to find under aforementioned piece of dislodged pine a number of films I had only read about until then: Secrets of a Secretary, The Man from Yesterday, The Phantom President, Four Frightened People, and The Misleading Lady. Having been ill (and ill-tempered) of late, I did not want to squander these flickering gems by heaping them onto my thick head; so I kept myself tolerably amused watching films like The Saint Strikes Back (a sly caper challenging one of my more simplistic conclusions about Hollywood law and order). Yesterday it was time at last to screen one of these five films, and the Lady took the lead.

The Misleading Lady is no classic, to be sure; few of the films are. Their construction and moral ambiguities render many of them incongruous or downright irritating. We expect such digressions from a contemporary independent film, but are still surprised to encounter it in an old—and therefore presumably stodgy—production of Hollywood’s studio era.

As my IMDb review, once approved, will tell you, The Misleading Lady is not without daring and rather disconcerting scenes involving a bored socialite being trapped in her own scheme to land a man. She doesn’t want the guy, mind you (not at first, at least); but he might just be her ticket to a starring role in a stage play. Once he realizes that he’s been had, he sets out to restore his pride and win the dame in the process. Too bad Colbert doesn’t get to wield the gun more often, but is being terrorized and tamed instead as the farce veers into something more akin to lurid melodrama.

There is a radio angle, of course. Clark Gable played the role of the macho dupe in a 1935 Lux Radio Theatre production of The Misleading Lady. Transcriptions of this broadcast (not starring Colbert, Gable’s partner in It Happened One Night) are unfortunately no longer extant—but I’ve always got this Lady to return to . . .