IMDb meta-data is twenty-seven hour-long episodes rated 8.0 by 51,306 idiots.
Genre: Derivative
Verdict: The Bickersons in space. (Well, not that good, but like that.)
A group of Star Trek wannabes mix with CGIs while imitating a Seinfeld episode. Oh hum.
No characters, no character development, no narrative, no mystery, no awe, no story, just a few ever more lame gags that could have been situated anywhere, decorated with a lot of rubber face masks. The mental level was frat boy with keg.
I did like Arbor Day and the best use of the Kardasians, but not enough to persevere after episode three. It was mercifully free of the repetitive high volume shoot ‘em ups that now comprise Star Trek movies.
Though in one shoot-out the determined efforts of one alleged character to present right profile regardless of the circumstances was apparent. So was the absence of officers from the bridge on several occasions. Is that anyway to run a starship?
The name Orville I suppose is a tribute but nothing is made of it. Apollo 11 carried a splinter of a strut from Kitty Hawk lend by the Smithsonian Museum. (Figure it out, Bro.) Now that was a tribute.
GoodReads meta-data is 254 pages, rated 3.69 by 397 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: I wanted to like it but didn’t.
Setup: In November 1941 Edgar Rice Burroughs, yep père Tarzan himself, has taken a vacation in Waikiki to finish a book free from distractions of home and hearth. One of his sons has tagged along to carry the luggage. Burroughs is a man’s man and mixes with the uniforms that populate Hawaii, and distrusts 40% of the local population who are Japanese. In addition there is German in the next door cottage, who can only be up to no good.
A ’man’s man’ to be sure but at this time in his life Ed B was a teetotaller who did not smoke. Real men did both to prove their manhood. However Ed paid his manly dues by killing defenceless creatures for sport, and making sexist and racist remarks.
ERB was prone to bad dreams (caused by indigestion) and these he dutifully recorded in his adventure stories. Hmmm. We can be glad he did not have diarrhoea.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is nice hook at the start that describes the 3000 deaths in the attack on 7 December as murders, and then adds to that total the murder at the start of this story. Clever, but insubstantial. Too much hindsight after that as everyone assumes a war with Japan is coming. More likely many thought that little yellow Nips would not dare take on those manly men.
Enjoyed the description of our home-away-from-home Waikiki as it was in late 1941. While much has since changed some things have not, like Fort DeRussy.
Read it before but doing so again on the Kindle.
Does it really matter what colour trousers each character wears, tan or white, linen or cotton? Max seems to think so, padding out every scene with such useless detail.
Goodreads meta-data is 360 pages, rated 3.4 by 104 litizens.
Genre: chick phil
Verdict: More Voltaire!
Harassed, transplanted mother of three and aspiring novelist caught in a maelstrom of home renovations in an alpine village where school girl French is no match for the Vaudois accent is going spare while husband and father commutes long distances and works longer hours in Geneva saving the world for a Red Cross agency. She is close to breaking when….
Then one Saturday morning in mid-catastrophe of sick children, kaput hot water heater, overnight blizzard, absent husband, an oddly dressed chap appears in the house and who speaks a stilted English and reassures her all is well. She finds that strangely comforting until she realises he is not the doctor in fancy dress come to see her children and that no one else can see him. So it begins.
Misses is well schooled in Topper films and The Ghost and Mrs Muir and knows what not to do – no blurting, no blabbing. Disconcerting though the apparition is, he translates the Vaudois patois into English for her, much to the shock of some of the workmen lounging around the house on the pretext of repairing something. That jolt pleases her no end and she cuts the apparition slack.
Thereafter her visible invisible man is ever present, and he wastes no time in letting her know he is V O L T A I R E and is SHOCKED to learn that she has never read a one of his innumerable works and countless words. Pas un mot! Incroyable! To placate him she sits him down at the PC to read his Wikipedia entry which he begins to edit. They have bonded into the odd couple in this journey.
The author wisely does not try to explain everything in the interest of keeping up the momentum. Where did de V come from? Why is he there? How does she keep from blurting out his presence? How is it that his ectoplasm can strike letters on the keyboard but nothing else, and why does it react so strongly to the smell of coffee? De V adjusts quickly to some things like Wikipedia and he is flummoxed by others like doors. Though the author cannot forbear a tedious backstory. Too bad. That certainly brings the momentum to a halt.
Indeed at halfway through the backstories of the author – boring! – supplants V. That is a fatal error. Her backstories of drunken and lecherous journalists are as dull as the ideological prose such hacks regurgitate everyday. If I wanted to keep up with such twits I could read the Australian newspaper, if it could be delivered to my remote fastness.
Although I did find arresting her story of the effort of an African president, while being interviewed, to rape her as he denounced humanitarian imperialism. She had wanted to question him about the murder of international aid workers in his country. Then she understood why he only granted exclusive interviews to women. Something the hacks had figured out long ago, but did not bother to pass along. Such is the sport. Fortunately the president was a smoker and a heavy ashtray came to hand.
‘Humanitarian imperialism,’ a quick check with Professor Google confirms, is much denounced by PhDs. More than thirty thousand hits on books, articles, symposia, and op-eds from the learned. Nothing surfaced about either rape or murder as the antidote to this scourge.
Back to Vaudois, also amusing was the temerity of the newcomers to question Swiss Rail when a minor accident occurs at the local train station. The incomers raise the question of procedure in rail safety, and a stunned silence follows. No one questions Swiss Federal Railways (SFR, SBB, CFF, FFS, or VFS) by any of its many names. To do so is worse than swearing in church. Gasp!
Dinah Lee Küng
Once an American tourist opened a window on stuffy street car in Zurich and the whole coach load of chattering passengers who had been fanning themselves fell into an astonished silence, shocked that anyone would take such a liberty without seeking written permission from the Federal Council.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.2 by 72 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: A lost picture found.
The set-up: Captain Hugh Drummond, called Bulldog for no reason whatever, embarks on his twentieth film, played in this instance by that irresistible sot, Tom Conway who has his brief way with women, one after another. The fraternity brothers lost count at two. Situation normal.
Bulldog tracks down a set of stolen lead soldiers to find a long lost Anglo-Saxon treasure trove stashed just before the Battle of Hastings. It is a tried and true formula used by Arthur Conan Doyle and many others. Bulldog borrows some gear from Lara Croft and sallies forth with a cast of flunkies and leading ladies in his wake.
This is one of the many studio B quickies done in five days of shooting and subsequently lost to the ravages of indifference, until 2001 when a much deteriorated 16mm print turned up on Ebay from which the You Tube offering derives. It is nearly impossible to watch. The images are stretched, the surface flyblown, and the dialogue out of sync. All too much like a keg party at the House. Think of it as a Salvador Dali version of a film. It is available on DVD now in a cleaned up copy but I am not motivated that far.
GoodReads meta-data is 385 pages, rated 3.84 by 83 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Too much shoot ‘em up, not enough think ‘em up.
Time: 1970s. Place: South Korea.
The US Eighth Army had about 60,000 personnel in South Korea at the time. So many people, so many of them bored, all of them with access to American goods at wholesale prices while across the street from each camp was a thriving blackmarket. Result, a lot of low level crime. Buy the whiskey, cigarettes, radios, washing machines cheap on the base; cross the street and sell them for a profit. Illegal but profitable.
Then again put 60,000 people together in small spaces leading regimented lives, and friction results. Crimes against persons follow. Then add the money in blackmarket transactions and the felony fires flicker.
By the terms of the alliance with South Korea, the Eighth Army polices itself with a Criminal Investigation Division, of which Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are two investigators. They are both lifers and have been doing it a long time.* (This is the thirteen title in the series.) Their names and ways are known.
Both North Korea and South Korea are armed and dangerous. The piracy of the USS Pueblo in 1968 with the subsequent murder of one crewman in captivity, the crippling of two others, and the beating the rest into putty, is fresh in everyone’s mind. Ergo there are a lot of angry GIs who want revenge or at least who will make sure they are not next for the cement mixer.
The air along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) sizzles with tension. Talk about a misnomer, there was then no place on earth so militarised with a million armed men on each side of the line, many of them straining at the bit. It got worse when new North Korea artillery brought Seoul within range.
Bad as all that is, it is worse still in the Joint Security Area, that bubble inside the DMZ where those Blue Huts are with a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) dividing them in half.
The curb between the two is the DML.
JSA is an assignment no grunt wants because it is THE tripwire that (and all who dwell there) would be the first to go. Poof! In principle both sides have free movement within this small area, in practice everyone moves slowly and every move is watched with angry eyes.
Late one night Sueño and Bascom are roused from their cots in Seoul and ordered north to the JSA where they find the Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of the night shift standing guard over a dead body, that of a ROK soldier assigned to the JSA. Ten feet away stand a squad of NKs with AK-47s in ready. The corpse is sprawled over the MDL within the DMZ at JSA in the ROK. OK? The Chicken Colonel orders Sueño and Bascom to pull the body back to his side, while the NKs get twitchy. Sueño and Bascom do as ordered and begin their investigation into the murder of No-Go, as his friends called him, a ROK grunt who did warehouse duty in JSA.
What was No-Go doing in the middle of the night at the MDL? He should have been abed many yards away. Moreover, who split his skull with an entrenching tool?
The easy answer to the last question is the NKs. But why? They’ll do anything! Wait! If the NKs wanted him dead, they would have shot him. Period. No that answer is too pat, though some in the Eighth see it as another Pueblo incident. Meanwhile, life goes on, that is, crime goes on, and Sueñp and Bascom have other investigations to pursue.
They get mixed signals about continuing to investigate No-Go’s murder, but as always Sueño never knows when to quit, and Bascom goes along for the ride. Then the Eighth settles on No-Go’s buddy PFC Fusterman as the guilty party and begins to railroad him to clear the air. Convicting Fusterman will defuse tensions is the thinking of some. Others suppose the opposite, giving in the NKs a pass on this one will encourage other incidents. Back and forth goes the seesaw that Sueño and Bascom ride. It is pure McKinsey management pushing responsibility down to the lowest level, so when things go wrong the blame falls on those who have no choice in the matter.
It gets more complicated (too complicated for this reader) when a criminal gang horns into the plot. Sueño and Bascom drink a little less alcohol and bed fewer passers-by in this outing than in the earlier titles, but they still get beat up and shot at enough to get re-accredited as cartoon heroes. All that leaves this reader cold. As does Sueño’s repeated hormone attacks. Really Sueño zip it up for a while.
What is fascinating is the ways and means of investigating within the interstices of the Eighth Army. There is always a paper trail if one knows where to look and whom to ask, even when the perpetrator has tried to erase it, there are all those copies in triplicate times triplicate, and these two lifers can follow these snail trails. They know a lot of other lifer sergeants with whom to trade information. The sergeants’ network holds many an army together.
Further, Sueño has learned to speak Korean and his interactions with the locals are very well realised. He may be a ‘big nose’ but he knows and respects the ways of Koreans. No-Go had a family and Bascom and Sueño find out a lot through them. Fusterman had a family, too, and its members send a lawyer to defend him in the Court Martial. While feisty, she is an underdeveloped character in this telling, too easily misled while loudly proclaiming her savvy and contributing nothing to the story. Don’t blame her, she is written that way.
Inspector Kill and Officer Oh from the Korean National Police put in a welcome appearance. Kill is a dedicated man but he takes orders, and Oh remains enigmatic but a good friend to have in a tight corner. These two like nothing better than slamming up villains of any kind and sometimes it suits them to work through Sueño and Bascom.
Then there is the climatic firefight in the JSA which seemed gratuitous in the context of softly-softly, though it was noteworthy that one of the weapon wielders on the Sergeants’ side was a woman MP whose quick wit prevented a further disaster. The madness of Colonel Peel, another officer in the mix, is, well, madness. Though there is an implied complexity in the NK officer Kwon that might have been better brought to the surface when to save his family he refused to defect.
By the way, the fiction then as now is that the JSA is administered by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, consisting of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Neutral? As if. These representatives are seldom seen and never heard.
Grant Limón license, because many strange things have happened in the unique place that is the JSA.
Martin Límon, himself a lifer.
There is a superb Korean film, much more low key than this book, called ‘Joint Security Area’ (2000).
Lobby poster.
We saw it after we visited the JSA in 2004, and even in 2004 when things were not as tense as in the 1970s, the JSA crackled. At the time I was visiting professor at Korea University.
*Lifer means someone in for the maximum enlistment of twenty years. Not quite literally life but it most feel like is sometime.
GoodReads meta-data is 383 pages and it is rated 4.06 by 1246 litizens.
Genre: Chick Non-fic
Verdict: A cackle! Then a bore.
Executive Summary: Dedicated introvert bites the bagel and tries to live as an extrovert for one year. Disasters follow.
Long Summary: Self-diagnosed Shintrovert* (shy + introvert) goes all out to be a self-confident extrovert and talk to anyone and everyone on the street, on the bus, in the supermarket, in London. London! That was bound to fail. Luckily she was not charged with numerous violations of civil code of mutual indifference that rules Britannia.
The phrase in the title ‘Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come’ is her main social gambit. Maybe that explains a few things right there. She seeks professional help from a variety of consultants, while using friend apps. Do such things exist? Yes, they do. Both the consultants and the apps are real.
The social media apps match isolated loners with other isolated loners, although neither of them admits to it, with a view to a meeting. Some of these meetings consist of awkward silences, others are trips to a film where nothing can be said. Progress on extroversion scale: 0.
The consultants are varied, one teaches her to be charismatic by smiling, nodding, and offering a firm handshake. Was that Hitler’s method? Gandhi’s? Now we know. Others heckle her to thicken the social skin. Both get paid. Another listens to her talk and then gets paid. [No comment.]
She also reads the abstracts of social psychology journals to lard footnotes through the pages. Cargo cult: If is is in print, then it must be true, right? Check out Pox News for the latest on that.
I did keep flicking the pages but it got so-o-o-o repetitive. It is like far too many clever pieces published in the New Yorker magazine that are then puffed up into a book. Emphasis on puff. At sixty pages it was an amusing ride, at 383 (!) it was as tedious as a continuous family get together for Thanksgiving that lasted a year (with no survivors.) It went on and on for no other reason than to go on and on than to tear pages off the calendar.
Alright already, I know that many readers take it seriously as a psychological self-help guide, but you don’t have to be sick to laugh out loud, and I did. As usual the legion of GoodReads reviews are therapy for the writers and uninformative for the reader. Par for that course.
*Shouldn’t that then be ‘shy-introvert?’Autocorrect objects to both versions so nothing to choose there.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1192 cinematizens. (I do worry about some cinematizens when I see ratings like this.)
Genre: noir
Verdict: Oh hum.
In his first feature film a rake-thin Dr Leonard McCoy has a bad dream and tells the world about it, repeatedly. His Georgia origins are pronounced. (Get it?) He was born Jackson DeForest Kelley. Can you believe any parents would do that?
The dream opens proceedings and it is very well done, with spinning and shadows. In it there is a femme fatale, to be sure, and man bent over a safe in conservatory with four mirrored doors.
A robotic, and so perfectly cast, McCoy emerges from behind one door while the couple are intent on the safe behind another door, and he stabs the man to death while the femme scoots.
He then wakes upon a sweat, and begins to blab, while striving not to blab, he blabs to his brother-in-law of the chiselled chin (Paul Kelly) who laughs it off, slaps him around to straighten him out, and finally begins to think something might have happened. Chin is a copper and he has his ways of finding out things, namely, a slap on the chops. After the pair of them with their wife and girlfriend, respectively, just happen to go on a picnic on the grounds the very mansion possessed of a conservatory with four mirrored doors. Small world.
Sidebar: By now the fraternity brothers had passed out from boredom and beer in equal measure.
Thereafter Kelley and Kelly are on the case. McCoy cries, faints, trembles, and is useless, while Chisel-chin does all the running, thumping, and shooting. As we Noiristas realised from the second act, the harmless little man next door was an evil genius who had hypnotised weak-minded McCoy into hiding in the conservatory closet to surprise the safe cracker and moll.
The moll was Harmless’s wife who was going to run off with the cracksman after he cleaned out Harmless’s safe. Not nice to be sure.
Turns out robot McCoy had no responsibility because the yegg attacked him when he appeared out of nowhere ergo he acted in self defence. Sure, tell that to the judge, which he did. The end.
The dream sequence at the beginning derives from ‘Spellbound’ (1945) and anticipated later imitations. In this outing it lacks the gravitas imparted by Alfred Hitchcock who added doses of Salvador Dali hyper-reality to it in ‘Vertigo’ (1958). Strangely ‘Fear in the Dark’ is not included on the IMDb list of more than a thousand films with a dream sequence, but it does index many Donald Duck cartoons. Did A.I. compile that list?
One of the reviews attached to the IMDb entry – Film Noir of the Week – goes on and on for about 3000 words interpreting the film as a homosexual love story between Chisel-chin and trembling McCoy. Believe it, Ripley! I watched a different movie.
McCoy had just come out of the army and was branching out from his pre-war career as a radio singer. (!) His acting peaked in this outing, though he had a career as a villain in westerns on television before The United Federation of Planets was desperate enough to draft him. He remained robotic.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.98 by 116 litizens.
Genre: Travel
Verdict: languid and insightful.
Morris first set eyes on Trieste in 1946 as a soldier in the British Army, then near to fifty years later Morris returned.
When Trieste had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire for nearly a century it was the port of Venice at a time when the Hapsburgs, at the height of their powers, developed maritime ambitions in the Adriatic. To link it to the capital, all-weather roads and railways were built over the mountains while the harbour was dredged, and made modern. Vienna was the seat of a vast empire and home of a royal house that had once extended from the Carpathian mountains to the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It was rivalled only to London and Paris as a world capital at its peak, and Trieste was its nautical doorway for those years.
Trieste only became Italian by dint of others, and like its neighbour, Venice, it has never felt itself to be Italian, but rather a world of its own with its own language, mōres, and manners. And that is what it was in 1946 when a callow Morris arrived with the 2nd New Zealand Division, to a Free City under the aegis of the United Nations, while national borders were resolved in the jig-saw puzzle of the post-war Balkans. Both Italy and Yugoslavia advanced claims for it, both for the same reason: as a buffer against the other, i.e., neither wanted it for itself. While those tensions played out the city was divided and occupied as Vienna was for a time. In Trieste it was Kiwis on one side and Jugs on the other for a time in an uneasy fait accompli.
Berlin was divided and occupied and so important no one would yield a centimetre thereby spawning a vast culture of art and literature about that long-divided city. Vienna was divided and occupied for a time and Graham Greene immortalised it in ‘The Third Man.’ Trieste was divided and occupied and no one noticed, not even many Triestinos.
Today Trieste is in if not of Italy, but the city lies within a few kilometres from the successors of Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia, once the hinterlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the guns of August unlimbered in 1914, it was through the port of Trieste that the remains of the slain Archduke passed on the way to Vienna.
But to revert, at the end of World War I Italy got title to Trieste as a spoil of war for being on the winning side after the blood bath at nearby Caporetto with the result that the city lost its raison d’état for it was then shorn of its hinterland and the capital it had been developed to serve, namely Vienna. No longer glowing in the reflected glory of Viennese art, culture, literature, music, power, or commerce, Trieste fell into the torpor of a melancholy lassitude where it was content to remain far from any beaten path.
Proof of its irrelevance is that it was all but untouched in World War II, not being important enough for anyone to bomb it to smithereens, and when Italy changed sides in August 1943 neither partisans nor fascists bothered much with Trieste, since it had offered no material, strategic, or symbolic advantage. Ergo there was no rush to get there and fight over it. However it bears scars of that war in another way, as the locale of a Nazi charnel house at San Sabba.
In the parade of names of Triestinos only Italo Svevo meant anything to me and that was very little, as the author of ‘The Conscience of Zeno.’ By the way ‘Italo Svevo’ is a pseudonym for Aron Schmitz.
Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal) served as French Consul there. While his most famous novel is Le Rouge and le Noir, for my money far more interesting is the one set in Italy, namely La Chartreuse de Parme. Though he preferred cosmopolitan Milano to the backwater of Trieste.
James Joyce spent much time there pencilling his incomprehensible Ulysses, which Morris by-passes ever so delicately.
Illy coffee stems from here where the family remains. We have been loyal imbibers of Illy for many a year in its red, blue, and pink banners.
Much of the book is Morris musing on life, and it is so well done that I, curmudgeon first class that I am, have no complaints. Indeed I hope to read more of Morris’s books in due course for sheer pleasure of the effortless prose.
Effortless to read, but no doubt it takes quite an effort to achieve that.
There is a story of an aspiring young writer visiting Anatole France, famed for his elegant yet simple prose in many novels. The ingenue was shown into the master’s study where France was at work surrounded by a mass of pages, doodles, crumpled-up balls of paper, pages of cross-out done with such vigour as to tear the paper, and more discarded pages overflowing the bin. Seeing the eyes of the would-be acolyte noting the mess, France said, ‘this writing, it is not so easy as it looks when it is done.’
We spent four nights in Trieste in 2019 and enjoyed it. I noticed several posters called for a Free State of Trieste.
Goodreads meta-data is 119 pages, rated 4.51 by 101 litizens
Genre: krimi, period piece
Verdict: Ruso and Tilla are at it again.
By some mischance Ruso and Tilla have taken up residence in Gaul on his brother’s farm, while the latter is away. What Ruso knows about farming is zero. So he tries to look thoughtful when the foreman seeks his decisions. Meanwhile, he tries to make peace among his many quarrelling siblings, in-laws, relatives, and visitors. He means well but seldom succeeds. Tilla tries to be a good Roman wife and shut up, but she is not good at that either.
Then Ruso’s younger sister has an illicit boyfriend who seems to have murdered his employer. After much avuncular tsk, tsk, tsking, he hopes to let the law take its course. Not so his sister who throws herself into the defence of her beau and Ruso must extricate her, and the best way to do that is to find the real killer. He means well but seldom succeeds at this either.
Enter Tilla who is much better at getting people to talk to her, partly because she is such a foreign specimen no one takes her seriously – big mistake.
This title is an entry in Downie’s Medicus series. Much I sympathise with Ruso and love Tilla, I fear that the author is running out of steam.
Goodreads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 276 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Fun but flabby
When CBS executives pressured Orson Welles to reduce the verisimilitude of the script for the Halloween broadcast in 1938, his standard defence was that no one would be stupid enough to think it real. Ah, he should have paid more attention to P. T. Barnum. There is always someone that stupid with many friends, just look at the White House today.
In 1938 Welles was an infant terrible of twenty-three years already with a string of theatrical triumphs behind him. While he was a creative genius, as well he knew, he needed help and founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman to produce his genius. Yes, that John Houseman.
Welles never did one thing at a time; while he continued to stage dramas for the Mercury Theatre on Broadway, he also branched out with the Mercury Theatre of the Air, while simultaneously writing scripts for movies. If he had fewer than three separate and independent projects to work on in a day, he became bored.
Welles own career in radio started with that voice as the caped avenger in ‘The Shadow,’ who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, rivalling Santa Claus in contravening of the NSW Privacy Laws. To return to this yarn Welles is hatching a new project and he brings into the tent the writer of ‘The Shadow’ stories from earlier years, Walter Gibson, who is the narrator thereafter.
Gibson is no ingénue but even he is swept up in the profligate and prodigious energy that Welles exudes, and — since all expenses are paid — he goes along for the ride. He enters just as the Mercury Theatre of the Air is rehearsing for The War of the Worlds. It is fascinating to read of the organised chaos that produced live-to-air radio in 1938. While on air and in role before the microphone Welles scribbles new lines for the other players to whom he hands them.
Genius he may be, but that most levelheaded of men, Houseman, knows Welles is riding for fall, and he tries to reign Welles in, again and again. Ditto the CBS executive who delivers the budget, but who also wants to curb the enthusiasms of the Wunderkind least the corporate goodwill evaporate taking the money with it. Gibson observes all of this with wry detachment.
The Welles that emerges in these pages conforms to the general impression. Genius, yes, without a doubt, charming and charismatic to get his way. But also he can be crude, rude, and arrogant by turns. And ever theatrical in appearance, tone, and movement. He could turn the taps on for love or hate with equal ease and switch between them in a breath, because he did not mean any of it. Not so much that he was insincere, as like an Olympian god, he was indifferent to the matters of mere mortals. (What a comeuppance then to spend all those later years pitching for Findus frozen peas and Paul Masson wine in television advertisements. These make painful viewing on You Tube. How low the Olympian fell before the long arc of justice.)
Every time Houseman forced a compromise on him after much resistance and rancour, Welles would give in with lavish good grace, and promptly undermine the agreement. To give an example, if CBS insisted that no real names be used. He made up names that in the script did not look like real names but when said with certain inflections — which he coached the actors to do — sounded like real names of people or places. When CBS said the script cannot have a simulated President Roosevelt speaking, after hours of angry resistance, Welles conceded by substituting a Secretary of the Interior. He then cast as the Secretary an actor famous for his perfect impersonation of FDR. And so on.
So Houseman decided to teach Welles a lesson he would not forget – SPOILER ALERT — by framing him for murder! As an accomplished producer Houseman knows everything about staging and with the help of a woman scorned he fakes a murder scene with Welles’s name written all over it – literally, for Welles to find a few hours before the ‘The War of the Worlds Broadcast.’ That’ll tame him was Houseman’s hope. A subdued Welles could then be guided to moderate the realism of the upcoming broadcast, thought Houseman.
Yes the frame-up did stun Welles, but the show must go on and, if anything, the spectre of the murder fired him to make even greater effort in the broadcast. Houseman had underestimated his man.
I said ‘flabby’ above because I found the pages padded with endless and pointless descriptions of clothes, decor, food, and the appearance of players who walk across the page. Buried in this verbiage is short story that is a corker, notwithstanding the fact there is almost no investigation, no psychological depth, just an elaborate prank within an even more elaborate prank. But the evocation of radio drama was fascinating and I intend to listen to a few from Audible, starting with ‘The Shadow!’ On a similar note I read years ago, and have dredged up the reference thanks to the app Book Collector, John Dunning, Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime (2001). It too evokes the magic of radio in 1942.
A number of other items related to Welles’s ‘The War of the Worlds’ broadcast have been discussed on the blog, including Ed Murrow’s documentary on it and Hadley Cantril’s study The Invasion from Mars (1940). Seek and ye may find.
It turns out there were plenty of people dumb enough to believe that invasion story, despite the station breaks, the newspaper advertisements, the fabricated place names, the incorrect terminology, the elapsed time, and any number of radio-addicted children who recognised the voices of the actors. These people vote, drive cars, and have opinions. Think of that. Look around, they are your neighbours today.
Collins is a writing industry from his Iowa home with a number of series. This one is in a set of so-called Disaster novels, that centre on a real, or in this case imagined, disaster, e.g., the Hindenburg crash, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, or the assassination of Huey Long. In them he mixes real people of the time and place with some fictional ones to stir the pot. He does a great deal of research for the context, but anachronisms still appear, as he admitted in the afterword to this novel. These always jar.
