Tag: Lux Radio Theater

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They [Got] What They Wanted: or, We Postpone This Wedding

Starting next week, I shall once again take in a few shows on and off Broadway. In the meantime, I do what millions of small-townspeople used to do during the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s—I listen to theater. Since the 1920, such makeshift-believe had been coming straight from the New York stage, whether as on-air promotion or educational features. Aside from installing an announcer in the wings to translate the goings-on and comings-in, it took the producers of broadcast theatricals some time to figure out what could work for an audience unable to follow the action with their own eyes. When that was accomplished, in came the censors to determine what could come to their ears. The censors were in the business of anticipating what could possibly offend a small minority of self-righteous and sententious tuners-in who would wield their mighty pen to complain, causing radio stations to dread having risked their license for the sake of the arts.

Few established playwrights attempted to re-write for radio. One who dared was Kenyon Nicholson, whose Barker, starring Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert delighted Broadway audiences back in 1927 (and radio audiences nearly a decade later). On this day, 19 May, in 1946, the Theatre Guild on the Air presented his version of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, with John Garfield as Joe, Leo Carillo as Tony, and June Havoc (pictured) as Amy.

Now, I have never seen a stage production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning They Knew; nor have I read it. Like most tuning in that evening, I would not have known about the tinkering that went on so that the story involving a doomed mail-order May-December romance could be delivered into American living rooms—were it not for Nicholson’s own account of what it entailed to get They Knew past the censors.

Nicholson got to share his experience adapting They Knew, one of his “favorite plays,” in a foreword to his script, which was published in an anthology of plays produced by the Theatre Guild on the Air. According to the inexperienced adapter, his “enthusiasm for the job lessened somewhat” as soon as he began to undertake the revision:

“Radio is understandably squeamish when it comes to matters of illicit love, cuckolded husbands, illegitimate babies, and such; and, as these taboo subjects are the very core of Mr. Howard’s plot, I realized what a ticklish job I had undertaken.”

After all, Messrs. Chase and Landry remind us, as the result of a single listener complaint about this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, which retained expressions like “hell” and “for god’s sake,” several NBC Blue affiliates were cited by the FCC and ordered to defend their decision to air such an offensive program. Nicholson was nonetheless determined “that there could be no compromise. Distortion of motivation as a concession to Mr. and Mrs. Grundy of the listening public would be a desecration of Mr. Howard’s fine play.”

It was with “fear and trembling” that Nicholson submitted his script. Recalling its reception, he expressed himself “surprised to find the only alteration suggested by the Censor was that Joe seduce Amy before her marriage to old Tony.”

The “only alteration”? Is not the “before” in the remark of the pregnant Amy—”I must have been crazy, that night before the wedding”—precisely the kind of “compromise” and “[d]istortion” the playwright determined not to accept? Nicholson dismisses this change altogether too nonchalantly as a “brave effort to whitewash the guilty pair!” Rather, it is the playwright’s whitewashing of his own guilt in this half-hearted confession about his none too “brave” deed.

The censors sure knew what they did not want those to hear who never knew what they did not get.

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The Hard Way, Another Way

Now, what’s wrong with this picture? This is what I thought last night when I screened the Vincent Sherman-directed melodrama The Hard Way (1943). From the title credits, showing those diamonds and pearls, it seemed obvious what it takes to get rich in the fashion suggested by the title. The image is, however, somewhat misleading. While hardly an abject failure, The Hard Way somehow seemed too soft. It is essentially a draft for Mildred Pierce, or might have been.

A woman struggling and scheming behind the scenes so that a younger one may have the new dress, the big break, the easy life—but not the same man—does call Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth to mind; and, indeed, those two would have faired much better in this glossy, showy vehicle than the rather too young Lupino and the too plain Joan Leslie. I kept hoping that, instead of pushing her sister onto the boards, Lupino’s Helen Chernen would finally push her off them and take the lead herself. Who, I ask, would pick Leslie over Lupino, unless, perhaps, for a cow-milking contest?

Nor did I buy Jack Carson (who also co-starred in the aforementioned Mildred Pierce) as a suicide; robust and none too philosophical, his Albert Runkel struck me as too much of a trouper to call it quits in that way. The only player to be cast perfectly in The Hard Way is Gladys George as the washed-up, boozy Lily Emery (pictured opposite Lupino above, in what to me is the film’s most effective scene) . George brought to the show the sort of pathos an old-fashioned backstage backstabbing melodrama requires.

As I thought of a new set of stars for the film, I once again availed myself of the theater of the mind, being that radio dramatizations routinely recast plays made famous on stage and screen (as previously discussed here). The Lux Radio Theater version, presented on 20 March 1944, offers this alternative group of players: Miriam Hopkins as Helen, Anne Baxter as her younger sister, Katie, Franchot Tone as the man loved by both, and Chester Morris as the hapless Runkel.

Host Cecil B. DeMille sets the scene with the kind of intimacy for which Lux was famous. It truly brought the stars home:

The Hard Way is a drama of tempestuous emotion. We’ll go backstage, into the life of the theater, behind the scenes of glamour, to discover what one woman’s ambition can do to those she loves. There’s always a fascination for me in a story of the theater. All my life has been spent there. From the time I was six or seven years old and hung around backstage, watching my father and David Belasco at the business of staging plays.

The strident, temperamental Ms. Hopkins, well remembered by many Lux listeners from her most recent success opposite Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance (the 2007 Broadway revival of which I reviewed here) brings to the role of Helen what the brainier, more sophisticated Lupino withheld. It is convenient to observe in hindsight that the scheming big sister backstage, fighting for the kind of parts she could never get, was more ideally suited to Hopkins, whose career as a leading lady was pretty much over. Hopkins would not make another movie for half a decade, and take either supporting roles or appear in B-picture thereafter. Still, Hopkins has the kind of intensity that, in the close-up medium of film, can appear shrill and overbearing, but that works well on the stage, where she starred during those days in plays like The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) and The Perfect Marriage (1944). True, Ms. Lupino comes from an old theatrical family; but in The Hard Way, her performance seems rather too understated for the kind of histrionics fit for that toothsome stew of the sensational and the sentimental, the kind of potboiler once known as a woman’s picture.

Not that the Lux production is flawless. Its major fault lies in the narration. No longer is it Helen who recalls past sins after having so desperately attempted to drown them; instead, the teller of tales is Mr. DeMille, the omniscient director, who sets the scene for the ladies to inhabit (until the next commercial break, that is). Of course, anyone hoping to rework the established structure of a slick, commercial program like Lux would, like Helen Chernen, try and fail The Hard Way.

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Disappearing Acts

“Last night, I couldn’t sleep, and lit the light to read. I saw the bulb go out. It faded out, as though the power went off by slow degrees.” This is one of the voices describing the disconcerting events that occurred “At Midnight on the 31st of March.” It is the dramatization of a story in blank verse by Josephine Young Case (published in 1938) which, the result of fortuitous timing or a bad case of literal-mindedness, was broadcast on this day, 31 March, back in 1943. It was one in a series whose literary aspiration was signalled by its title Author’s Playhouse (just where to place the apostrophe I am not quite sure). A transcript of the broadcast may be perused here; while an excerpt of the original work has been shared and discussed here by a fellow webjournalist). “At Midnight” is a peculiar, disturbing look at a small-town community dealing with the disappearance of the world its members knew or thought to have known, had created for themselves, learned to accept as binding or let shape them without questioning its nature.

“Our lights went out at midnight,” another speaker recalls how the end of their world began. “And the radio programs died out, too. And I’ve got a battery set. But I couldn’t get nothin’ but static.” A third one marvels that, beyond their village, there were no “towns at all. Not any house or road. Only the river, and the creeks, and the trees.” “At Midnight” offers no solutions, no explanations. It is the vanishing of a world with which those who used to inhabit it are forced to deal.

Tuning in, I was not only reminded of our current spell without a drop of heating oil or my remoteness from the city I once called home, but of a threat to all I knew or wondered at when, as a child, I overheard my parents talking about a prediction that the world would come to an end before dawn, leaving me to ponder an unfathomable chaos. “And what will come to us?” another voice “At Midnight” echoes the distant fears none but a thoughtless adult would call childish. “Yes, where will we be?”

“At Midnight” encourages us to rethink what we generally consider the end of the world—the end and the ends of our life. The show, an adage has it, must go on, as it had to on 1 April, back in 1946, when Noah Beery, scheduled to appear with two of his family members in a Lux Radio Theater production of Barnacle Bill, died shortly after the rehearsals. Producers of the well-oiled Lux program found an immediate replacement, with brother Wallace and niece Carol Ann clinging like the titular organism to their comedy vehicle so that it could take off as scheduled. Noah Beery’s voice now speaks to us from the beyond as, in this rare case, an transcription disk, unaired and long-forgotten, has given it a now public afterlife.

“Yes, where will we be?” I keep thinking as I go on making a largely unheeded record of the lives I know, and lead, and dream of . . .

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Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry

Her name was Lola Lola. She was a showgirl. Never mind yellow feathers in her hair. Her dive wasn’t exactly the Copa. She was a practical kind of dame who worked up a sweat making those drool who followed her curves as she did her “Head to Toe” number over at the Blue Angel. She wasn’t the “Angel” . . . at least not until Paramount took her under its ample wing and transformed her into a goddess, a Blonde Venus whose heavenly body was beyond the touch of mortals. It was certainly beyond the thought of body odor.

 
Last night, as I watched Der Blaue Engel (1930), the German classic responsible for Marlene Dietrich’s career in Hollywood, I thought of that transformation and thought of it as a fortunate mistake. Fortunate because it gave us this iconic figure—slimmer, trimmer than that of the fleshy Lola—and a face that was all cheekbones and arched, pencilled brows. A mistake because all that glamour inhibited an actress who henceforth was thought of as a star, dazzling and distant.
 
In Hollywood, Dietrich was an exotic figure whose very voice spelled foreign. In Der Blaue Engel, she had an accent as well; but one that told German audiences that she was a girl of the streets and not a creature from Mount Olympus.
 
Right at the beginning of the film, Lola Lola gets a dousing; her image, that is, which is on display in a shop window. She seems in need of it; her life and trade being none too clean. “Mensch, mach Dir bloss keen Fleck,” she snaps at her short-tempered boss (“don’t soil yourself”), just before she sets out to reduce the respectable academic Dr. Rath (“Dr. Council”) to Professor Unrat (“Professor Refuse”). That is where that box of soap powder comes in, with which the showgirl washes her undies (as pictured above).
 
Those are Lux flakes, prominently displayed in the center of the frame. Some six years after the success of The Blue Angel, Dietrich once again became associated with the stuff, without having to come in contact with it. On 1 June 1936, she became the first actress to appear in the overhauled Lux Radio Theater, whose stage had been moved from Broadway to Hollywood. After slipping into the role of Amy Jolly in an adaptation of her first American picture (Morocco), Dietrich had a chance to sing Lola Lola’s signature song “Falling in Love Again,” perhaps as a plea to an audience rather less enthralled by her than poor Dr. Rath. In German, that had been “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt,” lines that translate as follows:

I am from head to toe
Ready for love
Since that is my world
And else nothing.

From head to toe, and every body part in between. Die “fesche Lola” was all flesh; what was returned to us from Paramount Olympus was a shape in shadow and light, a statue made of glamour and enlivened by suggestion. And when audiences were through adoring her, whether irritated by her anaemic vehicles or incensed by the bloodshed in Europe, it was tough for Dietrich to regain the earthiness she had agreed to renounce . . .
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A Letter to Three Wives and a Couple of Radio Executives

“Then heaven help the masses!” That’s what English teacher George Phipps exclaims in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) when confronted with the notion that soap operas were the “literature” of his fiercely commercial, communists fearing day. Alerted to this mock prayer by Leonard Maltin’s Great American Broadcast, I began to wonder what radio executives, whose business it was to take note when their line of business was threatened or questioned, would do with such a line if ever A Letter were to be read on the air.

To begin with, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning screenplay would have to be reduced to a memo, given the tight, commercials-cluttered slots allotted for post-World War II broadcast drama; but the Letter had already been severely edited, two of what had once been five wives receiving the pink slip in an economic downsizing of a property initially spread out on the pages of Cosmopolitan back in 1945. It was too prominent a missive not to be bottled anew and tossed into the airwaves.

Sure enough, on this day, 20 February, in 1950, “A Letter” was posted by the prestigious, popular if highly conservative Lux Radio Theater, with Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas (pictured) reprising their screen roles. Would the wireless-defiant educator make the cut? Or would a radio rewrite mean “Goodbye, Mr. Phipps”?

The Lux producers were not generally concerned with aesthetics; but, Phipps’s disparaging remarks notwithstanding, the screenplay for A Letter is most radiogenic. After all, it depends on voice-over narration by an unseen character (played by Celeste Holm in the film version), a storytelling convention suited to—and appropriated from—radio drama, whose publicly confidential talks transported audiences straight into the mind of the speaker.

The film version also makes excellent use of the aforementioned Sonovox, a device that could turn any sound into speech. In A Letter, it gets droplets of water to seep insinuations into receptive ears. What speaks volumes in the Lux production is that the Sonovox, largely relegated to advertising duty on radio, was being scrapped altogether. Its innovative props disposed of, its potentialities ignored, radio theater was frequently reduced to borrowing its material from the movies it had assisted in furnishing and shaping.

However impoverished, Sandy Barnett’s radio adaptation does take on the challenge posed by George Phipps, even though the teacher’s arguments have little bearing on the plot involving the two leads of the Lux production. And rather than being turned into a hausfrau, George’s spouse Rita is the soap opera writer she was on the screen.

The scene for the assault on radio is set: Rita (played by Joan Banks) has invited one of “those radio people” to dinner. “You know what I like about your program?” her maid tells her, “Even when I’m running the vacuum I can understand it.” Besides, it keeps her “mind off [her] feet. George (Stephen Dunne) is not pleased having to entertain the entertainers; he is unwilling to serve them expensive liquor to make them feel at home:

Rita.  People in show business, well you know what I mean.  Those kind always drink scotch.

George.  I know what you mean, dear, but I wish you wouldn’t say it in radio English.  That kind, not “those kind.”

Rita.  There are men who say “those kind” who earn a hundred thousand dollars a year.

George.  There are men who say “Stick ‘em up” who earn even more.

Not surprisingly, given her husband’s attitude, Rita is concerned about the evening’s entertainment.

Rita.  George, just one thing, please.  No jokes about radio.

George.  Oh, the time for joking about it is past.  Radio has become a very serious problem now, like juvenile delinquency.

Rita.  That’s just what I mean.  Cracks like that.

The get-together does not go as smoothly as planned by Rita, who would like her self-consciously impecunious husband to quit teaching in favor of writing for the soaps.  A debate about radio’s cultural offerings and the lure of the big money behind them ensues:

George.  Look, Rita, let’s put aside my personal likes and dislikes.  They’re not important.  I am willing to admit that to a majority of my fellow citizens I’m a slightly comic figure: an educated man.

Rita.  But nobody’s asking you not to be.  Think of the good you could do.  Maybe raise the standards.

George.  And what’s even worse than being an intellectual, I am a schoolteacher.  Schoolteachers are not only comic, they’re often cold and hungry in this richest land on Earth.

Rita.  And thousands are quitting every year to take jobs that pay them a decent living.

George.  That is unhappily true.

Rita.  Then why not you?

George.  Because I can’t think of myself doing anything else.  What would happen, do you think, if we all quit? Who’d teach the kids? Who’d open their minds and hearts to the real glories of the human spirit, past and present? Who’d help them along to the future?

I suppose the impressionables of 1940s America have, for the most part, survived those radio days unscathed. Besides, the lessees of the airwaves awash with suds had learned to respond to the dirt on radio offered by its detractors by giving such criticism a good rinse and a clever spin. Sure, it got Fred Allen and fellow satirist Henry Morgan into trouble during the ’40s; but The Hucksters (shown here) had proven how profitable rants against radio could be.

When “A Letter” was sent off by the renowned toilet soap promoters (having been delivered previously by the Camel-sponsored Screen Guild, without any references to the evil influences of radio), such attacks were as old hat as the consoles from which they occasionally sputtered.

By 1950, there was little need to suppress a memo critiquing what was becoming immaterial as its subject matter was being yanked from the broadcast schedules. Everyone was making eyes at television; and while Hollywood stars still flocked to the microphone to make a quick buck, the radio theater audience dwindled as Americans scraped together their savings for the set that would define our everyday in the second half of the 20th century.

In a 21st-century update of the Letter, Rita Phipps would probably be designing interactive games or reality shows—the literature of today?

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The Women Who Saved My Reputation

Close, but no big star. That’s what I’ve always felt when I come across Hollywood actor George Brent, the kind of actor I happen upon merely because he happens to be in something or opposite someone I care to see. Capable, certainly. Likable, perhaps; but Brent is lacking in the charisma, the je ne sais quoi that turns mere mortals into icons. There he was again, last night, at the close of a particularly quiet day (another one without telephone or internet here at our cottage). His dashing entrance notwithstanding (a rescuer on skis), I cannot say that I watched him. I sort of look past him, usually at the women with whom he had the fortune to be paired.

In My Reputation (1943, but not released until 1946), the woman in question is Barbara Stanwyck. Now, there’s a leading lady that is impossible to overlook; and in My Reputation she is particularly lovely. Perhaps, a little too lovely to be the questionable woman the title suggests her to be. I was reminded of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, a novel that tends to make readers go “What’s to forgive?” After all, Stanwyck’s character is a widow, not a bigamist. I suppose the Shakespearean Instruct My Sorrows, the title of the novel on which this romance is based, did not strike Hollywood producers as enticing enough.

What saves My Reputation are those minor players that manage to make a major impression in the few minutes they are allotted on the screen; they are supporting in the truest sense of the word. There’s Eve Arden, for instance, in the kind of role she filled in Mildred Pierce; her confidence and wit are always welcome. She often seems to be on her way to a party of her own and you wish she could have handed you an invitation; instead, she picks up her gift and dashes off. Cecil Cunningham walks on memorably, and Esther Dale is comfortingly efficient as the maid. And then there is Lucile Watson.

What a woman! In her expressions of disdain and her haughty delivery, Canadian-born Watson (1879-1962) bears a strong resemblance to Patricia Routledge, best known to television viewers as Hyacinth Bucket (of Keeping Up Appearances). And yet, as Stanwyck’s mother she remains formidable both in her dignity and her indignity, rather than appearing ludicrous in her pretensions. Just watch how she rebuffs the impertinent Brent, how she makes Stanwyck squirm in the above scene. It isn’t her stare alone that compels you to take notice. Hers is a voice made for lectures on etiquette and the uses of conventions. A voice that insists on being heard and heeded. A voice … for radio.

Unfortunately, radio adaptations of Hollywood films like My Reputation had no use for supporting actors, most of whom were replaced by repertoire players like Janet Scott, who was heard in Watson’s part in this Lux Radio Theater production from 21 April 1947. Even when, in this Screen Guild production of Watch on the Rhine (10 January 1944), Watson was given a rare chance to share the microphone with the film’s stars, Bette Davis and Paul Lukas, the script was so severely condensed that her supporting role was reduced to a mere cameo.

Far more interesting are Watson’s personal recollections in this tribute to Ethel Barrymore on Biography in Sound; having played opposite and observed Barrymore on the stage, Watson remarked that she “learned an important lesson in acting”:

When thousands came nightly to be thrilled by her magnetic voice, I was watching something else: the way she listened to the speeches of her fellow players.  And I thank her now for any knowledge I have of what is perhaps the highest art of an actor: the art of beautiful listening.

My Reputation makes plain just how well Watson had learned that lesson; at the same time, the supporting actress claims the center of the stage, defying us to ignore her. More than the leading lady herself, Watson, as Mrs. Kimball, makes you understand Stanwyck’s character: a repressed woman struggling to let go; not to let herself go, exactly, but to let go of the past when forced to confront an uncertain future after the death of her husband.

It is Watson’s performance that explains the pressures and strictures this blameless woman has always been up against. After all, Mrs. Kimball does not simply try to save her daughter’s reputation—she defined it.

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Based on Untrue Stories; or, When Jolson Sings Again

”Hooray for Hollywood!” The big-screenings over at our house have finally resumed. As shared here, the projector gave up the ghost last fall, during the climactic scene of I Want to Live!, when the bulb imploded with a bang. I inaugurated the arrival of its replacement with a screening of The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949), two hugely popular Columbia Pictures that reportedly raked in a combined $15 million—a lot of dough in those days. Now, I’ve never much cared whether or not a movie is “based on a true story”; to me, such a claim is certainly not an endorsement. It reeks of Lifetime entertainment, or some such exercises in exploitation. That is probably why I wasn’t half as irritated as I might otherwise have been watching the suspect Jolson Story, which, dramatically speaking, is really not much of a story at all.

The Jolson Story is so bland and uneventful, it makes Till the Clouds Roll By look like an exposé. For anything compelling, one would have to turn to the real-life stories of Jolson’s stand-ins, Larry Parks and Scott Beckett, whose careers were subsequently nixed by dirty politics and personal turmoil. One of the few “true” incidents in the Jolson Story, allegedly the one that sold the project to Columbia president Harry Cohn, was the has-been treatment Jolson received from the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills, for whose benefit he was signed on as a closing act, scheduled at an hour so advanced that few members of the audience could have been expected to remain in their seats. It sort of makes for a made for Hollywood comeback story; but it is hardly given the Star Is Born treatment.

Never mind. At least you get to hear the real Jolson (whose image I previously appropriated for a picture of my own) sing much of his best-known material, for the delivery which he used to disguise his face anyway. What really puzzled me was the sequel. I am not sure just how to read it. Not that I mind reading it in several ways at once, which—its foreshadowing of Jolson’s death in 1950 aside—is the reason the sequel intrigues me more than the pale “original,” or however you want to call the 1946 version of a faked and faded copy of Jolson’s life story.

A biopic self-conscious about its dubiety, Jolson Sings Again is coy about its artifice. “Let’s agree on one thing at the start, boys,” the film’s Jolson character tells the Hollywood producers interested in turning his life into a movie.

I don’t think anybody cares about the facts of my life, about dates and places. I’ll give you a mess of ‘em, you juggle them any way you like. What matters is the singing a man did and the difference that made.

Now, is this inspired bit of reflexivity an apology or a proudly displayed poetic licence? How brazen of the sequelmakers to quell our disbelief by making up for the make-believe of the first film with a faked endorsement from a false Jolson. But then, the true Jolson—who starred in the Lux Radio Theater versions of Story (16 February 1948) and Sings Again (22 May 1950)—had agreed to the project and made a tidy $5 million profit. It seemed to me as if I had followed up the “true story” death row drama of I Want to Live! with Jolson’s last cry of “I want to live on like this.”

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” . . . same again? Only a little different?”: Cary Grant and the Radio

Well, this being the anniversary of the birth of the man everyone including Cary Grant wanted to be, I decided to listen to a Lux Radio Theater production of “The Awful Truth,” originally broadcast on the actor’s 51st birthday in 1955. By that time, the program was transcribed (that is, recorded), so that Grant did not have to spend this special evening (previously commemorated here) behind the microphone entertaining a vastly diminished crowd of far-flung radio listeners. Not that the early to mid-1950s had been a particularly busy period in the actor’s career. Aside from its felicitous air date (unacknowledged by the host of the program), the 1955 version constitutes the first reteaming of Grant with his original co-star, Irene Dunne, even though both had shared the Lux soundstage for “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (10 October 1949), which would serve as the premise for Grant’s own radio sitcom, co-starring wife Betsy Drake (who also wrote some of the scripts for the series).

Prior to their Awful reunion, Grant and Dunne reprised their roles in the mascara hazard Penny Serenade (16 November 1941) for the Screen Guild Theater, appeared together in a Screen Directors Playhouse production of My Favorite Wife (7 December 1950), as well as the Screen Guild’s original radio play “Alone in Paris” (30 April 1939).

Nearly two decades of Grant’s life in picture are echoed on the air, in radio dramatizations ranging from Lux’s 8 March 1937 broadcast of ”Madame Butterfly” (adapted from the 1932 film) and the comparatively obscure (if recent DVD release) Wings in the Dark (1935), reworked for the aforementioned Silver Theater to classics like His Girl Friday (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Radio also invites speculations as to what a difference Grant might had made in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and I Confess.

Equally at home in melodrama and comedy, Grant guested on a comedy-variety programs like Pepsodent Show, starring Bob Hope (much to the delight of hundreds of screaming WAVES and nurses in the all-female studio audience), and the drama anthology Suspense (in which he was cast in a number of memorable thrillers, including two plays—“The Black Curtain” and “The Black Path of Fear”— based on stories by Cornell Woolrich). On the big screen, in turn, Grant was given the opportunity to star in an adaptation one of the best comedies written for radio, Norman Corwin’s “My Client Curley” (previously discussed here), even though the sentimental film, titled Once Upon a Time (1944), does not manage to capture the magic and wit of the original.

Listening to the actor’s radio performances through the years, it was interesting to hear the changes in Grant’s voice—a voice as distinctive as the cleft in his chin—divorced as it is on the air from the features that became rather more distinguished with age. Truth is that Grant, never known for passionate emoting, sounded awful staid in the 1955 rematch with Dunne, his next to last performance in radio drama. He had been heard once before in a Lux presentation of Leo McCarey’s raucous romance; but his sparring mate that night—the opener of the program’s fifth season on 11 September 1939—was Claudette Colbert, whose character in Without Reservations would write a role assigned to Grant (for the 10 March 1941 Lux broadcast, the role of Jerry Warriner was tailored to Bob Hope, with second fiddle Ralph Bellamy as the only original cast member in that production).

Back in 1939, there was zap and brio in his voice, which, in the sound-only medium, had to make up for the loss of some wonderful slapstick. Nearly sixteen years later, in a reading of the same if somewhat condensed script, what had once come across as carefree and devil-may-care sounded an awful lot like “who cares.” The by then all but defunct genre of screwball with its unsentimental take on love as war (from courting to court case) demanded more energy than either Dunne or Grant were willing (or able) to bring to their connubial tussles. Indeed, the loudest laughs in the studio audience are generated by the less than convincing barks of Mr. Smith, the couple’s pooch (granted, somewhat of a scene-stealer in the film as well).

After experiencing episodes of puerile madcap in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952), which did little to rejuvenate his career, Grant was finally slowing down. Unfortunately, he appeared to be rehearsing for An Affair to Remember with material not designed to make us forget that his days of cheeky indiscretion lay in a livelier past. Perhaps it is just as well that adaptor George Wells cut Jerry’s final speech in The Awful Truth. It might have sounded too much like an aging actor’s apology, his plea to an audience expecting lively antics: “So, as long as I’m different, don’t you think things could be the same again? Only a little different?”

In the 1930s and ’40s, Grant’s vocal chords were as elastic as his vaudeville-tested sinews. A few day’s after his 35th birthday (on 22 January 1939, to be exact), the lad from Bristol surprised those tuning in to the Ronald Colman hosted Circle with a spirited rendition of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” What’s more, the tune is followed later in the program by Grant’s tuneful delivery of . . . the FCC’s regulations regarding station identification. Something different, all right.

“No cackling,” Grant told Colman a few years later on the Command Performance (22 July 1944); but he could be persuaded, nonetheless, to sing a few notes. With the exception of his performance of Cole Porter in the disingenuous Night and Day (1946), there was nary a false one in Grant’s long and varied career on screen and radio.

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“Could She Kiss and Kill . . . and Not [Be] Remember[ed]”

Well, it had been a few years since the movie-going public lined up for a helping of The Egg and I (1947), the back-to-the-farm comedy that proved to be Claudette Colbert’s last major screen success. Still in print today, the non-fiction bestseller by Betty MacDonald on which the franchise-hatching hit movie is based has just been selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime (for a 1947 radio drama version starring Ms. Colbert and her co-star, Fred MacMurray, click here). Considerably less enthusiasm was generated by Mel Ferrer’s The Secret Fury (1950), a box office egg that, even upon delivery, was anything but farm fresh.

In 1944, Colbert left Paramount, the studio that had shaped and protected her image—spirited, smart and sophisticated, after initial siren turns in DeMille features. Despite being a shrewd businesswoman, the by then middle-aged actress stumbled from one middling project to another, playing roles emblematic of an identity in a state of crisis and a career in uneasy flux: a crime-solving nun, a terrorist-beset Planter’s Wife, a Texas Lady. Even her outstanding performance in Three Came Home (1950), for the ordeal of filming which she lost her chance at starring in All About Eve, had gone largely unnoticed.

The Secret Fury, the hysterical melodrama she starred in next, was filmed at a time when audiences were being swept away by a new wave of crime stories that were tough, gritty and low on frills. Unconvincing and anachronistic, it is an irritatingly contrived variation on one of those neo-gothic mysteries in which newlywed heroines distrust their brain much rather than those who stand to gain from addling it.

As if to compensate for the mediocre material or to suit her acting to the overwrought plot, the refined and often reserved Colbert was, for once, woefully overacting. Two years earlier, she had played a similar role in Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love (1948)—the thrills-promising poster for which I acquired last fall—and audiences had reason to be less than embracing of mature (if immaturely acting) women who put their lives and careers in peril by marrying into the wrong families or listening to the advice of their Hollywood agents.

When The Secret Fury was sold to theaters in Britain, it was promoted with the help of the Exhibitors’ Campaign Book pictured above. The latest artifact to have made it into my collection of Colbert memorabilia, it affords a fascinating glimpse at the industry’s marketing machinery. Aside from offering cinema displays and providing advertising copy to be fed to the press, it encouraged exhibitors to adopt various strategies of getting a potential audience excited about the motion picture. Suggested activities were contests in which audiences were asked to match Colbert’s eyes, to share their wedding pictures, or accurately to recall recent events in their lives (something Colbert’s character struggles to do in the film).

Another “stunt” to create interest in the film was this “Visualised Brain Test Reaction, followed by the instructions:

Make an enlarged copy of this graph to serve as a teaser display in the theatre foyer, along with an explanatory caption and film credits. Lead off with a display caption: “Did these brain waves reveal the truth of her mysterious week-end?”

Meanwhile, my own head is gradually clearing after a recent fever; no longer content to feast on television sitcoms, I am going to take in one of Colbert’s earlier comedy triumphs . . . the wintersporting romantic triangle I Met Him in Paris (1937). As DeMille pointed out in his introduction to the radio adaptation another Colbert comedy, The Gilded Lily (produced by the Lux Radio Theatre on this day, 11 January, in 1937), the actress had been somewhat of a “starmaker.” Those who were allowed to throw their arms around her became leading men in their own right, as had Charles Boyer and Gilded Lily co-star MacMurray. Back then, Colbert had her pick of roles and other halves, and brains enough to go for the right ones.

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Is That a Barrymore Behind the Mike?

Well, it isn’t C. B. DeMille, folks. Those tuning in to the Lux Radio Theater on this day, 30 November, back in 1936, were in for a surprise. DeMille, host and nominal producer of the program, briefly addressed the audience from New York, rather than uttering his customary “Greetings from Hollywood.” For the “first time” since taking on his role, he was going to “join the Lux Radio Theater‘s legion of listeners” instead. There was just enough time for him to mention his latest picture, The Plainsman, which he was currently previewing coast to coast, and to announce his substitute: “The show you and I are about to hear has been prepared by one who is certainly on speaking terms with our microphone: Lionel Barrymore. To one so familiar, and so beloved, the mention of his name is the most glowing introduction I could give.”

Barrymore was on hand to ring down the sonic curtain and narrate “Polly of the Circus,” a sentimental comedy starring Loretta Young in the role played on screen by the all too infrequently mentioned Marion Davies (whose Lux anniversary yesterday, the 1937 production of “Peg o’ My Heart” I neglected to acknowledge). Barrymore assured the audience that he did not intend to take the place of the celebrated director: “That, as you and I both know, is something no one could do. I am here, anyway, highly flattered and slightly uneasy, hoping to keep things in order until Miss DeMille, er, Mr. DeMille resumes the reins next week.”

The busiest of the Barrymores in broadcasting had no reason to be coy or ill at ease. He had previously been heard on the program and, beginning in 1942, would delight listeners as star of his own dramatic radio series, The Mayor of the Town. Dr. Kildare went on the air in 1950. Subsequently, he served as host of the drama anthology Hallmark Playhouse. Now, the producers and sponsors of a live show like Lux may very well have felt uneasy to let go of their star voice for the first time. The show had to go on.

Exactly five years later, on 30 November 1941, the producers of Behind the Mike suggested an answer. On that program, dedicated to the broadcasting industry and its players, listeners once again heard Barrymore … but the voice was that of impersonator Arthur Boran, who also offered his best Eddie Cantor. Which makes me wonder: just how many of those famous voices on the air are mere vocal illusions?

My own voice will be heard less frequently on broadcastellan next month, as I am going to pay return visits to New York and London, from which locations I shall only occasionally file my reports. Sorry, no Barrymores.