The Golden Age of Radio, April 25, 2015

Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, is on WBAI, 99.5, every Sunday night from 7-9 PM.
The show April 25,2015 started with the last episode of The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen and was followed by three shows written by Cathleeen Hite, from Gunsmoke, Escape and Night Beat.

The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen ran on the Mutual network from 1947-1948, was written by Gil Doud and Bob Talman and directed by the versatile Elliot Lewis, who also starred as Master Phillip Carney, captain of the cargo ship on its route through Asia.  The episode Schmid played on April 25 was 'The Winchester Rifle and the Ambitious Groom'", about the murder of the groom at a wedding on Singapore, where one "never goes to bed without them brass knuckles."  At the end, as usual, Carney and his crew are off again to the freedom of the ocean.

Nightbeat ran from 1950-1952 on NBC and the show Schmid played on this date was "The Bug Murders", broadcast on Sept. 25, 1952, directed by Warren Lewis and written by the prolific Cathleen Hite.  Frank Lovejoy plays a Chicago reporter covering the night shift and solves a series of murders that turn out to be perpetrated by the psychologist who had volunteered at the newspaper to help solve them. It is a show full of the sounds of the city and the people of the night.

Escape ran from 1947 to 1954 on CBS and this night's episode came near the end, "The Eye of Evil" from July 17, 1954.  The reliable John Dehner plays a man who goes to Burma to find a friend, the plot being quite similar to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The show was written by Hite and directed by Norman Macdonnel, and effectively captures the disorientation an American would feel in a Burmese jungle.

Gunsmoke ran on radio from 1952-1961, on CBS, and the star, William Conrad, was always bitter that the TV version replaced him with James Arness (some may remember that Conrad was a bit portly).  Gunsmoke was one of the first "adult Westerns," with its gritty realisn, and Schmid played the episode "Nelly Sitden", from May 1,1960, where Sheriff Matt Dillon gets injured by Indians and is taken in by an elderly woman, who had been around for many years and was friends with the Indians.  Cathleen Hite wrote the script and Norman Mcdonnel directed.

Up to this point there has been very little written on the aesthetics and auteurs of radio, a medium that had only begun to reach its artistic peak when it was eclipsed by television, where one did not need one's imagination so much (three of the four shows mentioned above did not take place in contemporary America).  If you are interested in learning more about radio you can listen to Schmid's show every week on WBAI and read John Dunning's excellent On the Air:  The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press, 1998).  There are many shows that survive and they are readily available on the internet, some of them free and some quite inexpensively on MP3 disks.

A Prairie Home Companion May 10,2015

"That's the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong,all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average."

 I have enjoyed the radio show A Prairie Home Companion for about 25 years, almost as long as it has been on the air in its present form.  Host Garrison Keillor turns 73 this year and occasionally threatens retirement but so far has been unwilling to go through with it.  The May 10th show was a typical combination of dry humor and American music, including an effective parody of "The Times They Are A' Changing" that emphasized how we are changing: "my daughter doesn't dare leave me alone ..."  There was an episode of Guy Noir, private eye (a tribute to film noir that I'm sure many people don't get) and "commercials" from Bebop-A-Rebop Rhubarb Pie and The Ketchup Advisory Board.  Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White and Kentucky Thunder performed some country rock ("Home is Wherever You Are"), Stuart Duncan performed a bluegrass version of a Waylon Jennings song and Keb'  Mo' played the blues.

The highlights of the show for me were the sketch about Dwayne and his mother, who always tells Dwayne everything is okay when it isn't, and the news from Lake Woebegone, this week about a dog that died, a cafeteria lady at the elementary school who retired, and what happened at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, as well as the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.  As always, Fred Newman did wonderfully effective sound effects.

I grew up in a small town and I am not one who thinks that Keillor condescends to the people in small towns such as Lake Woebgone; rather, it is an attempt to understand those people and what goes on there, even if one doesn't want to continue living in a town that doesn't have a public library.  And there is no question that Keillor has wide-ranging taste in music, having musical guests in just about every genre, from classical to country, as well as local guests wherever in the country he takes his show.

Mad Men

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and often incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the direction is unimaginative.
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Mad Men Account, The New York Review of Books, Feb.24, 2011

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.
Mark Grief, London Review of Books, 23 October 2008

I largely agree with these comments (even if they sound like John Simon film reviews) but I still like and enjoy the show.  Mendelsohn thinks that the show may appeal to those too young to have lived through it (it takes place mostly in the sixties) who are interested in what their parents lives were like.  I lived through that period myself and find it quite accurate in its portrayal of the things and attitudes of that period, though I think "realism" is a fallacy when applied to any art.  Certainly the show is not like a nineteenth century novel (though many of the characters are Dickensian in their resistance to change) but it is somewhat like the eighteenth century novels of Smollett and others in its episodic and comic qualities.

My take on the show is that Matthew Weiner, its creator and writer, is not trying to say that today we are superior in so many ways but rather we are very much the same:  some people may smoke and drink less but attitudes toward women, gay men and lesbians, and people of color have not changed as much as we think they have:  there are still many Don Drapers in the world and many women such as Peggy Olson and Joan Harris who are trying to find their way in the business world using whatever combination of sex and accomplishment they can find that works.

The show is something of a soap opera indeed, but so are the films of Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk.  Over a period of seven years Mad Men has consistently delighted and surprised one, as Draper's children have started to grow up and question things, just as their parents did and their parents before them.  The attitudes in Mad Men are centered in the advertising world, where the desire and ability to flimflam the public continues, sometimes more sophisticated than previously, but by no means always.

Secrets and Lies; David Letterman

Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it come close to an abuse of cinematic power.
Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster 1967)

Secrets and Lies had its season finale Sunday with an episode directed by Timothy Busfield and written by Barbie Kligman (who created the show, based on an Australian series) and Judy McCreary  A series about seeking the murderer of a young child makes one a little queasy, though it is becoming more common these days (Gracepoint is another recent example). This series was helped immensely by the presence of  thirtysomething veteran Timothy Busfield, who produced and directed, as well as acting in the series.  I did not find the mystery of who killed the young boy particularly interesting but everyone was a suspect at one time or another and the fragility of neighborhood bonds was convincingly demonstrated.  What I did find also well evoked were the authority issues among the lower-middle class and how little understanding there was between husband and wife and parents and children:  spouses routinely cheated on one another and fought constantly, fueled by alcohol,  and the most important thing for children is to obey their parents and other authority figures.  Violence was never far away and Juliette Lewis, the intimidating lead police investigator on the murder, was everywhere. Lewis was tough and no-nonsense (even sending her own child to jail for drugs), though at the very end she literally let down her hair as a father confessed to a murder his 12-year-old daughter committed.

There's not much to say about David Letterman.  After watching last night's special about his thirty-three years in late-night television it is clearer than ever that, like his idol Johnny Carson, he had little to contribute that will last or be remembered.  The special spent most of its time on the same celebrity guests that visit all these shows, though he did include an occasional hero, such as someone who rescued somebody from the subway tracks.  Letterman's tricks and stunts were all done before, and better, by Steve Allen, the original and best Tonight Show host (1954-57).  Letterman did hire some good writers and  I enjoyed Letterman up to a point when he was on at 12:30 in the 80's, but once he moved to an 11:30 spot (in 1993) he was not much different than Carson and no longer had guests such as Pee Wee Herman telling jokes.