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.
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).
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