Tag: Suspense (radio program)

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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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On This Day in 1948: James M. Cain Authenticates a “Lovely Counterfeit”

Well, I’ve done my darndest here to spread the word about old-time radio. Before it became “old-time,” radio did this rather more effectively, of course; spreading the word, about itself that is. It had professional announcers who could make you buy, or at least desire, most anything, from a can of soup to a slice of soap opera. Sure, not everyone fell for the hyperboles of the air, especially when they fell on the deaf ears of journalists who made a living trashing the American pastime of listening to romantic serials, aural funnies, and gory thrillers; if they did not ignore radio drama altogether, as they do nowadays, the peddlers of the printed word tended to denounce and deride as gleefully and excessively as radio announced and applauded itself.

Unlike the feud between radio comedians Fred Allen and Jack Benny, this was an all too real confrontation. If listening to the radio continued to be a pleasure, it was increasingly thought of as a guilty one, much to the displeasure of the sponsors.

One way of countering the attacks of the press, of assuring listeners that radio drama was perfectly respectable, middle-class fare, was to drag noted authors before the microphone, especially when their works were being adapted for the broadcast medium. When Howard Koch’s dramatization of Rebecca opened the Campbell Playhouse on 9 December 1938—thus predating the premiere of Hitchcock’s film adaptation by well over a year—the legitimacy of the production was underscored by producer-host Orson Welles’s transatlantic telephone conversation with Daphne du Maurier.

Five months later (5 May 1939), when the Campbell Playhouse presented Wickford Point, author J. P. Marquand was also on hand to add prestige to the production. And when Edna Ferber was heard in the 31 March 1939 broadcast of Show Boat, she not only appeared for a curtain call, but joined the stock company of the Campbell Playhouse to play the role of Parthy in a non-musical adaptation of her 1926 bestseller.

Of course, such cross-promotions, which were likely to benefit authors and publishers even more than broadcasters, were no guarantors of excellence or authenticity. Agatha Christie’s previously discussed sanctioning of The Adventures of Hercule Poirot (22 February 1945) could hardly have deceived anyone about the spurious parentage of this anonymously penned and not surprisingly short-lived series. Christie spoke with dignity and authority, but could lend none to the production.

Quite the reverse can be said about the Suspense production of Love’s Lovely Counterfeit and its endorsement by author James M. Cain, heard over the US network CBS on this day, 17 January, in 1948. The play, headed by James Cagney and introduced by Robert Montgomery (who also read an excerpt from the novel, was the real thing: not mere dramatic snipped, but an hourlong presentation that could do justice to Cain’s short novel.

Its author, however, was little of help when asked to address the public: “briefly, I thought it was excellent.” In a rather unusual move, bespeaking the prestige of the Suspense program, Cain also congratulated the two men responsible for the adaptation. Missing his cue twice during his short scripted small talk with Cagney and Montgomery, he rendered his authentication disingenuous in the process.

Perhaps, a bit of fakery, such as Cagney’s enthusiasm about the “particular element that makes Cain the most powerful writer of true suspense fiction in America”—the “inevitable climax, an explosion of the energy” generated by “two people in love”—might have been more convincing. Most listeners would not have noticed if their favorite author had been impersonated by a professional actor, reading lines prepared for the occasion by the author; but so eager were producers to demonstrate that radio was no cheap substitute, that they felt compelled to sell the authentic at the cost of sounding phony.

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On This Day in 1959: A Ghost of Crises Past Shares "A Korean Christmas Carol"

Yesterday, we took the train up and across the border to Birmingham, England, to see the exhibition Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Deceptively saccharine, the title of this show (borrowed from Solomon’s fanciful dream narrative “A Vision of Love Revealed by Sleep”) also refers to the Victorian artist’s troubled life, to the disclosure of his secret and the end it meant for his career as a commercially viable painter.

There was nothing sensationalistic about this staged revelation; and even though Solomon’s paintings and drawings do not always stand up particularly well when placed alongside the works of his better known contemporaries, “Love Revealed” did not leave me with the impression that this rather obscure artist is being deemed due for a revival chiefly because certain academics with an agenda think his private life under public scrutiny, his outing and ousting, fascinatingly queer or historically significant enough to warrant such a tribute. The past may come back to haunt us—but it may also be revealed, at last, in a light that is different without being garish.

Christmas, of course, is just the time to conjure up haunting spirits; the telling of ghost stories during the season when days are darkest is a tradition in Britain, Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” being the most famous of them all. On US radio, updates of Ebenezer Scrooge were attempted on programs as diverse as Blondie (“Scrooge,” 15 Dec. 1939), The Six Shooter (“Britt Ponset’s Christmas Carol,” 20 Dec. 1953), and the syndicated propaganda series Treasury Star Parade (ca. 1942), in whose seasonal offering, “The Modern Scrooge ($18.75),” the reformed old miser becomes an air-warden.

The past was not always the exclusive domain of pastiche, however. On this day, 20 December, in 1959, a rather more gritty ghost story was presented by Suspense, an anthology of radio thrillers heard over the Columbia Broadcasting System in the United States between 1942 and 1962. Titled, “A Korean Christmas Carol,” the play tells the strange tale of an American soldier stationed in Korea, Christmas 1958.

On his way to Seoul, he picks up a hitchhiker, a fellow soldier who relates his own experience fighting in Korea some seven Christmases earlier. Insensitive to the icy weather and oblivious to the cigarette smoldering between and singeing his fingers, the stranger seems to be dwelling wholly in the past. When he steps out of the car and disappears into the darkness, he leaves behind his AWOL bag, forcing his listener to follow his path. But instead of taking him straight to some barracks or military installation, the path leads to a secluded orphanage. It is here that the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future crowd in on our haunted storyteller.

Featuring the non-traditional holiday sounds of fierce machine gunfire, the play opens and closes with a choir of Korean children—the orphans of the war to whom the mysterious hitchhiker, himself a casualty of war, sets out to deliver a bag of toys by turning the driver-narrator into his earthly messenger. Having died to save his comrades, he now returns to remind and guide his countrymen to look after the offspring of those whose lives he took.

“A Korean Christmas Carol” is a story of sacrifice and redemption, a story of making amends—a story of love revealed in a vision of death. Will the present war on terror produce or inspire any such ghost stories to be shared underneath the Christmas tree in the decades to come?

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Review by Request: “The House in Cypress Canyon”

Recently, I was asked to write about “The House in Cypress Canyon,” a radio play first heard in the US on CBS’s Suspense program on this day, 5 December, in 1946. Robert L. Richards’s neo-gothic thriller has received some scholarly attention, but it is rewardingly suggestive enough to accommodate multiple readings.

In her essay “Scary Women and Scarred Men: Suspense, Gender Trouble, and Postwar Change, 1942-1950,” Allison McCracken refers to “The House in Cypress Canyon” as a play that “amply demonstrates the particular kinds of domestic horrors that radio thrillers could convey.” Indeed, Suspense specialized in homegrown violence, in the terror of jealousy and the horror of revenge, in the manifestations of greed and green-eyed monstrosities.

Like the film noir, whose first-person voice-over narrations are reminiscent of and influenced by radio storytelling, many 1940s radio thrillers comment on the threat posed to men by independent females in the workplace, by shoulder-padded career women who, rather than being kept contentedly within white picket fences, appeared ruthless enough to impale their male counterparts upon them. At least their assertiveness was portrayed in such a light by the men who fictionalized this very real change in the position of women in wartime America as well as their forced retreat into the home. The first year after the Second World War was in many respects an uneasy period of adjustment.  It was a time out of joint—and “The House in Cypress Canyon” reads the signs of the times by forcing past, present, and future into a bewildering confrontation.

The titular abode is seemingly “ordinary” and “undistinguished.” Part of a pre-war housing complex whose construction was put on hold for the duration, the house was completed after VJ-Day and now awaits occupancy. No doubt, some who might have wished to live here are no longer alive, while those who remain—alone and robbed of future happiness—have no need for it at present. Lives have been put on hold so that life might go on; blood has been shed so that future generations may dwell here. Can any home built under such circumstances truly be ordinary? Not according to the real estate agent who is about to make the house available for rent, who has evidence that something extraordinary is going on inside. That is . . . has it already happened? Is it yet to happen? Is it bound to happen?

Confiding in his detective friend, the agent relates how the construction workers found a manuscript in the as yet unfinished house. It appears to be a diary—an account of life within the house after its completion, the story of how it was rented to Jim Woods (played by Robert Taylor), a chemical engineer, and his wife Ellen (Cathy Lewis), a former schoolteacher; how the “reasonably happy” couple moved in and found one of its closets locked; how the two were awakened by strange howling; how they investigated and found “oozing” from under that closet door something that was “unquestionably blood”; how they left the house in “something very close to a panic” and returned with the “moral support of two stalwart Los Angeles police lieutenants”; and how the couple, having received no assistance from the officers, found their lives forever altered.

Like the title character of Arch Oboler’s “Cat Wife,” Richards’s Ellen undergoes a destructive change; she becomes bestial and predatory but seems entirely unaware of her second nature. That side of her quite literally emerges from a secret closet, a locked room of which she had been unconscious. “If that isn’t a commentary on the housing problem, huh? A woman moving into a house without even knowing where all the closets are,” Ellen laughs.

The opening of that closet is a “commentary,” too, namely on the uncertain boundaries of marital relations, on what lies beyond as the uncommunicated, that realm where the social and the biological converge. Whereas the “den” is being advertized to Jim and Ellen as an “attractive little room, particularly for a man,” there is no such “attractive” nook for the woman of the house. Instead, the blood-oozing closet becomes the scene of Ellen’s transformation from mate to monster. Once it is unlocked, domestic stability as defined by the male architects of heterosexual relations are shattered. Men become Ellen’s vampiric prey.

According to a newspaper clipping attached to the found manuscript, Jim committed suicide after doing away with his spouse, an event said to have occurred on the night after Christmas, the year being unspecified. The real estate agent once again emphasizes that the journal was discovered in the unfinished and as yet uninhabited house. However impressed by the story, the detective does not consider it further and leaves his friend as he puts up the “for rent” sign. The first people to express interest in the place appear almost immediately after the detective’s departure. They are none other than Jim and Ellen Woods.

“Do you know what time it is?” Jim at one point reprimands his wife as she continues to rearrange the furniture while the midnight hour approaches. Do we know what time is it? Is the manuscript found in the “House in Cypress Canyon” a blueprint for a new phase in the battle of the sexes? Will the events described therein play themselves out with the same inevitability that brings Jim and Ellen to the doorstep of their doomed abode? Are the two rehearsing a text that Jim has already written for them, a domestic play that casts the wife as fallen angel in the house?

The dischrono-logic of “The House in Cypress Canyon” drives home the gender role confusion in which men and women found themselves in postwar America and the uneasy future anticipated by skeptics of the seeming consumer comforts of Leave It to Beaverdom.

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On This Day in 1962: Suspense Ends As US Radio Invests Its Drama Dollar Elsewhere

She’s fiddling with the wrong knobs

Imagine flipping through the latest copy of Entertainment Weekly and reading about a psychological thriller starring Halle Berry and Colin Farrell, to be broadcast live from your favorite radio station. Imagine sitting on a train catching the opening of another season of Desperate Housewives on your iPod . . . with your eyes closed. Imagine what audio entertainment used to be and still could be today had radio not been “abandoned like the bones at a barbecue” (as comedian Fred Allen once put it). Instead of continuing the feast, we are starving our senses, having been given less to nourish our imagination and more to gawk at from afar, even as our television sets are being gradually retired in favor of cyber-age gadgetry.

Well, as anyone passionate about the half forgotten and much neglected culture of US radio drama will be only too keenly aware, today marks the anniversary of what is generally regarded as its official demise. The two last holdouts, the thriller anthology Suspense and the detective series Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar presented their final episodes on this day, September 30, in 1962. In an age when listeners were taking their transistor radios everywhere, radio drama was going nowhere.

Storytelling on US radio had been suffering a decade-long decline, even though, as one of my readers pointed out to me recently, there were still a few fine programs left on the air in the mid-to-late-1950s, including the long-running series mentioned above. There were attempts to revive radio drama in the 1970s and ’80s, as well; but since the old dial had been refitted with a new shorthand for aural art, the potentialities of the medium collapsed into music, talk, and news formats, leaving little space and fewer resources for the theater of the mind.

In the US, the radio play has always been looked upon as a makeshift art, a substitute or remedial form of entertainment for a public that was being told for ages that television was just around the corner. Television was supposedly the real thing, which in reality meant that the landscapes of the imagination were being walled in to fit the tiny screen before our sore eyes.

Getting the picture was a considerable loss; but our ocular preoccupations keep most of us from getting it, from making up for it by making it up all over again.

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On This Day in 1943: Silent Screen Legend Dies on the Air

Some thirty years after making her debut in silent movies, Lillian Gish became all voice when, on 9 September 1943, she appeared before the mind’s eye of listeners to CBS’s thriller anthology Suspense. Gish’s performance in the play “Marry for Murder” was announced as one of the “rare radio appearances” by a star who “occupied a unique place in the affections of moviegoers ever since the screen first became of age.” Together with her sister Dorothy (left, in a picture taken from Billips and Pierce’s informative Lux Presents Hollywood), Gish had twice performed on the then new and ambitious Lux Radio Theatre, assuming the part of Jo in “Little Women” (21 April 1935) and recreating one of her most famous silent screen roles in “Way Down East” (25 November 1935)—but that had been years ago in the early days of network drama.

You had the right to remain silent, dear

In the late 1930s, she had twice been a panelist on the celebrity quiz program Information, Please and was later to act in a number of dramatic anthologies and variety programs, including Arthur Hopkins Presents and the Theater Guild on the Air. In a medium that demanded and devoured talent daily, her isolated guest spots had been few and far between. Even more rare had been her roles in film after the demise of her mute métier (Top Man, her fourth sound film, was to open in the US a few days after the “Marry for Murder” broadcast); so, the sounding of a silent screen belle must have remained somewhat of a novelty act to many American listeners. Unfortunately, the evening’s entertainment had little of the grace and passion of Miss Gish’s celebrated on-screen histrionics.

Heard again tonight on the WRVO Playhouse, “Marry for Murder” is a routine affair, an is-she-or-ain’t-she thriller that requires little guess work from the audience and yields even fewer surprises. It is a story told too often—and often better, too—on Suspense. Still, the tone of Ray Collins’s narrative and the ominous sounds of the fog horn add some slight intrigue to the Way Down East yarn of recent widow and newlywed Letty Hawthorne, “a frightened, neurotic creature who seemed destined to be a perfect victim” for her domineering husband.  Living rather close to “Philomel Cottage” or taking more than a page out of “The Diary of Sophronia Winters,” aren’t they?

The story is told from the perspective of Letty’s friend Phil (Collins), an attorney who was called upon to assist in drawing up a new will for Letty’s husband Mark. When Letty expresses herself anxious to compose a will as well, Phil—a lover of whodunits—speculates whether Mark might not have urged his wife to do so in order to do her in and get her dough. Heard through a filter, Letty’s words “but if I’m found dead” repeat in Phil’s ear until he is convinced of Mark’s villainous intentions. That is, until . . .

Since the three-character play opens with the announcement that Letty is dead, the directions the plot could take are rather limited (unless we are to distrust Phil’s narrative altogether). Radio thrillers often suffer from simplifications, restrictions demanded not only by the lack of time allotted to each play in a medium catering to commerce but by the difficulties aural drama poses for an audience that struggles to take in complex information when playing a puzzle by ear.

“Marry for Murder” might still have been an intriguing character study, like those starring the formidable Agnes Moorehead. Ms. Gish, alas, overdoes the contrast between mousy and monstrous, and her line readings are not always assured. Her Letty here bears little resemblance to her haunted namesake in The Wind (1928), her final silent. Now, I won’t stoop to saying that the actress was a Gish out of water—but she was not quite in her element here. Let’s see whether I can manage to dig up a more satisfying anniversary tomorrow . . .