Tag: John Dickson Carr

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Once Over “Lightly”?

My blood is running cold tonight; and the chiller responsible for it is no mere work of fiction. Our house has all the comforts of a mausoleum. The faucets are spouting glacial water; and “daylight savings,” which went into effect last night, meant no appreciable gain in solar heat. We ran out of oil, and, except for the benefit of a fire blazing in the living room, are feeling the want keenly, as hail the size of chickpeas pelted our conservatory roof this afternoon. So, reaching for a certain volume in my library with hands in gloves, like a thief anxious not to leave incriminating fingerprints, was quite beyond playacting. Never mind the melodramatic embellishment. Warmth was the effect I was after.

There is something comforting (and very British besides) about sitting by the fire while contemplating cold-blooded crimes as perpetrated by the villains of a cozy whodunit. The aforementioned John Dickson Carr is the man of this frigid hour. His “Dead Sleep Lightly” was first broadcast on this day, 30 March, in 1943, with noted theater actor Walter Hampden, screen star Susan Hayward, and Lee Bowman (who would play opposite Hayward in Smash-Up) in the leads.

As I picked up the script (published in an anthology of the same title), I wondered how its production would measure up to the words on the page. As it turns out, the published script differs significantly from the play as broadcast in the United States. Revising it for a British audience, the author did not simply go once over “Lightly.”

To begin with, as Carr biographer Douglas Greene points out in his foreword, the BBC script (produced on 28 August 1943 as part of the series Appointment with Fear) is considerably longer (about thirty percent). Carr struggled with twenty-odd minute frame allotted for his puzzlers when they aired on Suspense, a brevity that forced him to be simplistic or otherwise render his plots overly complicated. Like most Carr thrillers, “The Dead” invites listeners to figure out not only whodunit, but how it was done. On the air, the mysteries could not be quite as confounding yet fair as they appear on the page, where, undisturbed by the ticking of the studio clock, readers may gather clues and ponder them at leisure.

That said, the lengthened script is not any more intricate in its construction than the shorter dramatization. Removed from the romantic mist of atmospheric sound effects, its clues are strewn in plain sight. Nor does the provision a guide (Gideon Fell, Carr’s serial killer-catcher) enhance the thrill of the hunt. The US version does without such a voice of authority, a detective who examines the facts for us and solves the mystery in due course; instead, those tuning in find themselves in the company of the parties most immediately affected.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” With these apposite words the Suspense drama gets underway. We are at a funeral on a rainy spring morning; but the buried body is not the one referred to in the title. We are being misled or meant to stumble upon something along the way, just like crotchety Mr. Templeton (or Pemberton, as Carr renamed the character in his revised script). The man has just been confronted with his none too comforting past, a moral blot that the British version darkens to the point at which American broadcasters generally draw the line, in fear of offending the puritanically overzealous among the public they were meant to serve. The victim, you see, is no honorable fellow and might well deserve persecution. In the more sentimental original, he may just have the ghost of a chance at redemption.

Fair play or foul, “The Dead” is made for airplay. There is a disembodied voice at the cold heart of it all. What I appreciate most about listening and not having to turn the pages on a day like this is that, while taking it all in, I can keep these icy digits up my sleeves . . .

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A String of Pearls? Sweeney Todd on Stage, Screen, and Radio

As much as I have enjoyed our Gracie Fields trip—which continued last night with Look Up and Laugh (1935), featuring Vivien Leigh in her film debut—an excursion into the make-believe of contemporary cinema seemed long overdue. And if “contemporary” means Victorian melodrama set to music by Stephen Sondheim, such a break is hardly a violent disruption. Still, I was reluctant to return to Fleet Street. I’m familiar with the Demon Barber’s establishment; and unlike those to whom Burton’s slasher with songs serves as an introduction to this well worn piece of penny dreadfulness—Sweeney Toddlers, I call them—I cannot help but be reminded of past encounters with the not-so-gay blade. Would the razor, as swung by Burton, be sharp, dull, or just too ornate to be effective?

According to my diaries, whose racier passages I skipped to extract the data I required from it, I got my first look at Sweeney in September 1989, when Sondheim’s 1979 musical was revived by the York Theater Company and moved to the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway, with Bob Gunton as Sweeney and Beth Fowler in the role of Mrs. Lovett (see Playbill above). Referred to as “Sweeney Todd, Up Close and Personal” by its director, it was a scaled down production that depended far more on the talents of its performers than on an elaborate set design. What besides rage, a razor, and that ingenious chair does Sweeney really need to get the job done?

A little more than three years later, Mrs. Lovett was Judy Kaye and Fleet Street was a set at the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey. As I remarked in an undergraduate essay, venturing out to New Jersey “meant not only the reluctant departure from the cultural center, but also from personal stereotypes about Manhattan’s periphery.” Ms. Kaye, whom I would meet on a few occasions thereafter, truly brought the amoral pie maker back to life for anyone who might have thought she had died after the spirit of Angela Lansbury departed from a body so easily collapsed into a single dimension.

A decade later, the melodrama The String of Pearls by George Dibdin Pitt had made it onto my reading list as I sauntered toward my doctorate. The barber’s chair and the revolving trap were already in place when the play premiered in 1847; but in this version, borrowed from French sources, the motive Todd’s scheme to “polish off” his customers was a hankering after the titular pearls rather than suffering and revenge:

When a boy, the thirst of avarice was fist awakened by the fair gift of a farthing; that farthing soon became a pound; the pound a hundred—so to a thousand, till I said to myself, I will possess a hundred thousand. This string of pearls will complete the sum.

Since my studies were chiefly concerned with US radio drama, it had also come to my ears that, back in 1896, Sherlock Holmes had attended, “with obvious delight,” a revival of the shocker. In one of Doctor Watson’s accounts of his life with the famed detective (broadcast on 28 January 1946), Holmes is invited backstage, where the actor in the title role shares his horrible suspicion:

I know it sounds fantastic, but it’s true. I’ve often heard of actors beginning to live their parts off the stage that they play on it. Well, it’s happening to me. I am turning into another Sweeney Todd, the character I am portraying on the stage.

A reference to this oft sliced chestnut, heard here in a CBC production from 1947, can also be found in John Dickson Carr’s this episode of Cabin B-13 (5 July 1948), in which an American visitor to London learns that he resembles a killer who lives above a barber shop in Fleet Street, has got a razor and “is ready to use it.”

While not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated, Burton’s Sweeney is joyless and drab, rendered in computer generated imagery that, by now, has become more tiresome than the traditional hokum on display in this black-and-white version from 1936 starring Tod Slaughter. Being forced to fly rather than slowly make our way through the labyrinthine passages of the dingy, darksome metropolis, one gets no sense of entrapment or secrecy.

Our minds do not get the workout that make our bones ache in the keen awareness of having travelled on foot rather than some multi-purpose not-so-magic carpet from the CGI warehouse. Whatever happened to a sound brick wall like the one we want to bang our head against after having been taken for a ride that?

Removed from its narrative frame (“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd”), the epic theater convention of encouraging detachment to achieve a demonstration of social problems, what remains of Sondheim’s Sweeney is old-fashioned melodrama for the pathos of which Burton used to have a flair. And yet, more so even than Charlie (discussed here), Sweeney is largely devoid of wit and vision. With the exception of the Pirelli-Barker shaving contest, in which Sacha Baron Cohen steals the show as the Todd’s spurious rival, most of the numbers are listlessly assembled.

It would have been intriguing to see this melodrama turned into a pop-up book in which cardboard characters struggle to emerge as three-dimensional individuals; but the characters, as presented by Burton, would not stand a chance to distinguish themselves. They are utterly forgettable—a rare feat, given such material.

Burton might do well to look beyond his ensemble once in a while. Depp, who is being given a virtual Botox treatment that renders his phizog expressionless, and Bonham-Carter, who is buxom yet bloodless, are not suited for every costume he throws at them. Their voices are thin, their singing flat and, what is worse, the enunciation frustratingly poor. Bonham-Carter, if you’ll permit the pun, has probably the worst pipes in London. The orchestra is meant to give the musically challenged actors a boost; but here it ends up given them the boot instead. Casting, after all, is not as easy as “popping pussies into pies.”

In short, this latest Sweeney is as tired as a Victorian scullery maid who has lost the ability to dream up ways of disposing of her employers. With all those pearls of ruby blood spilled onto screen, some ought to have been set aside for an emergency transfusion.

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On This Day in 1943: Peter Lorre Gives Voice to "A Moment of Darkness"

Well, I am generally slow to catch up. As the broadcastellan maxim—”Keeping up with the out-of-date”—suggests, I am forever belated in my response to the news of the world, food for thought I tend to chew more slowly than the dinner on my plate. Having just learned from a fellow web-journalist that the mind of ousted American Idol finalist Mandisa might be considerably less broad than her frame, I thought of other occasions on which the message of a voice seems out of tune with the messenger, moments in which timbre and text, sound and image, appear to be at odds. One such occasion was “A Moment of Darkness,” a radio play by noted mystery writer John Dickson Carr that aired on this day, 20 April, in 1943.

“A Moment of Darkness” is one of Carr’s ambitious but far from satisfying attempts to make up for the inadequacies of the medium by complicating the kind of plots that radio is least successful in rendering: the “whodunit.” The murder mystery is a genre best suited to novels, page-turners that permit the confounded to do just that: turn the pages, forward and back. On the air, such puzzles are often marred by a lack of pieces, or red herrings, due to the limited number of suspects and clues a listener can be expected to tell apart and pick up within the short time allotted for the drama.

In the fall of 1942, when Carr became the head writer for a fledgling US radio program titled Suspense, he devised alternate ways of mystifying his audience, of casting doubt about the outcome of his thrillers.

As I discuss it in Etherized Victorians, my study on so-called old-time radio, Carr not only asked listeners “whodunit,” but “how done,” by presenting posers involving locked rooms, less-than-obvious weapons, as well ingenious acts of committing and concealing crime. Unlike the reader, the listening audience is rarely equal to this double challenge of guessing the “who” and “how,” considering that there is no chance to recap or retreat in order to evaluate the (mis)information provided. The likely response is that of utter dumbfoundedness, a puzzlement of the least intellectual sort that, in turn, may trigger feelings of exasperation or indifference.

Later Suspense dramatists well understood and expertly solved this problem by emphasizing the “most dangerous game” of the manhunt or exploring the mental state of criminal and victim. Determined to trick his audience with surprises rather than tease them with suspense, Carr decided to heighten the element of doubt and suspicion, to exploit the prejudices of the listener in ways that sounded entirely radiogenic: foreign accents suggesting fiendish acts. In “The Moment of Darkness,” as in Carr’s “Till Death Do Us Part,” such a foreign-tongue twist was delivered by the enigmatic Peter Lorre.

During World War II—and for many years thereafter—harsh Germanic tones often sufficed to taint or undermine a speaker’s message, to make listeners question the sincerity of the utterance or the motives behind it. His Teutonic tongue made Lorre a formidable wartime villain; and his voice, which could be disconcertingly oleaginous, sly, or sinister, inflected with hysteria and madness, only fueled the imagination of Americans prejudiced against foreign influences.

Given the diversity of US culture, however, the networks did not altogether endorse the exploitation of accents—particularly European accents—as reliable signposts of a certain, unmistakable nationality, a mother tongue bespeaking the fatherland of the enemy. Radio writers like Carr were advised not to use voices as a means of identifying—and disqualifying—a speaker as un-American. According to the logic of pre-Political Correctness, Lorre’s character, a sham shaman, is not at all what he sounds, a vocality/locality mismatch that not so much teaches the audience to question their prejudices but to distrust their ears altogether.

There is no such thing as accent-free speech, of course; but those, like me, whose first language is not the one in which they primarily speak are often self-conscious about the sound of their voice, or at least keenly aware of the doubt and derision it might provoke.