1‘Barbed Wire and Forget-Me-Not’:

The Radio Adventures of Laura (1944)

- Frank Krutnik, University of Sussex –(published in Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 5 no. 2

(December 2012))

ABSTRACTThis article explores the audio rendition of films withinthe movie adaptation series that proliferated on US radiofrom the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s. Focussing on severalversions of the 1944 film Laura, the article examines theinstitutional, ideological and representationalnegotiations involved in translating this property fromthe cinema screen to the airwaves. A celebrated exampleof film noir, Laura reveals an unusual handling of questionsof gender and sexuality as well as highly eccentricstorytelling strategies and a distinctive visual style.Drawing on a range of critical approaches, reviews andtrade materials, as well as offering detailed textualanalysis of filmic and radio material, the articleconsiders what happens when such a distinctive film isadapted to a medium that communicates exclusively throughsound and which operates within more tightly regulatedcommercial and institutional imperatives.

KEYWORDSradio dramafilm noiradaptationOtto PremingerVera CasparyLaura (1944)sexual representationnarratology

2From the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s American radio

audiences could tune in on a regular basis to hear big

name Hollywood stars plying their wares in audio versions

of recent and vintage movies. Lux Radio Theatre (1934-55)

initiated the trend in May 1936, when it relocated from

New York to Los Angeles and swapped its diet of Broadway

plays for lavishly-mounted renditions of Hollywood films.1

The Lux show was joined by Screen Guild Theatre (1939-52), and

then through the subsequent decade by many similar film

adaptation programs – including Hollywood Premiere (1941),

Theatre of Romance (1943-6), The Star and the Story (1944), The Old

Gold Comedy Theatre (1944-5), Academy Award Theatre (1946), This is

Hollywood (1946-7), The Hollywood Players (1946-7), Hollywood Star

Time (1946-7), Screen Director’s Playhouse (1949-51), MGM Theatre

of the Air (1949-51), Hollywood Sound Stage (1951-2) and Stars in

the Air (1951-2) (Krutnik 2013). Film adaptations were also

extremely popular on other dramatic anthology series such

as The Philip Morris Playhouse (1941-53), Suspense (1942-62), The

Radio Hall of Fame (1943-6), Everything for the Boys (1944), Theatre

Guild on the Air/ US Steel Hour (1945-53), Hour of Mystery (1946),

3Studio One (1947-8), Ford Theatre (1947-9), The Family Hour of Stars

(1948-50), Hallmark Playhouse (1948-53), General Electric Theatre

(1953) and NBC Radio Theatre (1955-60).

With the heyday of US radio's movie adaptation genre

coinciding with what critics have identified as the 'film

noir era', it is not surprising that a large number of

films subsequently labeled noir were translated to the

airwaves, alongside comedies, dramas, Westerns, war

films, musicals and films of other genres. Although

recent scholarship on film noir has acknowledged that

certain radio programs form part of what James Naremore

(1998, 254-78) has termed the 'noir mediascape', audio

adaptations of noir films – or indeed any other films –

have thus far received surprisingly little attention,

despite the fact that many of these programs are now

easily accessible from various sources.2 Along with

several other programming forms that can be seen to be

affiliated with, influenced by, analogous to, or

anticipating film noir, the movie adaptations constituted a

key part of what has been termed 'radio noir', a concept

4that has been gaining increasing attention in discussions

of both cinema and old time radio of the 1940s-50s.3

This article examines in detail several radio

versions of one highly regarded example of film noir, the

Twentieth Century-Fox crime thriller Laura. Directed by

Otto Preminger, this 1944 film was in itself a

translation of a pre-existing text, the successful

mystery novel of the same name by Vera Caspary. In

analyzing these adaptations I will investigate to what

degree the celebrated noir qualities of such a film can

survive translation to the audio medium. Faced with the

prospect of transforming Laura into workable radio drama,

the producers of the movie adaptation series certainly

had their work cut out for them. Like other noir

properties, the film posed substantial formal and

ideological challenges for the audio dramatist as,

besides profiling a series of anomalous sexual scenarios,

Laura also uses highly eccentric strategies of narration

and visualization. Despite such textual intricacies,

however, the film proved to be one of the most popular

5choices for adaptation within these series, with seven

dramatizations broadcast from February 1945 to February

1954. It was quite common for successful films to enjoy

multiple adaptations across several series – for example,

there were eight versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion

(1941) and nine of Shadow of a Doubt (1943), five versions

of both The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Woman in the Window

(1945), and eight versions of Double Indemnity (1944).

Subsequent airings of a film within a particular series

generally utilized the same script, though not always

with the original cast – as happened, for example, with

the Lux and Screen Guild renditions of Laura. As the shows

were generally presented live, the rebroadcasts were not

so much repeats as re-presentations.

Looking in detail at two versions of Laura, one from a

60-minute series and one from a 30-minute series, I will

explore how this unusual film was rendered workable

within the representational and institutional constraints

of the movie adaptation program. As well as scrutinizing

the adjustments required to accommodate this particular

6film to the airwaves, this case study will also

illuminate the more general operational procedures of the

movie adaptation series. First, however, I will consider

the screen version itself, suggesting how Laura functions

both as a film and as a film noir.

Laura as Film/Noir

The copious critical work on 1940s film noir includes

Laura as part of the canon, even though it lacks key

canonical elements such as a femme fatale, the mean streets

world of urban criminality, and extensive chiaroscuro

stylization. Nevertheless, it qualifies for inclusion

within the noir corpus on several grounds. Most obviously,

Laura features a hard-boiled detective, even if the film

casts him adrift from his conventional moorings. As he

investigates a high-society murder case, proletarian

police lieutenant Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) struggles

with the alien class values and mores of New York’s

cultural elite. Journeying through this glittering world

of wealth and privilege, McPherson encounters a

7succession of venal, amoral and perverse characters: the

waspish Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), who has a

Pygmalion-style fixation with the beautiful and

promiscuous Laura (Gene Tierney); the shamelessly amoral

gigolo Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price); and Laura’s rich

aunt Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), who poaches Shelby

from her niece. McPherson is himself compromised by the

strange obsession he develops with Laura when he believes

her to be dead.

Many critics are drawn to the noir films because of

the manner in which they question conventional

formulations of sexual desire and gender identity (see,

for example, Kaplan 1978 and Krutnik 1991). Laura is a

productive text in this regard, as it uses the framework

of the mystery story to mount a fascinating exploration

of the psychopathology of desire.4 Waldo Lydecker provides

the film's most flamboyant example of non-normative

desire. In recent years it has become commonplace to read

him as gay, owing to his Wildean witticisms, his effete

mannerisms, and the fact that Clifton Webb was

8ostentatiously homosexual (see for example, Dyer 1977).

But this is not essentially and inherently the case, as

the film arguably codes his obsession with Laura as a

perversely fetishistic and voyeuristic variant of

heterosexual desire.5 Thus, Eugene McNamara (1992: 10)

insists on reading Lydecker as ‘a raging heterosexual’,

while Kristin Thompson (1988: 190) argues that the film

codes him as impotent. If not necessarily gay, however,

Lydecker is demonstrably queer in his deviation from

heterodomestic norms – with the film connecting such

perversity to his intellectualism and aestheticism.

Clifton Webb’s playing of the role certainly opens the

film to more explicitly gay-themed readings, with at

least one contemporary critic having no doubt about

Lydecker’s sexual orientation. Reviewing the film for The

New Republic, Manny Farber claimed that ‘his perfumed

literary style of talking expresses a lot of auntyish

effeminacy’ (2009: 197).

The film also offers a remarkably equivocal account

of its nominal hero. Vera Caspary described her initial

9conception for the film’s source novel as a ‘murder-

romance about a detective who falls in love with a murder

victim’ (1978: 143). McPherson becomes enamored not with

a person but with an idealized image of woman that is

filtered through the desires of other men: both the

portrait painted by one of Laura’s lovers, Jacoby (John

Dexter), and Waldo’s glowingly romantic verbal depiction.

Despite lending her name to the film, Laura herself

remains a diaphanous and elusive presence who circulates

as a free-floating signifier of male desire and identity.

Her character is a collage of male projections that never

adds up to a fully consistent identity: for Lydecker she

is an exquisite art object he wants to possess, for

Shelby she is a wealthy and glamorous career woman, for

McPherson she is a good-hearted girl ready for a domestic

career as a cop’s wife. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck

complained at one stage in the scripting process that:

Our main, our central character is a nonentity.On one page she is looking for a job (via thefountain pen endorsement...), but on anotherpage we find that she has a rich aunt whotravels with the smart set and sleeps with

10gigolos... I do not know whether she [Laura]was a school girl who wanted a career, orwhether she was a rich girl who was trying tobreak away from her aunt and society by tryingto get a job. (quoted in Behlmer 1982: 184)

Besides its sophisticated subject matter, Laura

further resembles designated noir films through the

unusual manner in which it tells its story. Caspary’s

novel uses a complexly realized prismatic narration in

which multiple characters relay events through their own

stylistic idioms: Lydecker, then McPherson, then Shelby

(via the transcript of a police interrogation), then

Laura, and finally McPherson again (McNamara 1992: 24-

33). At times, the same scenes are presented from

different perspectives, so as to question the characters’

reliability. The film similarly aimed for a complex

handling of narration and focalization, although

Caspary’s use of multiple narrators was gradually

abandoned during the production process.6 Lydecker's

narration was retained, however, and his voice-over

provides a memorably atmospheric start to the film. In a

11tone of poetically self-absorbed melancholy, Waldo

expresses the loneliness he has felt since Laura’s death:

‘I shall never forget the weekend Laura died. Asilver sun burned through the sky like a hugemagnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday inmy recollection. I felt as if I were the onlyhuman being left in New York. For with Laura'shorrible death, I was alone’.

Lydecker's narration returns later, for a series of

flashbacks through which he informs McPherson (and the

audience) about his relationship with Laura. Besides

providing crucial expository material, these scenes also

dramatize the process by which McPherson grows

increasingly fascinated with the lost Laura through what

Lydecker tells him about her (the audience, of course,

possesses superior knowledge as we actually see Gene

Tierney as Laura in the flashbacks). While Lydecker’s

view of Laura dominates the first half of the film, the

second half privileges McPherson’s perspective. But

instead of using the latter’s voice-over, the film

engineers a marked shift in focalization after Waldo has

delivered his flashback narrations. As they depart

12Montagnino’s restaurant the camera momentarily holds on a

medium long shot of the two men as they exchange their

parting words. Waldo walks off, screen right, but rather

than following him, the camera executes a flamboyant

dolly in for a tight close-up of McPherson’s face as he

looks on at the departing writer. This is followed by the

first fade out in the film, an emphatic punctuation

device that signals a key dramatic pause – which marks

the point of focal switchover between the two characters.

Although the filmmakers eliminated McPherson’s

voice-over narration, the subsequent scenes stick very

closely to him. Instead of relaying his thoughts

directly, the film presents McPherson from an exterior

perspective and encourages the audience to speculate

about his subjectivity. This strategy of proximate

focalization is especially crucial in the remarkable

sequence preceding Laura’s ‘return from the grave’.

Across several scenes we see McPherson making himself at

home in Laura’s apartment – reading through her letters

and effects, and using it as a venue to interrogate her

13friends. Entering the apartment one night, he gazes at

the large portrait of Laura hanging over the fireplace,

as David Raksin’s lushly melancholic theme builds an

atmosphere of romantic reverie. McPherson takes off his

coat and jacket, loosens his tie, and then picks up a

bundle of letters, which he carries with him as he

wanders through the apartment. In Laura’s bedroom, he

reaches into a drawer and toys with one of her silken

handkerchiefs, then sniffs her perfume. McPherson’s

sojourn in the apartment is interrupted by the arrival of

Lydecker, who chides the detective for invading Laura’s

privacy and accuses him of:

‘... acting very strangely. It’s a wonder youdon’t come here like a suitor, with roses and abox of candy. Drug store candy, of course. Haveyou ever dreamed of Laura as your wife – byyour side at the policeman’s ball, or in thebleachers, or listening to the heroic story orhow you got a silver shinbone from a gun battlewith a gangster?’.

Waldo’s exit line twists the knife further, warning

McPherson that he could ‘end up in a psychiatric ward. I

14don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love

with a corpse’.

When Lydecker leaves, McPherson helps himself to

more drinks and collapses into an easy chair, gazing up

at the portrait. As he begins to doze off, the camera

dollies in on him for a tight close-up and then, just as

quickly, dollies back again to frame the sleeping

policeman beneath the portrait of his inamorata. At that

moment there is the sound of a door opening offscreen,

and the film cuts to Gene Tierney’s Laura standing in the

doorway of the apartment. She walks over to McPherson and

he awakens, startled to find that the woman of his dreams

is alive after all.

These lengthy and leisurely scenes convey the

detective’s growing obsession with the apparently dead

Laura exclusively through composition, performance and

music. As a consequence, they pose quite a challenge to

radio dramatists – as I will consider later. Beyond this,

however, these sequences also connect to what critics

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton identify as a

15signature tendency within film noir: the oneiric. In Panorama

du Film Noir Americain (1955), the first book-length study of

the topic, they suggest that while the subject matter of

these films was ‘undoubtedly banal’, they become

fascinating because of the ‘quality of strangeness’ they

impart to events – ‘an ambiguity to the suspense: obscure

motives, shifting interests, absurd corpses’ (Borde and

Chaumeton 2002: 142). Such qualities, they suggest, were

evidence of ‘a more general tendency: the exploitation of

incoherence, the heritage of Surrealism, the influence of

Kafka’ (ibid.). The extent and nature of this heritage

may be debatable but numerous thrillers categorized as

noir demonstrate oneiric features such as the flaunting of

dreams and hallucinations, a focus on disturbed psychic

states, the psychological infusion of atmosphere,

experimentation with subjective narration, the

expressionistic visualization of characters’

disorientation, and an absurdist narrative logic. Good

examples include such films as Detour (1945), Suspense

(1946), The Chase (1946), Somewhere in the Night (1946), Dark

16Passage (1947), They Won’t Believe Me (1947), Nora Prentiss

(1947), Hollow Triumph (1948), and I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes

(1948), which bypass rational plotting in favor of

coincidence and the twisted figurations of the

unconscious. Laura fits within such company precisely

because of the uncanny resurrection of its central

character, which Borde and Chaumeton describe as ‘one of

the great moments of postwar (sic) American cinema’

(ibid: 22).

Eugene Archer explored the film’s oneiric implications

in a perceptive article for the British screen journal

Movie. Describing it as ‘demonic’ work, Archer suggests

that the film operates as ‘sadistic study in necrophilia,

on the illusion and reality theme the director [Otto

Preminger] has pursued throughout the remainder of his

career’ (1962: 13). Like the detective, Archer suggests,

the audience becomes fascinated by Laura as an illusion –

as ‘the eternal myth of womanhood, a shimmering,

exquisite creature of beauty and mystery, incisive

intelligence and maidenly warmth, a dream goddess...

17[who] is mercurially fascinating and infinitely unreal’

(ibid: 12). The most unsettling feature of the film,

Archer posits, is the doubling of the detective and the

killer through their shared obsession with Laura.

Lydecker seeks to destroy her because ‘she will never be

able to sustain his image of her’, while the tormented

and brooding detective is himself doomed to find ‘poor,

unwitting Laura, the merest shell of his erotic fantasy’

(ibid: 13).

Kristin Thompson’s later neoformalist analysis

adopts a very different approach to the film, but

nonetheless takes its cue from the film’s invocation of

dreaming. Thompson suggests that the dolly into and out

of McPherson’s face as he falls asleep in the chair

operates as a recognizable cue for a dream sequence – as

in such contemporaneous films as Stranger on the Third Floor

(1941), The Woman in the Window (1945) and Spellbound (1945)

(1988, 163-8). As Thompson points out, there are also

several direct references to dreams in characters’

dialogue through the film (ibid: 171-2). Read in this

18manner, the Laura who appears to McPherson in the

apartment is not the real woman but McPherson’s fantasy

projection of her – and, indeed, she is more in tune with

the wifely woman he desires than the potentially

promiscuous sophisticate he learns about from other

characters.7 What is unusual, however, is that the film

provides no closure for the ‘dream’, no return to

‘reality’, with the effect that ‘we are left to choose

between two possibilities: that Laura is indeed alive, or

that the narrative ends with McPherson’s dream. The film

itself refuses to aid us in deciding’ (ibid: 162). ‘The

transgressive property of Laura’s structure’, Thompson

notes, ‘is precisely that it achieves closure without

ever coming out of the ‘dream’ signaled when McPherson

falls asleep by the portrait’ (ibid: 172). As Thompson

acknowledges, it is not essential to read the dolly in-

and-out as a dream cue, but the technique certainly

serves to foreground the obsessional nature of

McPherson’s fantasizing about Laura (ibid: 179-80).

Moreover, the technique adds a striking indeterminacy to

19the second half of the film that works against the

conventional resolute trajectory of detective fiction,

adding the ‘quality of strangeness’ that Borde and

Chaumeton so admire in noir films. And, once more, this

is not so easy to achieve on radio.

Laura Rides the Airwaves

From 1945 to 1954 seven versions of Laura were broadcast

by five dramatic anthology series, all but one of which

specialized in film adaptations. Besides fitting within a

long-established tradition of film-radio tie-ins, these

adaptations also constituted part of a more extensive

textual relay initiated by Vera Caspary’s property.

Besides the novel and film, this included Caspary’s

original 1942 Collier’s magazine serial Ring Twice for Laura, a

stage play, several television renditions (in 1955, 1962

and 1968), and the hugely successful and much covered

song created when Johnny Mercer added lyrics to David

Raksin’s haunting film theme.8 The neo-noir thrillers

20Sharky’s Machine (1981) and Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) also

pay self-conscious homage to the 1944 film, and McNamara

suggests that it may also have influenced Hitchcock’s

Vertigo (1958) (1992: 65).

The first radio version was broadcast a mere four

months after the film’s opening, when it was still

playing in cinemas, while subsequent versions capitalized

on the film’s reputation and on the ongoing popularity of

its stars. Given how firmly she was associated with the

title character, it is hardly surprising that Gene

Tierney is the original cast member who appears most

often in these radio adaptations, starring in all but two

of the broadcasts. Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb each

perform in three radio versions and Vincent Price in only

one (see Table 1). The following analysis considers the

contrasting approaches taken to the adaptation of Laura by

Lux Radio Theatre and Screen Guild Theatre. Besides the general

difficulty of cramming an 88 minute narrative into much

shorter timeframes it is precisely the most ‘noirish’

aspects of the film that pose the greatest challenges to

21the radio dramatists. In particular, they faced problems

in dealing with the film’s eccentric narrational

strategies and with its perverse take on sexuality,

especially as exemplified by the figure of Waldo

Lydecker.

Lux Radio Theatre

The most illustrious of the movie adaptation shows,

Lux Radio Theatre was the first and last program to tackle

Laura. As was standard practice for this series, the

producers aimed to keep as faithful as possible to the

structure and plot details of their cinematic source. The

most striking deviation from the film involves the

handling of narration. Instead of launching the drama

through Lydecker’s voice, the venerable actor-director

Lionel Barrymore serves an authorial third-person

narrator as well as the program’s guest-host. Barrymore

opens the first act by introducing the characters and

setting the scene in a rather prosaic manner, describing

Lydecker – here renamed Paul, for some reason – as an

22acid-tongued radio and newspaper critic who is ‘a

legendary oracle of barbed-wire and forget-me-not’.9 In

the film, Lydecker’s initial voice-over is accompanied by

a complexly executed lateral tracking and panning shot

that prowls around the prized antiques in his apartment –

oriental statuary, glassware, wall-mounted masks, and an

ornate standing clock - before fixing on the skeptical

figure of McPherson as he peruses these extravagant

treasures. Lydecker then calls the detective into his

bathroom, where the tough guy seems even further out of

place when forced to pay court to the naked writer in his

marble bath. The film uses body language and composition

to develop the substantial differences between the two

men, at the same time as the dialogue provides expository

details about the Laura Hunt murder.

The Lux adaptation substantially compresses the

initial encounter between the two characters, overloading

it with exposition as McPherson summarizes what he knows

about the case. Stripping out Lydecker’s voice-over not

only simplifies the telling of the story but also locates

23McPherson more emphatically as the story’s protagonist –

although, in the process, the adaptation loses the

atmospheric resonance that the writer’s words contribute

to the film. The Lux adaptation must also, of course,

dispense with the elegant visual design of the apartment

and the carefully orchestrated camera movements, which

tell us a great deal about both Lydecker and McPherson.

Such intricate scene setting is instead reduced to

Barrymore’s blunt comment that Lydecker’s ‘New York

apartment is a combination art gallery and Roman bath’.10

The first act adheres closely to the film by presenting a

series of scenes in which McPherson questions the various

suspects in the case (Lydecker, Ann Treadwell, Shelby

Carpenter), followed by a suite of flashbacks that

Lydecker introduces as he lunches with McPherson. Filling

in significant backstory information about Laura, these

flashbacks manage to pack in a surprising amount of the

film’s narrative material. They also provide a taste of

Lydecker’s narration through the vocal bridges that

introduce the dramatized scenes. The act concludes with

24Lydecker and McPherson parting after their luncheon

engagement, but there is no attempt to simulate the

radical shift in narrative perspective that happens at

this point in the film.

After an intermission in which announcer John M.

Kennedy and a ‘working woman’ sing the praises of Lux

soap flakes, Barrymore introduces the second act. With

much of the scene setting out of the way, the drama

relaxes a little to build a more focused atmosphere. The

second act’s key sequence conveys McPherson’s lonely

vigil in Laura’s apartment, which climaxes with her

‘return from the grave’. As in the film, the Lux rendition

prefaces the sequence with a brusque encounter between

McPherson and Lydecker, who chastises the detective for

prying into Laura’s letters and for falling in love with

a dead woman. The film expresses McPherson’s romantic

longing through external visual strategies – juxtaposing

him with Laura’s portrait, for example – in conjunction

with Raksin’s theme music, which provides an analogy for

the detective’s emotional state.11 The radio version, of

25course, has to rely exclusively on sound to suggest

McPherson’s internal drama. Dana Andrews sighs

mournfully, and we hear the sound effect of his pouring a

glass of whisky to drown his sorrows. With a violin theme

creeping in as atmospheric underscoring, the drama

replays snippets from Lydecker’s earlier speech about

Laura’s unsuitability as a policeman’s wife. These aural

flashbacks imply McPherson’s psychological turmoil, and

his agitation is further externalized via a sound effect

of smashing glass as he tosses his drink away in despair

and then cries out:

‘What’s the matter with me? Maybe you can tellme. You – the girl in that portrait there.You’re beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’veever seen. Somebody killed you. Why? Why? Icould sit here and look at you all night. Allnight long I could sit here -’.

While by no means as subtle as the film version,

which blocks direct access to McPherson’s thoughts, this

brief monologue provides a serviceable means of

clarifying his distress. Where the first act positively

gallops through a great deal of backstory, this scene is

26developed in a delicate and leisurely manner that builds

an intimate psychological atmosphere before the, perhaps

inevitable, verbal reinforcement. McPherson’s words are

followed by the sound of a door opening, and Laura

reappears as if summoned by his romantic wish. From here

on in, the Lux adaptation hews pretty closely to the

details of the film narrative while simultaneously

transforming it into a more conventionally ordered love

story.

The most telling indication of this process of

ideological normalization is the manner in which the Lux

version reworks the film’s oneiric tendencies. The drama

retains several dream references found in the original.

For example: Lydecker taunts McPherson by asking him

whether he has been dreaming of Laura as his wife; after

revealing the shotgun Lydecker has concealed within the

antique clock in her apartment, McPherson advises Laura,

‘Try to forget this – it’s just a bad dream’; and when

Lydecker sneaks into Laura’s apartment in an attempt to

kill her, his voice plays on the radio, courtesy of a

27transcription recording, reciting Ernest Dowson’s poem

‘Vitae Summa Brevis’ – which includes the lines ‘Out of a

misty dream/ Our path emerges for a while, then closes/

Within a dream’. Where the film mobilizes such references

to create a complex oneiric atmosphere that ultimately

resists definitive closure, the Lux adaptation deploys

them to arrange a standard heterosexual clinch. After

Lydecker is killed, McPherson comforts Laura with the

sincere words: ‘It’s alright. The bad dream is over’. His

words identify Laura’s involvement with the perverse and

murderous Lydecker as the ‘bad dream’ she needs McPherson

to rescue her from. Freed from the corruptive demands of

the elitist intellectual and aesthete, Laura can now

marry McPherson, relinquishing not only her many suitors

but also her life as a modern career woman.

By contrast, the ending of the film moves beyond the

united couple to close on a resonant and disconcerting

image. Lydecker is shot by the one of the detectives as

he attempts to blast Laura, and she runs into the

protective custody of McPherson’s arms. The film then

28cuts to a low angle shot of Waldo as he stumbles

forwards, with Laura’s portrait looming large in the

background - a compositional choice that transfer the

taint of obsessional desire from McPherson to Lydecker.

Waldo says ‘Goodbye, Laura’, and there is a swish pan

across to a two shot of Laura and McPherson, with the

camera beginning a forward dolly-in towards them.

However, the two characters swiftly move out of shot -

screen right, towards Waldo - as the camera continues its

forward dolly movement, now fixing instead on a large

close-up of the smashed clock. Just before this image

fades to black, we hear Lydecker’s final words: ‘Goodbye,

my love’. Where the earlier gunshot had obliterated the

beautiful face of a woman (Diane Redfern, mistaken for

Laura), the face of the baroque clock is the victim of

his second misfire.

Pointedly bypassing a closing vision of heterosexual

embrace, the film presents instead a more mysteriously

overdetermined image that arguably resists easy

comprehension. The busted face of the clock replaces and

29inherently qualifies the more prosaic possibility of

heterosexual coupling. A gift of love from Lydecker to

Laura, as well as a repository for the murder weapon, the

clock is also, of course, signifier of time. It

consequently chimes with Dowson’s discoursing on the

transitory nature of human emotions. As such, the film

returns in its closing moments to the framework of

Lydecker’s subjectivity, with which it began, replacing

the mundane world of happy Hollywood lovers with his more

decadently aesthetic sensibility. This very tricksy chain

of associations is bluntly resisted by the Lux drama,

which reroutes the ending of the story firmly along the

well-worn furrows of popular convention: the crime is

solved, the romance resolved, and Lydecker’s troubling

desires are exorcised – just in time for another set of

public service announcements and commercial plugs.

Rounding off the upbeat sentiments is a curtain call in

which Lionel Barrymore has a good-humored, if a little

too evidently scripted, chat with the stars - a regular

feature of the Lux programs (see Hilmes 1990: 104).

30As suggested, the Lux adaptation steers as closely as

possible to the original film narrative, while ironing

out its more eccentric narrational, stylistic and

conceptual wrinkles. Relying for the most part on a

slavish précis of scenes from the original film, the

adaptation only once comes close to matching the film’s

mise-en-scene with a vibrant mise-en-son - in the sequence

detailing McPherson’s obsession with Laura, just prior to

her return. This is the only point where the audio play

capitalizes on radio’s communicative strategies to

generate a distinctive dramatic atmosphere. As the

concluding scene of the Lux drama reveals, however, its

differences from the film derive not solely from the

signifying possibilities of their respective media. The

creators of the radio program also aimed for an

ideological rewriting of the more outré features of this

strange film, to make it conform more rigorously to

conventional cultural scripts of narrative and romance.

CBS and J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency that

made these shows on behalf of the sponsor, Lever

31Brothers, clearly wanted the glamour of Hollywood and its

film stars, but they also needed to cleanse the original

screen property of its more potentially awkward features

to render it a suitable vehicle for selling soap to the

home audience.12

Screen Guild Theatre

With approximately 45 minutes for dramatic development,

the Lux rendition of Laura could squeeze in much of the

original film’s narrative - albeit in a compressed and

compromised manner. This option was not available to

programs such as Hollywood Star Time and Screen Guild Theatre,

which had to take greater liberties with their source

material to accommodate it within 22 minutes or so of

dramatic content. The Hollywood Star Time adaptation of Laura

proved a significant misfire. Taking his cue from the

film, scriptwriter Milton Geiger decided to retain Waldo

Lydecker (Clifton Webb) as the narrator: indeed, he

expanded Lydecker’s role so that he narrates the entire

32story except for the scenes between McPherson (William

Eythe) and Laura (Gene Tierney). It is certainly an

intriguing decision to root the narrative in Waldo’s

perspective, but the actual realization leaves much to be

desired. As Variety accused in its scathing review of the

episode, Waldo's dense narration is forced to carry too

much expository weight and provides an ungainly

substitute for the dramatization of story incidents.13

Thus, where the Lux version finds a sonic means of

conveying McPherson’s growing infatuation with the dead

Laura, Hollywood Star Time bluntly conveys this information

through Lydecker’s verbal testimony: ‘And even as he

gazed at the portrait of a dead woman, he had begun to

fall in love with her’. To impart some sense of life to

the proceedings Webb is forced into some awkward dramatic

overemphasis in his reading of the script, and at times

has to speed through the verbose prose. Moreover, because

he continually has to give literal expression to the

film’s subtextual implications, Lydecker never emerges as

a fully delineated character.

33Pondering the failure of Hollywood Star Time’s adaptation,

the Variety reviewer suggests that: ‘If the answer doesn’t

lie in original scripting for radio, then certainly

there’s a more satisfactory solution in a complete

rewrite job holding to the dramatic format’ (1946: 28).

Five months earlier, Screen Guild Theatre managed to produce a

far more imaginative and accomplished 30-minute version

of Laura that did indeed offer ‘a complete rewrite job’ by

jettisoning or extensively reworking much of the source

material. Broadcast on 20 August 1945, Screen Guild Theatre's

first version of Laura featured David Bruce as Shelby

Carpenter along with the film’s original players, Gene

Tierney, Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb. Writer Harry

Kronman takes several liberties with the original film

narrative to de-clutter it, for example by compressing or

eliminating plot developments and subsidiary characters

(such as Ann Treadwell, Laura’s aunt and Shelby’s lover).

Most striking is his decision to use McPherson as the

story’s narrator.14 Following a lush rendition of Raksin’s

‘Laura’ theme, Dana Andrews begins speaking in the hard-

34boiled vernacular so pervasive in contemporaneous films,

popular fiction and radio programs: ‘Me, I’m a cop.

Murder is murder and a dame’s a dame. Personally, I never

get mixed up with either – until I was put on the case of

Laura Hunt’. The novel and film deliberately reject such

pulp conventions, but the embrace of the hard-boiled

idiom here serves to locate the drama within a familiar

fictional frame that offers the audience a clear and

economical orientation. Kronman is also not afraid to

replace the film’s verbal text with original writing that

plays better in the audio arena. For example, McPherson

offers the following brisk and vivid summary of Lydecker

that effectively delineates both his character and the

detective’s own class-based prejudices: ‘Quite a guy,

Waldo. Big shot columnist and radio spieler. The kind who

dressed formal to have his nails trimmed. The kind who

built styles and ruined reputations. Kind of guy I never

liked. Ah, he got a kick out of doing things different’.

Compared to the other radio adaptations, the Screen Guild

rendition devotes substantial time to the initial

35encounter between Lydecker and McPherson, rendering it a

springboard for the subsequent drama.15 Where the film

differentiates the two men through bodily performance and

mise-en-scene, the radio scene does so through language and

voice, with McPherson’s low-pitched vernacular competing

with Lydecker’s upper-register erudition. The detective

is a hard-working regular guy (and, as Lydecker charges,

‘a proletarian snob’), while Waldo comes across as a

decadent, leisured aesthete as he pays court to McPherson

from his bathtub. The sprightly sparring between the two

keeps the scene animated, eliciting several laughs from

the studio audience.16 Kronman retains some dialogue from

the film here but also adds fresh material to bolster the

opposition between the two men. Thus, when Waldo

complains that ‘The world is rather soiling, I find. I

believe one should wash it off fairly frequently’, his

words not only characterize him as a man who sets himself

above worldly matters but also provides further

justification for the bath scene. By contrast, McPherson

likes getting his hands dirty with low-life gang crime,

36as it allows him to deal ‘with real, down to earth

people’.

The Screen Guild adaptation also reveals adept handling of

the flashbacks that sketch in Laura’s early encounters

with Waldo. In the first half of the film these play a

key role in filling out expositional backstory and

providing some sense of Laura’s character. Kronman’s

script relocates these flashbacks to become part of the

initial encounter between McPherson and Lydecker. When

Waldo steps out of his bath, McPherson insists that he

tells him what he knows about Laura. With Raksin’s theme

as underscoring, Waldo’s narration covers his first

encounter with Laura, her flourishing career under his

patronage, and his sabotaging of her relationship with

the painter Jacoby. By bringing this material forward

from the film’s much later restaurant scene, the

adaptation can offer a more focused account of Laura

before the drama becomes congested with other incidents

and characters. Rather than presenting Waldo’s narration

in a solid block, or interspersing it with a succession

37of brief scenes, the adaptation punctuates it with a

single exemplary dramatization – which illustrates

Waldo’s first meeting with Laura - and with snatches of

dialogue between the two men. This allows Screen Guild’s

rendition of Laura to provide essential backstory in an

economic, fluent and fluidly realized manner that avoids

the long and clunky expository delivery that hampers

Hollywood Star Time's version.

Waldo’s narration concludes with a reference to

Laura’s latest affair, with Shelby Carpenter, which

provides a link to the next scene. The adaptation removes

Lydecker from McPherson’s interrogation of Shelby - which

was necessary in the film to motivate Waldo’s ongoing

narrational perspective. Carpenter’s characterization

also differs from the film version: he is not the soft-

spoken and deceitful male butterfly played by Vincent

Price, but is more earnest, if weak and vacillating. The

adaptation minimizes Shelby’s role in the narrative by

reducing his sleazy backstory and eliminating plot

developments in which he figures (Laura does not

38telephone him after her return, for example). This

simplifies the story arc by disqualifying Carpenter as a

viable romantic rival for McPherson, thus rendering the

detective’s relationship with Lydecker as the major axis

of dramatic conflict.

After a further encounter with Lydecker, the drama

returns to McPherson’s narration as he visits Laura’s

apartment. ‘That was the first time I saw the portrait’,

he says, as a lone violin starts to play Raksin’s theme.

The portrait captivates him, and he stands transfixed

before it (‘thinking a lot of things, I guess’), until

his reverie is interrupted by the arrival of Laura’s

maid, Bessie, and then by Lydecker. As in the film and

the other audio versions, Lydecker both articulates and

critiques McPherson’s romantic obsession, accusing him of

acting more like a suitor than a policeman. The drama’s

first act climaxes with Laura’s reappearance, and like

the other radio adaptations the Screen Guild version

acknowledges the crucial importance of the scene leading

up to it. Where the film version generates its

39tantalizing intensity by dispensing with McPherson’s

voice-over, the decision to reintroduce the device here

brings the sequence much closer to the stream-of-

consciousness psychodramas popularized by CBS’ highly

regarded Suspense series. With McPherson left on his own

after Lydecker’s departure, the narration conveys his

inner turmoil via the kind of tough guy romanticism that

characterizes the voice-over confessionals of a film such

as Out of the Past (1947) (see Krutnik 1991: 105-109). In

both cases the tough detective is made passive and

vulnerable through his yearning for a woman, with the

poeticizing of verbal discourse representing a dramatic

transformation in his masculine self-figuration. As

Raksin’s ‘Laura’ theme once more insinuates its hypnotic

spell, McPherson expresses his emotions with barely

concealed despair:

‘I was alone again. I sat there waiting.Waiting for what? I don’t know. The room, thenight, the silence were alive with her – andher ghost wouldn’t let me go. I guess it musthave been after ten when I heard the door ...and steps’.

40The spell is broken by the arrival of the ‘phantasmic’

Laura, who appears as if in answer to the lovelorn

detective’s prayers.

Following a pitch for ‘Lady Esther Bridal Pink Face

Powder’ in the intermission, the second act returns to

this initial encounter between McPherson and the flesh-

and-blood Laura, who is, he reassures us, ‘even more

beautiful than her portrait’. The adaptation rattles

through the expected plotting maneuvers – such as the

revelation that Diane Redfern is the murder victim, and

Laura’s decision not to marry Shelby – though it

streamlines some of the film’s plot conceits (Laura, for

example, is not implicated as a potential suspect).

Instead, the Screen Guild drama pushes towards a more

evident consolidation of the McPherson-Laura romance by

exposing Lydecker’s insufficiency. As suggested, the

film’s resolution shifts its emphasis from the coupling

of McPherson and Laura to Lydecker’s perverse fantasy –

with both camera and soundtrack privileging the murderous

aesthete rather than the lovers. Screen Guild’s adaptation

41differs from all the other renditions of Laura by keeping

Waldo alive at the end. Avoiding the rather protracted

series of entrances and exits that leads up to the film’s

finale, the radio drama ‘stages’ the concluding scenes

very differently. McPherson hides behind a screen in

Laura’s apartment as Waldo visits her, ostensibly to

retrieve his antique clock (the prominent sound effect of

its ticking underlines its importance to the scene).

Lydecker releases a hidden spring to reveal a secret

compartment in the clock – and the shotgun it conceals.

Wielding the gun, Waldo turns aggressive and

melodramatic, saying, as in the film, that he wants to

save Laura from ‘the vulgar pawing of a second-rate

detective who thinks you’re a “dame”’. But McPherson

intervenes before Waldo can do any damage, and arrests

him – after the latter has warned Laura about the

degradation that lies in wait for her in ‘what promises

to be a disgustingly earthy relationship’. The drama ends

with Waldo meekly allowing himself to be led away by the

detective.

42The decision to have Lydecker arrested rather than

killed radically diminishes the stature of his decadent

amour fou. Where the film affirms a fascination with this

perverse alternative to heterodomesticity, Screen Guild’s

adaptation refuses Waldo his grand romantic gesture.

Thus, instead of sacrificing his life to his idealized

fantasy of Laura, he bows out with an embarrassing

whimper. The studied degradation of Waldo and his

romantic obsession is also confirmed by the treatment of

the earlier scene in which he faints on seeing Laura

alive again. The sound effect of a falling body provokes

audience laughter, but where this was an unintended

consequence in the first Lux adaptation it seems here to

be a deliberate strategy to render Waldo a figure of fun.

After he collapses, McPherson comments wryly: ‘He fainted

flat on his face – you know, I think I like him better

that way’. The wisecrack prompts even more audience

laughter, and the scene finishes with a humorous musical

bridge. Such tactics seem designed to align the audience

firmly with the more conventional heterosexual option

43embodied by McPherson. Unlike the film, this adaptation

does not identify the detective as a compromised figure

but as a genuine and worthy mate for Laura. With the main

critique of McPherson coming from his unmanly and

pathetic rival, it becomes much easier to discount such

challenges to a benignly conceived romantic union. The

Screen Guild version further deviates from the film by

having Laura participate willingly in the overcoming of

Waldo, by authorizing McPherson to hide in the apartment.

Lydecker is thus defeated not simply by the police

intervention but by a conspiratorial plot between the

members of the rightful heterosexual couple.

These audio renditions of Laura illustrate that

audiences were prepared to accept extensive deviation

from the original films when they were translated to the

airwaves. This is particularly evident from the range of

storytelling strategies on offer – from the third-person

external narrator of the two Lux adaptations, to the use

44of either Lydecker (in Hollywood Star Time) or McPherson (in

both The Ford Theatre and Screen Guild Theatre) as character-

narrators.17 As Variety’s review of the Hollywood Star Time

version confirms, fidelity was not necessarily perceived

as an asset in such cross-media transactions. Instead, as

these adaptations of Laura demonstrate, a more fluid set

of relations existed between screen and radio drama -

just as the film in itself substantially reworked the

fictional property on which it was based. Screen Guild’s

creative reinterpretation remains the most effectively

radiophonic dramatization of Laura, even if it offers an

ideologically conformist take on the film’s tale of

strange romance. By taking substantial liberties with the

source material - rewriting dialogue, rearranging or

excising plot events, and aligning the narration with the

hard-boiled idiom – it achieves a smoothly engineered and

clearly-signaled drama that functions well within the

tight 30-minute format. Rather than reading such

adjustments as a ‘betrayal’ of the source, it is better

to regard them as constituting a shrewd response to the

45institutional, ideological and communicative

practicalities of contemporary radio drama.

This case study also suggests how difficult it was

within the movie adaptation series to approximate the

textual features critics have valued in the noir films.

Translated to the airwaves, Laura inevitably loses its

visual sophistication and its provocative subtextual

implications. The cleansing of such material from the

radio versions resulted not simply from signifying

differences between the two media but also from broader

institutional pressures. Films were encountered in the

public arena of the movie theatre, with the darkness of

the auditorium offering relatively free reign to the noir

films’ metaphorical darkness. Radio, by contrast, was

subject to much tighter regulation because it was

generally experienced in the more intimate and more

visible realm of the home, and because commercial

sponsors were unwilling to support programming that

jeopardized the wholesome image of their products.18

Nevertheless, there remain fleeting moments – for

46example, when the lovelorn McPherson inhabits Laura’s

apartment and is bewitched by her spell - where the

evocative orchestration of sound allows the programs to

leave their filmic sources behind by capitalizing on

radio’s potential to summon forth, as the clichéd but

apposite phrase has it, a ‘theatre of the mind’.

References

Archer, Eugene (1962), ‘Laura’, Movie, 2, September, pp.12-13.

Behlmer, Rudy (1982), ‘The face in the misty light: Laura(1944)’, in America’s Favorite Movies: Behind the Scenes, New York:Frederick Ungar, pp. 177-199.

Billboard (1945a), ‘Record reviews’, (24 March), p. 2.

Billboard (1945b), ‘Records most played on air’, 14 April,p. 19.

Billboard (1945c), ‘Advance record releases’, 28 April, p.25.

Billips, Connie J. and Arthur Pierce (1995), Lux PresentsHollywood: A Show-by-Show History of the Lux Radio Theatre and the LuxVideo Theatre, 1934-1957, Volumes 1 and 2, Jefferson, NC & London:McFarland.

Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton (2002), Panorama ofAmerican Film Noir, 1941-1953, San Francisco: City LightsBooks. First published, in French, 1955.

47

Caspary, Vera (1971), ‘My Laura and Otto’s’, Saturday Review,26 June, pp. 36-37.

Caspary, Vera (1978), ‘Mark McPherson’, in Otto Penzler(ed.): The Great Detectives, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brownand Company, pp. 142-146.

Caspary, Vera (1987), Laura, London: J.M. Dent. Firstpublished 1944.

Corber, Robert J. (1997), Homosexuality in Cold War America,Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 5-78.

Dunning, John (1998), The Encyclopaedia of Old Time Radio, NewYork & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dyer, Richard (1977), ‘Homosexuality and film noir’, JumpCut, 16, pp. 18-21 [available from:http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC16folder/HomosexFilmNoir.html]. Accessed 7 June 2012.

Dyer, Richard (2002), ‘Queer noir’, in The Culture of Queers,London: Routledge, pp. 90-115.

Edelman, Lee (1998), ‘Imagining the homosexual: Laura andthe other face of gender’, in Homographesis: Essays in GayLiterary and Cultural Theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 192–241.

Farber, Manny (2009), ‘Murdered movie’, in Robert Polito(ed.), Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, DesMoines, IA: Library of America, 2009. First published1944.

Fischler, Alan (1948), ‘Film cuts hit air dramas’,Billboard, 28 August, p. 15.

Furia, Philip (2003), Skylark: the Life and Times of Johnny Mercer,New York: St. Martin’s Press.

48Gould, Jack (1946), ‘Programs and people’, New York Times,13 January, p. X5.

Hilmes, Michele (1990), Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio toCable, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Internet Archive (2012), ‘Old time radio programs’,http://www.archive.org/details/oldtimeradio. Accessed 7June 2012.

JazzStandards (2005-12), ‘Laura (1945)’,http://www.jazzstandards.com/compositions-0/laura.htm.Accessed 7 June 2012.

Jordan-Smith, Paul (1943), ‘I’ll be judge, you be jury’,7 February, Los Angeles Times, p. C5.

Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.) (1978), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI.

Krutnik, Frank (1991), In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre,Masculinity, London: Routledge.

Krutnik, Frank (2013), ‘“Be moviedom’s guest in your owneasy chair!”- Hollywood, radio, and the movie adaptation series’(forthcoming).

Lees, Gene (2004), Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John HerndonMercer, New York: Hal Leonard Corporation.

Leff, Leonard (2008), ‘Becoming Clifton Webb: a queerstar in mid-century Hollywood’, Cinema Journal, 47: 3,Spring, pp. 3-28.

Lehman, Peter (1998), ‘“Tonight your director is JohnFord”: the strange journey of Stagecoach from screen toradio’, in Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds.),Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, pp. 293-309.

49McNamara, Eugene (1992), Laura as Novel, Film and Myth,Lewiston: The Edward Mellen Press.

Nachman, Gerald (1998), ‘Radio noir – cops and graverobbers’, Raised on Radio, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, pp. 296-319.

Nadel, William (1998), ‘Radio noir’, in Ed Gorman, LeeServer, and Martin M. Greenberg (eds.), The Big Book of Noir,New York: Carroll & Graf, pp. 347-52.

Naremore, James (1998), More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts,Berkeley: University of California Press.

Neale, Steve (2000), Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge.

New York Times (1943), ‘What happens when three strong menlove the same beautiful woman?’ (display ad for DoubledayOne Dollar Book Club), 8 August, p. BR24.

Orodenker, M.H. (1945), ‘Record reviews’, Billboard, 7April, p. 25.

OTTR (2012), The Old Time Radio Researchers Group,http://www.otrr.org/. Accessed 7 June 2012.

Radio Spirits (2012), Radio Spirits – Old time Radio Shows,http://www.radiospirits.com/. Accessed 7 June 2012.

Schlotterbeck, Jesse (2010), ‘Killing noir?: theadaptation of Robert Siodmak's The Killers to radio’, Journalof Adaptation in Film and Performance, 3:1, March, pp. 59-70.

Thompson, Kristin (1988), ‘Closure within a dream? Pointof view in Laura’, in Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist FilmAnalysis, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp.162-194.

Variety (1946), ‘Hollywood Star Time’ (review), 16 January, p.28.

50

51

52

53Date Program Ntwk Sponsor Adv. Agency Time Duratio

n

Stars

5 February

1945

Lux Radio Theatre

#470

CBS Lever Bros/

Lux

J. Walter

Thompson

Monday,

9pm

60

mins

Gene Tierney,

Dana Andrews,

Vincent Price,

Otto Kruger.20 August 1945 The Screen Guild

Theatre #259

CBS Lady Esther

Cosmetics

Biow Monday,

10 pm

30

mins

Gene Tierney,

Dana Andrews,

Clifton Webb,

David Bruce.13 January

1946

Hollywood Star

Time #2

CBS General

Motors/

Frigidaire

Foote, Cone &

Belding

Sunday

2.30pm

30

mins

Gene Tierney,

William Eythe,

Clifton Webb.30 May 1948 The Ford Theatre

#35

NBC Ford Motors Kenyon &

Eckhardt

Sunday

5pm

60

mins

Virginia Gilmore,

John Larkin.

17 October

1948

Theatre Guild on

the Air #126

ABC US Steel Batten,

Barton,

Sunday

9.30pm

60

mins

June Duprez, Burt

Lancaster, George

54Durstine &

Osborn (BBDO)

Colouris.

23 February

1950

The Screen Guild

Theatre #453

NBC Camel

Cigarettes

William Esty Thursday

, 9pm

30

mins

Gene Tierney,

Dana Andrews,

1 For consideration of the Lux program, see Hilmes (1990: 78-115), Billips and Pierce (1995), and Dunning (1998:416-19).

2 Lehman (1998) and Schlotterbeck (2010) provide case studies of the adaptations of individual films withinthese series. Original programming can be obtained from various internet sites, including the Internet Archive(2012) and the Old Time Radio Researchers Group (OTRR 2012), as well as from commercial organizations such as RadioSpirits (2012).

3 See, for example, Nachman (1998), Nadel (1998), and Naremore (1998: 259-60).

4 Vera Caspary’s novel Laura was promoted by her publisher as a ‘psychothriller’ (see Jordan-Smith 1943, C5). A1943 display ad in the New York Times that promoted Laura as part of the Doubleday One Dollar Book Club alsodescribed the novel as ‘this most titillating of recent psychological thrillers’ (New York Times 1943: BR24).

5 Although his 1977 article ‘Homosexuality in film noir’ reads Lydecker as unequivocally gay, Richard Dyer’s laterassessment in his essay ‘Queer noir’ (2002: 90) qualifies this by suggesting that a key principle of sexuallydissident representations in film noir is their very uncertainty, which he identifies as part of ‘noir’s generaluncertainty about how to decipher the world’. For further queer readings of Laura, see Edelman 1994: 192-241;Corber 1997: 55-78; and Leff 2008: 3-28.

6 Dana Andrews seems to have recorded McPherson’s voice-over narration for the film, but the idea of usingLaura’s narration was abandoned before production commenced (Behlmer 1982: 183, 194).

7 In this sense, the second half of the film follows on from Lydecker’s sarcastic comment about the detectivedreaming of Laura as his wife. The film’s use of the dream device is foreshadowed by a passage in the novelwhere, soon after Laura’s return, McPherson comments: ‘I dreamed for two hours about Laura Hunt. The dream hadfive or six variations, but the meaning was always the same. She was just beyond my reach. As soon as I cameclose, she floated off into space. Or ran away. Or locked a door. Each time I came to, I cursed myself forletting a dream hold me in such horror’ (Caspary 1987: 84).

55Clifton Webb.

1 February

1954

Lux Radio Theatre

#867

CBS Lever Bros/

Lux

J. Walter

Thompson

Monday,

9pm

60

mins

Gene Tierney,

Victor Mature [+

Carleton Young/

8 For more on the play, which Caspary co-wrote with George Sklar, see Caspary (1971: 36-7). For discussion ofthe Mercer-Raksin song, see Furia (2003: 150-152), Lees (2004: 169), and JazzStandards (2005-12).

9 The adaptation also changes the name of the artist with whom Laura has an affair, and who paints hercaptivating portrait, from Jacoby to Joseph Carter, and the murder victim is rendered as Diana rather thanDiane Redfern.

10 The rewritten dialogue is not always successful. Clearly worried about Lydecker’s original remark thatMcPherson’s romantic obsession with a corpse will lead him to the asylum, the Lux scriptwriter translates thisinto the unwieldy: ‘I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a beautiful girl who diedbefore he met her’. The clumsiness of the line is not aided by Otto Kruger’s flat delivery – throughout thedrama he proves a rather poor substitute for the urbane Clifton Webb, most emphatically so when he has torecite Ernest Dowson’s poetry in the final scene.

11 The Lux adaptation does not include David Raksin’s music, presumably because the Mercer-Raksin song had notyet been propelled into popular consciousness by the highly successful phonographic recordings by Woody Herman,Johnnie Johnston, Jerry Wald, Dick Haymes and Freddy Martin. These were all released in late March-April 1945and competed for radio plays and record sales over the next five months. See Billboard (1945a: 2; 1945b: 19;1945c: 25), and Orodenker (1945: 25).

12 For discussion of Thompson agency’s role of the in the production of the Lux shows, see Hilmes (1990: 90-93).

13 ‘Certainly it lost in the projection of its central character and was stripped of much of the element ofsuspense by the spasmodic effect attained in using the narration technique. It was probably the easier way outin telescoping the pic into its half-hour version, but in terms of radio it made for a series of loosely-knitepisodes. Neither the reality of the characters was established nor did the continuity of the story benefit bythe series of interspersed dramatic portrayals’ (Variety 1946: 28). A week earlier, Jack Gould’s review ofHollywood Star Time’s premier episode, a version of the celebrated 1927 Fox film Seventh Heaven, pointed to thedetrimental effect radical dramatic compression could have on actors’ performances: ‘it is difficult and

56Joseph Kearns].

Table 1: Radio adaptations of Laura.

perhaps unfair to attempt to assay the contribution of the stars, if only because they were not called upon forperformances but rather for hit-or-miss of emotional tidbits’ (Gould 1946: X5).

14 Howard Teichmann’s script for the 1948 Ford Theatre version also sticks with McPherson (John Larkin) as thenarrator, using the device of an official police report to organize the telling of the story.

15 The scene lasts approximately 7.30 minutes, about one third of the show’s dramatic content.

16 Clifton’s Webb’s performance is far more lively here than in the Hollywood Star Time adaptation, as he caninteract freely with Dana Andrews rather than having to deliver extended monologues. The studio audience alsodelights in the bathroom scenario, which is conveyed via sound effects of splashing water – especially whenLydecker asks McPherson to hand him the washcloth, then a towel, and then his robe.

17 Whatever narrational techniques are employed, verbal narration clear operates in a very different way withinan exclusively audio medium than in does in a film, which can achieve intricate and potentially conflictingjuxtapositions of sound and image.

18 For example, Billboard reporter Alan Fischler observed that many films were not suitable for radio adaptationbecause they featured unsavoury topics such as suicide, incest or other taboo sexual practices (1948: 15).

57