Tag: James Cagney

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". . . it’s been a good day": A Cake for Mr. B

Yes, it’s been a good day. Yes, sir, a good day. Started out that way. When I woke up, the warm, friendly smell of breakfast was drifting upstairs, and the blossoms of my cherry tree were tapping against the windows. Mmm. Lying there, I felt seventeen. Until Marilly’s voice bolted upstairs . . .

Mayor, aren’t you ever coming down to breakfast? It’s gonna be stone cold!

. . . and my years were upon me again as Marilly’s voice called me back.

Thus opens a wistful episode of The Mayor of the Town, broadcast on this day, 28 April, in 1943. The sentimental comedy starred the aforementioned Lionel Barrymore in the title role and Agnes Moorehead as his daydream-terminating housekeeper Marilly. Moorehead’s voice (last remarked upon here) sure could shatter illusions. None tuning in could have mistaken Barrymore for a teenager, though. While the microphone withheld much that a camera could not hide, Barrymore sounded as if the road of his life had seen better days and that, along the way, loads of dust and rubble had gotten lodged in the traveler’s voice box. The actor’s vocal chords not only bespoke the age we insist on calling true but also befitted the part of a man with plenty to look back on through the rear view mirror of his mind.

During the course of his “good day,” the Mayor encounters many a youngster—an inquisitive boy, a lovelorn adolescent, a young husband, and a father-to-be—whose doubts and cares recall to him the challenges faced by his former self. A whole life is condensed into the span of a few hours, further compressed to fit the time slot allotted for a single broadcast.

Yes, it’s been a good day. I kept seeing myself over and over in those kids. But what man doesn’t see himself in every real boy? And then, at noon, I performed a wedding, and I saw myself again. Young and in love and full of ideals . . .

Leaving his housekeeper well out of earshot in the company of her suitors (among them, another Lionel, the gravel-voiced Stander), the Mayor drifts in and out of reflections on youth and age as the goes about his daily business in Springdale. “My, how things do repeat themselves,” he muses, as he recalls bidding farewell to his love to go into battle, just like those thousands of young men and women who where then going out into the theaters of war.

“Too much nostalgia isn’t good for anyone,” the Mayor checks himself as he, a widower now, is reminded of his wedding anniversary. “I could stand a little vinegar to mix with all that honey.” Yet just as his character tells his housekeeper to “get out the sulphur and molasses,” the cast and crew of the show break into “Happy Birthday.” A cake was being brought in, the announcer explained to those listening at home. Yes, all along, while the Mayor reminisced, the actor who brought him to life with his well-worn voice was celebrating an anniversary of his own.

“Mr. Barrymore” Moorehead addresses the star of the program,

we of the cast of The Mayor of the Town want to give you our best wishes on your sixty-fifth birthday. We’re especially pleased your birthday falls exactly on our broadcasting day, for we’d like all our listening audience to join in our celebration. Springdale and its people are very real to us, and very near to our hearts. But nearer to us is the one who represents it all: our dear friend, Mr. Barrymore. So, Mr. B., we offer you our thanks for the many pleasant hours we’ve had with you and wish you many happy returns of the day.

Then paying his respects to Mr. B is the year’s Academy Award winning “Best Actor” and president of the Screen Actor’s Guild—the aforementioned James Cagney—who reminds us that this was not only the anniversary of Barrymore’s birth, but also the “fiftieth anniversary” of his

first appearance on any stage; because, friends, fifty years ago today, one of the most loved actors of stage, screen, and radio made his debut in Kansas City appearing in The Rivals, with his grandmother, the great actress Mrs. John Drew.

After such sentiment and cheer, the broadcast—itself as old as Lionel Barrymore was then—concludes with the “sulphur and molasses” supplied by the makers of Rinso, sponsors of the program, whose spokesman was called upon to bring home the realities a gentle comedy like The Mayor of the Town could only gloss over. The announcer reminded listeners that it had not been such a “good day” elsewhere, that many a celebration had to be scaled down or postponed for the duration (“save waste kitchen fats”—”yes, those homely meat drippings make explosives”), and that many a youth, such as the “American flyers executed by Japs” that day—would never get a chance to wax nostalgic . . .

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“Yankee Doodle went to town” . . . and That Is Where You’ll Find Him

Well, call me a “dirty rat,” but I’ve never paid much attention to this memorial on East 91 Street (or “James Cagney Place,” to be precise), a mere two blocks from where I used to live. The everyday renders much what surrounds us invisible; so, I’m going to make some noise for the old “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the tribute to whom I now see with eyes accustomed to the green hills of Wales. Say, just how Welsh is the old New Yorker? Taking advantage of the wireless network I am gleefully tapping, I reencountered the aforementioned Cagney in an adaptation of Night Must Fall by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams (previously discussed here). On American radio, the role of Danny, the charming psychopath, was most frequently played by Robert Montgomery, who also starred in the 1937 screen version. As it turns out, Cagney does not sound unlike Montgomery, which is to say, rather Irish than, as Williams prescribed it, “more Welsh than anything else.”

Among the other radio-related finds of the day were fine copies of Earle McGill’s Radio Directing (1940) and Harrison B. Summer’s Thirty-Year History of Radio Programs, 1926-1956 (1971), the latter of which I consulted so frequently while writing my doctoral study on old-time radio. Both volumes sat on the shelves of the Strand bookstore on 828 Broadway, which is well worth a visit for anyone who enjoys browsing for unusual books. A few blocks away, I found a copy of Once Upon a Time (for a mere $4.99); I have long wanted to catch up with this comedy. After all, it is based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy (“My Client, Curley” (previously discussed here).

Meanwhile, night is falling on Manhattan. Time to leave the old wireless alone and go out for a drink . . .

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Senseless: One Soldier’s Fight to Speak Against War

Well, how do you like that! We just got ourselves a DVD/VCR recorder, in hopes of upgrading our video library and phasing out the old tapes that are piling up all over the place. As it turns out, the cassettes I shipped over from the US, which had played fine on the machine that gave up the ghost a couple of days ago, are being rejected by the new, regionally coded, high-tech marvel. Is it any wonder I am such an advocate of the state-of-the-Ark, the marvels of old-time radio drama?

On this day, 9 March, in 1940, for instance, playwright Arch Oboler masterfully exploited the potentialities of the medium with his adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. As reworked by Oboler, this “most talked of book of the year” relates the experience of a soldier (portrayed by James Cagney) who lost his limbs, his vision, his hearing in combat. More than twenty years later, lying “alone in a room in a hospital close to your city,” having “no arms, no legs, no ears with which to hear, no eyes with which to see, no mouth with which to speak,” he yet learns to communicate what serving his country at once enabled and disabled him to say. He does not want a medal; he wants to speak up. It is a freedom for which he fought with the weaponry that is responsible for its loss.

According to Oboler, Trumbo’s story “has even greater emotional impact” on the air because, by virtue of being “transformed into living speech,” the soldier’s words attain an “almost unendurable reality.” Johnny does not address the audience, but is overheard in his desperate attempt to make himself understood by the hospital staff and visitors, the living beings he senses only through the vibrations of their movements.

Oboler was particularly impressed by the scenes in which the “blind, deaf and dumb soldier learns to recognize the approach of the nurse by the vibrations of her footsteps coming up through the bedsprings and reacting against his skin.” It is a cruel irony that appeals to the melodramatist: a man who nearly lost all his senses now tries to make others come to theirs.

Unlike the 1971 movie adaptation, however, “Johnny Got His Gun” was produced at a time when speaking up against war was neither daring nor idealistic. Indeed, most intellectuals warned against a false peace, whereas to isolationists, who didn’t mind dealing with fascists overseas, keeping out of it was literally good for business.

Oboler was no pacifist; soon he would distance himself from “Johnny” and advocate instead the stirring of “hate” as being instrumental in motivating the masses in wartime. “Do not tell me that the people are disillusioned because of our past sins, our ‘Johnny Got His Guns,’ and so on, and that they need a dream of the new world before they are going to fight,” Oboler argued; “anger is what people want. And they want hate, the hate of a determined people who are going to kill and must kill to win this war.” That mass of “living flesh” in the hospital bed had made his appeal in vain.

New generations of Johnnies are getting their guns. No one hands us a voice; that we have to find for ourselves and raise while we may.