Tag: Erik Barnouw

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Inherit the . . . Air: Dialing for Darwin on His 200th Birthday

Before settling down for a small-screening of Inherit the Wind, I twisted the dial in search of the man from whose contemporaries we inherited the debate it depicts: Charles Darwin, born, like Abraham Lincoln, on this day, 12 February 1809. Like Lincoln, Darwin was a liberator among folks who resisted free thinking, a man whose ideas not only broadened minds but roused the ire of the close-minded–stick in the muds who resented being traced to the mud primordial, dreaded having what they conceived of as being set in stone washed away in the flux of evolution, and resolved instead to keep humanity from evolving. On BBC radio, at least, Darwin is the man of the hour. His youthful Beagle Diary is currently being read to us in daily installments; his “Voyages of Descent” with Captain FitzRoy have been newly dramatized; and his theories are the subject of numerous talks and documentaries.

The bicentenary celebrations got underway early at the Natural History Museum in London, where last December I visited an exhibition of artifacts and documents from Darwin’s journeys of discovery, quests that had their origin here in the west of Britain: “In August quietly wandering about Wales, in February in a different hemisphere; nothing ever in this life ought to surprise me,” young Darwin noted.

Nor should resistance to change. Back in 1935 (as Erik Barnouw reminds us in A Tower in Babel), when the hostile response to Darwin’s theories resulted in a media event known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, station WGN, Chicago, took the microphone straight into the courtroom so that listeners might hear defense attorney Clarence Darrow ask prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, “Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?”

Bryan professed to believe just that; and unable to sway the jurors from thinking otherwise, Darrow lost the case—a case that, if some politicians had had their way, would not have been made public. It was not just the espousal but the very mention of Darwin’s ideas that was considered a threat. An amendment to ban all broadcasts of “discourses” about Darwin was proposed in the 69th United States Congress. If that amendment had passed, the evolution could not be televised today.

It comes as no surprise either that the two men who penned Inherit the Wind were former broadcast writers; in fictionalizing the trial, they disowned the medium that had imposed so many restrictions upon them, that kept potentially incendiary ideas from being disseminated; that, in the interest of public calm—as opposed to the public interest—was apt to cast aside what it did not dare to cast broadly.

It was not until long after his death that Darrow, once known as the “boy who would argue against everything,” became the subject of a CBS radio documentary; in it, many outspoken thinkers—including Edith Sampson, the first black US delegate appointed to the United Nations—were heard arguing in his defense.

Perhaps, I am overstating my case when say that Darwin was too hot for radio; yet even when his ideas were presented on the air, they needed to be cooled down so as not to inflame anew. In 1946, a dramatization of his career was attempted for The Human Adventure, an educational program produced by CBS in co-operation with the University of Chicago. As Max Wylie put it in his foreword to a published script from the series, The Human Adventure presented

dramatic interpretations of the progress being made in university research throughout the world, progress in any of the thirty thousand research projects that are now being worked on by scholars and scientists in this country and in the centers of learning throughout the civilized world.

The description does not quite fit the episode in question, which transports listeners to a less civilized, less enlightened past. It opens on a “leisurely day in London” anno 1859. On 24 November, to be precise, the very day on which Darwin’s Origin of the Species went on sale. The scene is a bookstore, the dialogue between a young scholar and his formidable aunt who disapproves of Darwinian notions:

When I was a girl, we knew exactly how old the world was. Bishop Ussher proved it in the scriptures. The world, he proved, was created in the year 4004 BC, on a Friday in October at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Not that the lad is particularly up-to-date; “everyone knows that animals don’t change” and that “species remain exactly as created,” he argues. “Every kind fixed and separate.” Darwin’s new book was flung at that rickety bandwagon, as the play drives home. “Instantly, overnight, the lines of conflict are drawn. The complaisant, orthodox world, which is Victorian England, erupts into a storm of controversy.”

The narrative soon shifts from social agitation to the thrill of exploration and pioneering. It emphasizes the spirit of “Adventure” over the dispiritingly “Human” by introducing us to the younger Darwin aboard the Beagle, the eager scientist in his laboratory, and the ailing researcher supported by a loving spouse. Without diverging from facts, the drama suggests that Darwin’s theory were not quite so earth-shattering after all, a similar treatise having preceded it that threatened to render Darwin’s own publication redundant. Without omitting a reference to monkeys, the broadcast refuses to acknowledge that its subject matter continued to make zealots go ape.

Defusing Darwin’s prehistoric time bomb, The Human Adventure argued the “storm of abuse,” the “bitter intemperate, all too human controversy” to be “behind us now.” The voices of protest give way to a demonstration of how Darwin’s words echo the theories of scientists from around the world, an enlightened world united through science. Science fiction, in short.

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“. . . that same young man in that same brown suit”: A "Jackass" Takes a Bow

For the life of me, I can’t turn a phrase. At least, not at a speed that would encourage anyone to keep up with me. I can’t seem to cut a line short enough to make it worthwhile anyone’s time or spin it fast enough to lasso in the crowds. By the time I’m done editing myself, everyone else has left the spot I failed to hit. As a matter of fact, I am still editing what you are reading now. I would have failed miserably in the days when radio demanded rapid-fire gags at a rate that prematurely aged funnymen like Lou Holtz, who had drawers full of them, and wrecked the nerves of his assistants (among them, the young Herman Wouk, aformentioned). “Take all the words in all the full-length pictures produced in Hollywood in a year,” Erik Barnouw calculated in 1939, “and you do not have enough words to keep radio in the United States going for twenty-four hours.”

Comedians and the largely anonymous writers who fed them their lines sure had to work fast; yet, energy aside, they also needed stamina to sustain an act through the seasons. Sure, you can get almost anyone to “Wanna buy a duck”; but to make it something other than a lame one and not to end up with egg on your face after a few weeks, let alone decades, requires some convincing.

That said, quite a number of comedians, most of them seasoned vaudevillians, enjoyed a long career on the air, a durability that, with a few exceptions, is foreign to today’s short-attention-spanned YouTubeans whose mental databases have been outsourced and replaced by all sorts of gadgetry (or re-call centers) designed to make us forget anything other than to heed those reminders of how to pay dearly, if conveniently, for our carefully nurtured deficiencies. Their mental faculties scattered along the hard drive, future generations may well be on too short a term with the world even to get a running gag. (As I was saying, my syntax just wouldn’t do for broadcasting.)

Celebrating his seventh year on the air, on this day, 30 April, in 1939, was Jack Benny, that perennial middle-age dodger from Waukegan. “Exactly seven years ago today a young man walked into a small New York broadcasting studio and spoke into a microphone for the first time,” announcer Don Wilson (pictured, above, to the right of comedian Jerry Colonna) told those tuning in to the Jell-O Program. There he stood, “that same young man in that same brown suit,” still shaking before every broadcast. “And that’s what worries me,” Benny confessed, “Now I shake and I’m not nervous.”

From the opening tune, “Man About Town”—the title of Benny’s latest film—the broadcast was to be a half-hour of . . . depreciation, an invitation for Benny’s writers to go to town at the man’s expense. That, in shorthand, is the Benny formula, an instantly recognizable persona that contemporary critics Jack Gaver and Dave Stanley termed the “whipping boy of the airwaves.” Benny’s first words on the air (uttered on 2 May rather than 30 April 1930) already signalled the fashion, but it also reminds us how successfully “that same young man in that same brown suit” retailored his act over the years:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Benny talking, and making my first appearance on the air professionally.  By that I mean I’m finally getting paid, which of course will be a great relief to my creditors.  I, uh, I think you don’t know why I’m here.  I’m supposed to be a sort of a master of ceremonies and tell you all the things will happen, which would happen anyway.  I must introduce the different artists who could easily introduce themselves, and also talk about the Canada Dry made-to-order by the glass, which is a waste of time as you know all about it.  You drink it, like it, and don’t want to hear about it.  So, ladies and gentlemen, a master of ceremonies is really a fellow who is unemployed and gets paid for it.

Gradually, such self-consciousness would become tempered with no uncertain vaingloriousness, and Benny (and his writers) left it to fellow cast members and rival comedians to make the fall guy trip. On the seventh anniversary program, even Fred Allen sent a wire, which Mary Livingstone somewhat less than dutifully read to Benny:

Livingstone.  Dear Jackass.

Benny.  Gimme that wire.  Mmm.  That’s “Dear Jack. As this is your seventh anniversary . . .”

The joke, however slight when quoted out of context, depends for its punch on a listener’s familiarity with the Benny-Allen feud. Audiences expected an acerbic note from a rival—but to be hearing it from those who worked with Benny, and on the occasion of his taking a bow to boot, gave the line a certain kick, one that was always directed at Benny’s posterior and conveniently administered by those nearest to him. Jackass? Benny was a regular piñata. The more direct the hit, the more likely the chances of hitting the jack(ass)pot.

Meanwhile, the anniversary of that celebratory broadcast is past . . . and I am still editing.

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No Headstone, No Regrets

How do you survive the ordeal of executing the killing of some 140,000 people and counting. Perhaps, by counting on facts and figures to counter or discount any accounts of fatality and disfigurement; by recounting to myself, for decades to come, that I could not be held accountable, having merely carried out orders as someone to be counted on; or by counting the praises bestowed upon me by those of my countrymen I would be pleased to encounter, for having been instrumental in ending a war that, without my precise handling of the instruments, might have ended the lives of countless more.

Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., the commander of the Enola Gay, whose idea of a loving tribute was to name after his mother the B-29 out of whose womb “Little Boy” dropped onto the roofs of Hiroshima, insisted that he had “no regrets” about the outcome of his mission, that he slept “clearly every night.” Clearly, he won’t be counting sheep, or charred bodies, tonight. Mr. Tibbets, the world took note, died today at the age of 92.

When I came across that announcement, I was reminded of “14 August,” a radio play by poet-journalist Norman Corwin (previously discussed here to mark the 60th anniversary of VJ Day). With it, Corwin sought to assure Americans that “God and uranium” had been on their “side,” that the “wrath of the atom fell like a commandment,” and that it was “worth a cheer” that the “Jap who never lost a war has lost a world; learning, at some cost, that crime does not pay.”

Broadcast on VJ-Day, “14 August” asked listeners to remember those Americans “dead as clay” after defending “the rights of men,” after “fighting for “people the likes of you.” No mention was made of the Japanese whose lives were turned to ash in the streets of Hiroshima; no words uttered to suggest that achieving peace at such “cost” might, too, be considered a “crime” for which someone other than the dead might have to pay.

I am reminded, too, of the aforementioned radio writer-historian Erik Barnouw, who, upon learning that the US government had “seized and impounded” reels of film shot in Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) by Japanese cameramen (headed by Akira Iwasaki), the reported return of which to Japan in 1968 led Barnouw to produce the documentary Hiroshima-Nagasaki, 1945 (1970). Reviewing the long-suppressed footage, Barnouw commented (in Media Marathon [1996]):

The material we saw had been organized in sequences, which included “effects on wood,” “effects on concrete,” “effects on internal organs,” and so forth, as though scientific questions had determined the shooting.  Other sequences showed grotesque destruction of buildings and bridges.

Finding only a “few sequences of people at improvised treatment shelters,” Barnouw was “troubled” by the “paucity” of what he referred to as “human effects footage.” Who could be counted on to tell the stories so often unaccounted for in the records of history?

The Allies’ fight against the Axis was a worthy cause; what is unworthy of those who lost their lives on either side is a victor’s sweeping dismissal of any consequences other than victory and the suppression or outright erasure of documents suggesting trauma rather than triumph.

VJ Day was hardly an occasion to show compassion for the defeated enemy, you might say, and that it is understandable that relief about the end of the war expressed itself in levity (as heard on the Fred Allen Show from 25 November 1945, a clip of which is featured in the above video [since then removed]).

To consider it appropriate, some thirty years later, to restage the Hiroshima bombing for a Texas air show; to insist, another thirty years on, that it is a “damn big insult” to acknowledge the sufferings of those who were killed for however worthy a cause, as Mr. Tibbets has done, strikes me as a failure to rival the inhumanity that is the success of Hiroshima.

Having long refused to draw attention to the death of thousands, Mr. Tibbets decided to make his own farewell a gesture of self-erasure. He had the foresight to request that no headstone be placed on his burial site, predicting that his contempt or disregard for others might tempt those ignored by him to turn his final resting place into a stage for protest.

Mr. Tibbets, it seems, was one to shun debate. Perhaps, a remarkably headstrong patriot like he deserves nothing more than our respect for his final wish: a vanishing act in keeping with a life of denial, a grave as unmarked as those of the victims unremarked upon.

“No regrets.” It is these words, and the words of those who call resolve what is a lack of compassion and an unwillingness or inability to countenance doubt, that we must mark, lest we are prepared to mark the occasion of another Hiroshima . . .

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On a Note of “Relevance”; or, What I Learn from Fellow Bloggers

Well, I had this particular spot reserved for two; but, as you will see, it got considerably more crowded here. Watching the Joan Crawford melodrama Possessed (1947) last night, I noticed in the opening credits that the screenplay was an adaptation written by playwrights once well known for their work in radio: Ranald McDougall and Silvia Richards.  I had come across McDougall’s name only yesterday, when his propaganda piece “The Boise” reached me by mail (between the covers of Erik Barnouw’s 1945 radio play anthology Radio Drama in Action).

McDougall’s plays for the series The Man Behind the Gun are notable for their effective use of second-person narration, an addressing of the listener as a character in the drama to follow:

You’re a chief bosun’s mate aboard the “Boise”—a gun pointer—the guy that points and fires the fifteen big guns of the cruiser.  Right now you’re standing by for action [. . .].  You’ve sighted the enemy, and your eye is jammed into the telescopic gun sight, searching for a target.  [And] now, very dimly, you see a light-gray spot on the lens . . . then another . . . and another—five of them. It’s them! You can see them plainly.

As those listening to old-time radio shows know, the technique was later used to announce each upcoming episode of Escape). McDougall’s collaborator writing the screenplay for Possessed was Silvia Richards. I assume that is the Sylvia Richards who wrote scripts for the thriller anthology Suspense. At any rate, I was going to discuss the influence of radio writing and technique on the structure of Possessed, a film noir that also makes use of radio’s voice-altering Sonovox, readers interested in which Google occasionally refers to broadcastellan.

The second topic on my mind was the narrative genre of soap opera, which occurred to me after misreading the date marking the demise of four long-running radio serials back in 1959, the anniversary of their silencing having been 2 January, not 1 February. I occasionally contribute a definition to Waking Ambrose and was interested in redefining “soap opera” for myself. It is a word that has become rather too loosely used, but might actually fit certain commercial blogs.

So, this is what I had planned to write about today; but technorati made me reconsider all that. After posting my essays here, I often go in search of other online journals discussing subjects similar to mine. Not infrequently, this leads to some follow up on my part. The other day, for instance, having written about the radio promotion for Cecil B. DeMille’s Four Frightened People, I searched for recent mentions of that title elsewhere. And what did I learn? That the film is going to be released as part of a DeMille DVD anthology. Both the Alternative Film Guide and Trouble in Paradise will tell you as much. That’s another product of popular culture recalled from obscurity. Unfortunately, my similarly obscure journal had little to do with it; but bloggers are doing their share by spreading the word and signalling interest in or demand for such films.

Yesterday, having just mocked the “relevance” of the Academy Awards, I came across an entry in the Popsurfing blog, shared by someone who, unlike me, took time to look at the entire list of nominees. And what is nominated in the documentary (short subject) category? A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, a film honoring the foremost exponent of American radio dramatics. How relevant (to me, the broadcastellan blog, and readers in popular culture) can an Oscar nomination get? The next question on my mind was not a rhetorical one: how can I get my hands on a copy of this film?

By sharing all this I meant to comment on the enriching interactivity of the blogosphere, on the flow of information (correct, false, relevant or not) that can sweep past, engulf, or uplift you, if only you bother to keep surfing. “There will be time later” (to quote a line from Corwin) to retreat into that world between my ears. Right now, I’m eager to look around and partake . . .

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Martin Luther Kingfish? Langston Hughes, Booker T. Washington, and the Problem of Representation

It was time to close the fourth broadcastellan poll, for which I had put together a list of radio plays by notable American poets, playwrights, and novelists including Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, and Pearl S. Buck, as well as works by writers more closely associated with the medium (namely Arch Oboler, Morton Wishengrad, and Norman Corwin). I was not surprised that the play receiving the most votes was Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry, Wrong Number.”

Less surprising still was that just as many voters turned out to declare that they had not heard or read a single one of the works mentioned. My intention was to highlight this anticipated lack of awareness, to suggest, particularly to those already interested in old-time radio, that to tune in to aural drama of the 1930s and ’40s does not mean to sever all connections with thoroughly respectable literature or so-called legitimate drama. Sure, Life Can Be Beautiful—but old-time radio drama can also be thought-provoking, historically relevant, and artistically engaging.

I needed to make this claim when I set out to turn my love for the traditional American Hörspiel (German for audio play) into the subject of a doctoral study in English literature. Long neglected and too infrequently discussed, aural dramatics are far easier to sell, package, and deliver as an historical subject than as an aesthetic one. Anything that may tell us about a people, its past and its paths, is generally deemed worthwhile a prolonged investigation of what is otherwise thought of as artistically negligible or intellectually dubious.

While eager to move discussions about radio drama into the academic circles in which I assumed myself to be spinning for years to come, I was anxious not to distort the subject by paying too much attention to a few isolated literary productions at the expense of the episodic thrillers, comedy-variety shows and dramatic anthologies that made up the bulk of the US networks’ night-time schedules throughout the 1940s. In other words, I did not want to represent the exclusive by excluding the representative.

As it turns out, recovering what was largely absent told me much about the everyday of American broadcasting as commercial construct and historical reality, as well as the democracy of memory.

None of those voting in my poll knew the radio play “Booker T. Washington in Atlanta” by noted African-American poet Langston Hughes; no wonder, since recordings of it have apparently not been preserved and its script has not been published in decades. It aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System to commemorate the Booker T. Washington stamp that was issued on 7 April 1940. Hughes called his play “a special occasion script, as are most scripts dealing with Negro life—since we are not normally a part of radio drama, except as comedy relief.”

Few radio plays captured the black experience, whereas the “stereotype of the dialect-speaking, amiably moronic Negro servant” was the “chief representative of [his] racial group on the air.” Erik Barnouw, who included the play in his anthology Radio Drama in Action (1945), added that “[t]his kind of script” was acceptable in American broadcasting since it “can emphasize Negro accomplishments instead of our society’s failure toward him.”

US radio entertainment was not all Amos ‘n’ Andy—an Anglo-Saxon distortion of the diversity of an ever-evolving culture; nor should it be mistaken for an accurate representation of 1940s America. The average radio audience was largely a construct created by an industry that provided the funding for programming designed to increase its profits and improve its image. Yet however warped, it was nonetheless a composite picture in which millions of individual listeners tried to find themselves.

It is this problem of representation that Hughes addresses in his play: “You’ve spoke in front of northern white folks, and southern colored folks, and us farmers around here too,” a farmer tells Booker T. Washington:

But in Atlanta tomorrow you gonna have city folks and country folks, Yankees and Southerners—and colored folks added to that.  Now, how you gonna please all them different kind o’ folks, Washington? I figger you got yourself in a kinder tight place.

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On This Day in 1945: Katharine Hepburn Acts Like It Is Nineteen Thirty-Three

Well, the past three weeks or so have been rather trying. My New York City souvenir proves to be one of the most adhesive colds I’ve ever had the misfortune to catch. I’ve slipped up on several occasions composing my blog entries—and am indebted to those who pointed it out to me. For weeks now I have not been able to enjoy my daily dose of classic Hollywood. You know there’s something amiss when you, an ardent movie buff, find yourself dozing off while watching some of the finest motion pictures of Hollywood’s golden age. Over the past few weeks I’ve been falling asleep during or failing to follow film classics including (in order of their disappearance before my eyes) the exotic Greta Garbo vehicle Mata Hari; Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People; Garson Kanin’s Bachelor Mother; the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel; and The Milky Way starring my favorite comedian, Harold Lloyd. What will this cold deprive me of next!

Now, tonight I was determined to take in another holiday themed radio play—and, having selected an hourlong recording, I was anxious to put my attention to the test. Instead of nodding off, I found myself laughing and shedding tears as I listened to Erik Barnouw’s adaptation of Little Women, first heard on this day, 23 December, in 1945 on the Theatre Guild program.

Barnouw, who later became one of the first historians of American broadcasting (and who recalled one of his experiences adapting plays for the Theatre Guild program in Media Marathon, pictured above), chopped up Louisa May Alcott’s beloved story so expertly that it comes across as whole and rich and unhurried. The success of this production is in large part due to the passionate performance of Katharine Hepburn as Jo, a role she first took on back in 1933, when she appeared in George Cukor’s cinematic rendering of the 1868 original.

Now, Ms. Hepburn’s voice aged rather more rapidly than her exterior; or at least it proved more difficult to cover up the brittleness of her vocal chords than it is to apply fresh paint to pallid or freckled cheeks. Generally, radio served aging actors quite well; but Ms. Hepburn, then merely 38 years old, sounded considerably older, especially when heard among the youthful voices of the three women who played her sisters. Since she also told the story in retrospect, however, this did not create much of a problem; besides, Hepburn’s enthusiasm and vigor readily assist the listener in imagining her as the quick-tempered and sharp-tongued Jo March, whose “ambition was to do something very splendid.”

Hepburn did something splendid that night, as did Oskar Homolka in the role of the Professor who wins Jo’s heart. The wounds of war were still fresh that Christmas—so Professor Bhaer was turned into an Austrian, instead of being Alcott’s idea of a “regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes [Jo] ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one’s ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble.” With the exception of a line from Goethe, this adaptation cuts most references to and expressions in German, which feature so prominently in Alcott’s novel.

Still, after those two previously discussed holiday plays on Suspense—the second of which I apparently forgot as soon as I had heard it—this intelligible and charming aural production of Little Women was a joy not behold. “‘I wish it was Christmas or New Year’s all the time. Wouldn’t it be fun?’ answered Jo, yawning dismally.” I am yawning, too, now; but I am glad to have stayed awake long enough to see Jo and the Professor happily united.

Now it is time to pack my suitcase once again. I’m off to the south of Wales and to London thereafter. So (as not to be forced into perpetuating the unfortunate “Happy Holidays”/”Merry Christmas” debate), I’ll say in my native German, “Frohe Weihnachten,” one and all!

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How a Picture Perfect Brief Encounter Dissolved into a Not-So-Still Life

Last night, when it was time to dim the lights, set up the screen, and decide upon a movie to take in, I could be convinced to leave Broadway and Hollywood behind to make it David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945). Mind you, it did not require much coaxing. I purchased a copy of the film a few weeks ago, but believed myself to be not deserving of experiencing it just yet. Some motion pictures are so grand that they demand not only our attention but our emotional receptiveness.

I have always thought it possible, and indeed imperative, to approach art with a keen eye and an open heart, to feel it and to feel like thinking about it at the same time. To examine Brief Encounter without being enveloped by it would be tantamount to noting the ingredients of a great meal without taking time to savor it.

Only after I had dried the tears I was neither inclined nor able to hold back, did I go in search of another interpretation of the story—cinema reconstituted as radio drama. A while back, I did as much with Lean’s Blithe Spirit, but knew right away that, in this case, radio could not hold a candle to a portrait so delicately outlined and exquisitely lit.

When the Theatre Guild reworked both Brief Encounter and Still Life, the Noel Coward play of which the film is an adaptation, the show’s producers made a number of sensible choices. They managed to bring Ingrid Bergman to the microphone to assume the role of Laura Jesson, the married woman who inwardly rehearses the miracle and misery of her recent indiscretion rather than confessing it openly to the husband beside her. Subtle and dignified, Bergman is perfect for the part, her emotive voice well suited to capturing moments of dignity under the assault of passion.

At the time of the broadcast (6 April 1947), Bergman starred on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, along with Sam Wanamaker and Romney Brent. Both her costars were heard in the Guild’s “Still Life,” with Wanamaker as Laura’s lover and Brent as her husband. Unlike Bergman, the two male leads do not quite communicate the vulnerability with which Trevor Howard and Cyril Raymond invested their parts.

Watching the film, I was under the impression that Laura was tormented by her overwhelming emotions, whereas the radio version suggested that she was torn apart by the two disparate men in her life, by the one wanting so little and the other demanding so much. What contributed to this impression was the way in which the adaptation by radio playwright and noted broadcast historian Erik Barnouw reframed Laura’s narrative without having access to a camera’s perspectival manipulations.

Lean’s film opens with the lovers’ last parting at the train station, a final farewell rendered furtive and mute by the sudden intrusion of one of Laura’s chatty acquaintances. Before the story of Laura’s affair unfolds in retrospect, the viewer already knows that something went terribly wrong for her, that the man who merely touches her shoulder has a stronger hold over her than she can permit herself to make public. Close-ups convey Laura’s grief, her isolation.

The radio version, on the other hand, opens with a scene of domestic life, as Laura’s husband struggles to control his two children who are unwilling to go to sleep before their mother returns home, presumably from a day of shopping. The listener is thus encouraged to prejudge Laura’s actions, to question the indiscretion of an inattentive mother who leaves her charge in the care of her husband while amusing herself with another man. Before she utters even one word of remorse, Laura is already a marked woman. In other words, whereas radio listeners are invited to accuse or pardon her, the film audience is given access to Laura’s own sense of guilt, her inner turmoil.

Generally, radio plays are quite capable of performing close-ups by means of whispered or closely-miked narration; in this particular cinematic challenge, however, the camera suggests so much more than unillustrated speech can express. When Laura acts on the impulse to end her life, her movements and features (pictured above) bespeak the horror that is her emotional imbalance.

In Barnouw’s adaptation, Laura merely talks in retrospect of having wanted to “throw [herself] under his [that is, her lover’s] train”—an unfortunate prosaic shortcut for the sweep and sway of Lean’s storytelling, aurally underscored images that reminded me, despite my love for the non-visual medium, what a sacrifice it can be to take leave of one’s complementary senses.