Favorite Welles Radio Show?

[blunted by community]

oh, no, glenn, i'm well aware that in it's day welles' radio work was on the cutting edge. he was doing stuff that no one else was doing. the shows were live, innovative, there were a lot of technical problems, and like you said, we are lucky to have them. a lot of them exists because some one at home had a recorder, and they were recorded on 1/4 inch thick records with a nail for a needle.

they are just tough for me to sit through. lack of patience i guess.

i might be wrong but i thought i remembered reading that the black museum was an innovative series, but jeff wilson said the same thing you did, they were just regular radion shows, no big deal.

[Jeff Wilson]

Generally speaking, The Black Museum shows are hired hand work, with Welles only as narrator. The ones I've listened to are okay. Nowhere near as interesting as the Harry Lime shows.

Another consideration when discussing Welles' radio career is the nature of radio made Welles much more reliant on his collaborators, and the nature of live broadcast made it obviously more difficult to get around incompetence or poor writing. Welles' 1944 Almanac show has perhaps the worst writing of any of his series, although it does have bright moments as well. Perhaps his most underrated show, in my opinion, is the Lady Esther sponsored series of 1941-42. Aside from the bad idea of having Jiminy Cricket as Welles' conscience in the first three shows (Welles wisely only signed Cliff Edwards, Jiminy's voice, to a three show contract), there is some really good stuff in this series. Sadly, much of the series is out of circulation or lost completely. Welles had to end the series to leave for It's All True, but wanted to continue the show from South America, which would have been interesting if agreed to.

[mteal]

Yes, the fact that much of The Lady Esther Show is missing is a lamentable gap in Welles' radio output. He was at the peak of his creative powers as evidenced by the exquisite version of THE APPLE TREE that can be heard on Voyager's collection of Welles/Mercury radio pgms, THEATRE OF THE IMAGINATION. The Lilly Library also has another LE show - not available commercially, I don't believe - which features Dorothy Comingore; one of the few if not only time besides CITIZEN KANE that she appeared with Welles. Another LE show features Tim Holt and Anne Baxter from Ambersons, a show that now appears to be lost.

I agree that the '45 This Is My Best version of HEART OF DARKNESS is far more interesting then the Mercury Theatre version, done in '38. Of course, the earlier version, like so many Welles radio programs, is difficult to judge fairly because of the rather poor sound quality. Check out MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY from Radio Yesteryear's recent 5-CD set of Welles radio shows if you want to see how vividly these shows can come across with clean sound.

[blunted by community]

i have theater of the imagination, will check out apple tree.

maybe it's the harry lime radio show the one that citizen welles mentioned welles spent time on and did very well, not the black museum. the book is right behind me, i just don't want to look it up. i did like the harry lime shows i heard. had welles' sense of humor, and i was able to sit through the whole show.

[Jeff Wilson]

Comingore appeared in the 10/6 episode, in "The Black Pearl." Holt and Baxter appeared in the 10/20 episode, in "Romance," which is apparently lost. Lady Esther was hurt in part by Pedlar & Ryan (the ad agency for LE) surveying housewives as to their approval of the show. The verdict was that the patchwork nature of the show was too much to handle for them, and they wanted one show, one story. Also, the show's choice of material often grated with the target audience of makeup-buying women; one of the show's best pieces, "Wilbur Brown-Habitat Brooklyn," (starring Glenn Anders, incidentally), was roundly panned by the survey audience, one even calling "typical of Orson Welles." And you have to love a program that begins its first show with "Shredni Vashtar," not exactly a nice story.

[mteal]

I believe The Black Pearl was an original story written by Norman Foster. As I remember, Welles lays on a pretty thick Mexican-bandito accent opposite Comingore. Too bad about the Holt/Baxter episode; that might have made a nice extra on an Ambersons DVD.

Welles' refusal to pander entirely to the "female" taste of the Lady Esther audience is yet another example of how his bend-but-don't-break artistic integrity applied to radio as well as film. It cost him again and again too, but it's one of the reasons he endures today. It's hard to imagine anyone not liking WILBUR BROWN- Glenn Anders and Ray Collins are hilarious and put the story across with great aplomb. I'm glad they put that on the Theatre of the Imagination set too.

Blunted,
I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating: two HARRY LIME shows stand out in importance from the rest, IMO. They are:

DEAD CANDIDATE (aka Buzzo Gospel)
A condensed version of Welles' novel UNE GROSSE LEGUME, which has never been translated into English.

MAN OF MYSTERY (aka Greek Meets Greek)
A condensed version of Mr. Arkadin

These and a few other of the Harry Lime shows were written by Welles. The Black Museum series, as Jeff noted, was little more then Welles reading cue cards for pocket change.

[blunted by community]

Buzzo, when lime wins a soft drink company in a card game, Buzo. goes to a south american country to sell his product and he's mistaken for a dignatary of the united states government.

years ago i read about welles thinking it would be funny to have such a story. the soda salesman arrives and the south american country, they turn out to pay him tribute with parades and airplanes, then they discover he's selling soda.

years after reading this i saw a film called THE COCA-COLA KID?, with eric roberts, and wondered if welles' idea sparked that. then i hear the harry lime show about the same thing. any one have any clues on this?

in the buzzo show welles has a south american dignitary named juaquimo. what a perfect name for a stuffed shirt south american dignitary. just the name makes you dislike him.

[mteal]

I've never seen THE COCA-COLA KID, but yes it sounds similar in some ways. Might be worth checking out sometime. Billy Wider's ONE, TWO, THREE also concerns an American soft drink executive (James Cagney) trying to open up new markets abroad; in this case he's trying to penetrate the Iron Curtain instead of South America. Funny movie, and Cagney is great as usual.

Back to the original topic: Many of Welles finest moments on radio can be heard on any of the three commercially released radio collections of Welles works, which are:
THEATRE OF THE IMAGINATION
THE GENIUS OF ORSON WELLES (available on cassette tape only) and
THE BEST OF ORSON WELLES

The Mercury Theatre/Campbell playhouse shows I like best are DRACULA, TALE OF TWO CITIES, WAR OF THE WORLDS, HELL ON ICE, ALGIERS, OUR TOWN, I LOST MY GIRLISH LAUGHTER, BEAU GESTE, THE GREEN GODDESS and THE CITADEL. I have to admit though, that I've only heard about half of them, and many of those were in poor sound. As was noted earler, we're lucky to have any of it (It's been estimated that only about 1% of all radio programs broadcast survive today). I'll have to order that 3-MP3 set with the 200 Welles programs sometime.

The Julius Ceasar and Man Who Was Thursday rehearsals are also very valueable artifacts.

[Glenn Anders]

Dear mteal: Your reference to "The Man Who Was Thursday" reminds me of a caution to those of us who think we know a great deal about the real Orson Welles.

John Houseman tells a droll tale of how Welles considered G. K. Chesterton's story one of the most sublime in the language, and that he was always chomping at having the Mercury do it. Finally, according to Houseman, he said, if you guys can't rough out "The Man Who Was Thursday" out for my revision, I'll do it myself. The result was, again according to Houseman, that the Company was in a panic at air time because Welles had produced virtually nothing useful. Houseman and a couple of others had to write most of the play while it was on the air, and Welles was forced to ad lib for several minutes at the end.

It is a G-R-R-EAT story, and Houseman tells it beautifully.

There is only one thing wrong with it.

Recordings of rehearsals exist for a number of the Mercury shows. Years ago, I ordered a rehearsal copy of "The Man Who Was Thursday," by mistake, from Radio Yesteryear (now part of Radio Spirits). I was so disgusted with myself that I threw the cassettes (it was over an hour long) to one side, without listening to them, and subsequently purchased the broadcast version.

[Welles is right. G. K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" is a wonderful piece of classic satire, as Welles adapted it for Radio, and as The Mercury Theater rendered it.]

Later, I heard Houseman's account, dug out my rehearsal copy, along with the broadcast version, and I compared the two.

Not to go on to much, but the rehearsal tape obviously has a few glitches and runs a bit long but it is complete, and at the end a voice, unmistakeably Houseman's, asks: "Any remarks, Orson?"

To which a wonderfully relaxed and boyish voice replies warmly: "None at all."

And so, it is inescapable, that the script was complete and intact, and had a full rehearsal prior to air time.

Perhaps there is another explanation, but either John Houseman made up this amusing story at Welles' expense, or perhaps, he confused the experience with "There's Always a Woman," the Welles's original, featuring Marie Wilson, which I mentioned earlier on the thread.

In any case, if you Wellsians are at all interested in Radio, by all means, try "The Man Who Was Thursday." Its black humor leveled at governments, intelligence services and anarchist plots is perfectly applicable to the madness which we call "The War on Terror" today.

Glenn

[mteal]

Houseman's story of how the "Man Who Was Thursday" show was 20 minutes too short is in Leonard Maltin's audio documentary on Welles and the Mercury (which is on the Theatre of the Imagination collection). An amusing anecdote, but as you said, it's completely disproved by the recording of the "Thursday" rehearsal, which runs nearly 25 minutes too long! Add to that the fact that the actors are noticeably rushing through their lines during the rehearsal and you have a show that might have run for closer to two hours.

My tape of the rehearsal does not have the little exchange at the end between Houseman and Welles that you mentioned. The person at Radio Yesteryear that made my tape must have cut it off a few seconds too soon. Shit.

[colwood]

mteal,

While there are dozens of sources for Welles OTR in mp3, I'd recommend a seller on Ebay named modrnknght. I bought a great 279-show set from him recently (search keywords "279 and "welles"). The only things missing, that I can think of off the top of my head, is the Welles Almanac and the interviews with Bogdanovich.