Fri 1 May 2015
Mike Nevins on CORNELL WOOLRICH and JOHN DICKSON CARR on TV.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns , TV mysteries[6] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
Thanks to being on the road – -among other places, in New York where I’ll attend the MWA annual dinner and find out if I’m going to be the proud recipient of a third Edgar — I need to hold this down to a mini-column. It’s an ancient tradition that when a professor has to miss a class or two, one leaves a homework assignment for the students. You’ll find mine in the next item.
What an amazing age we live in! I never thought anything could be added to the checklist of adaptations of Cornell Woolrich stories from the golden age of live TV drama that appeared almost thirty years ago in my FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE. Now I’ve just stumbled upon a Woolrich-based teledrama that I had never heard of before.
Not just a reference to it but the episode itself, and one whose origin was a Woolrich tale I had never known was adapted for TV. It’s available on DVD (SUSPENSE: THE LOST EPISODES, COLLECTION 3) and on YouTube to boot.
“Goodbye, New York†was based on the first-rate Woolrich story of the same name (Story Magazine, October 1937). A Web write-up of the DVD describes it as evoking a mood of “grim…noir-esque despair,†which certainly makes it sound faithful to its source. Meg Mundy starred in the 30-minute drama, which featured Gage Clarke, Philip Coolidge and an unbilled Ray Walston.
Like 90-odd other SUSPENSE episodes, it was directed by Robert Stevens (1920-1989), who later helmed dozens of filmed episodes of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. (Stevens died in his late sixties after being robbed and beaten by unknown assailants.) As shown on YouTube the episode doesn’t include an air date, but according to other Web sources it was the pilot for the series, broadcast on January 6, 1949, which apparently means that it’s the earliest TV version of any Woolrich tale.
YouTube claims that Woolrich’s story was also the basis for the 1952 Hollywood feature BEWARE, MY LOVELY, starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, but this is flat-out wrong; the literary source for that picture was Mel Dinelli’s “The Man†which, funnily enough, also first appeared in Story Magazine (May-June 1945).
Here’s your homework assignment: When you’ve finished reading this column, watch the YouTube video and see if you agree that perhaps the earliest contribution to TV noir has been unearthed.
If you have it handy you might want to read the Woolrich story too. It closes with lines that come as close as anything to capturing his world in a few words. “Two doomed things, running away. From nothingness, into nothingness….Turn back we dare not, stand still they wouldn’t let us, and to go forward was our destruction at our own hands.â€
There’s just space for a couple of bits of information that I promised to include this month, dealing with adaptations of John Dickson Carr for 60-minute broadcasts during the golden age of live teledrama. The first of these was seen on the CBS anthology series STUDIO ONE the night of January 7, 1952. “The Devil in Velvet†was directed by Paul Nickell from a teleplay by Sumner Locke Elliott based on Carr’s 1951 historical thriller of the same name. The stars were Whit Bissell, Phyllis Kirk and Joan Wetmore.
Apparently there were no more hour-long Carr adaptations until more than six years later when another CBS anthology series presented a version of by far the best known and most popular Carr radio play, “Cabin B-13″ (CLIMAX!, June 26, 1958). Shortly after a newlywed couple board a luxury liner for their honeymoon cruise, the man vanishes along with the fortune his wife gave him as a wedding present.
She reports his disappearance to the captain and is told that there’s no record of either herself or her husband as passengers and that what she claims to have been their cabin doesn’t exist. Heading the cast were Barry Sullivan (Dr. Edwards), Kim Hunter (Ann Brewster), Alex Nicol (Robert Brewster), Hurd Hatfield (Morini) and Sebastian Cabot (Capt. Wilkins). The original Carr radio play is easily available both in audio and script form.
Apparently the last hour-long live Carr adaptation on American TV was aired on NBC’s DOW HOUR OF GREAT MYSTERIES, a short-lived series that aired once a month for seven months during the last year of the Eisenhower administration, by which time live TV drama was pretty much dead.
Second of the seven episodes was “The Burning Court†(April 24, 1960). The adaptation of Carr’s classic 1937 novel of the same name was by Audrey and William Roos, who were well known for collaborating on whodunits as Kelley Roos. Paul Nickell once again directed. The cast boasted four top names: Barbara Bel Geddes (Marie Stevens), Robert Lansing (Edward Stevens), George C. Scott (Gordon Cross), and Anne Seymour (Mrs. Henderson).
I can’t remember a thing about this show, probably because I was watching MAVERICK or something that night.
May 1st, 2015 at 7:33 pm
I have a memory of having seen “The Burning Court” when I was in Library School, but did not remember who was in it. I remember that it so scared the bejabbers out of me that I was afraid to walk down the long hallway outside my apartment that night. I think it was the idea that the supernatural solution was the correct solution that did it.
May 1st, 2015 at 10:40 pm
I knew about both the Carr adaptations but never saw them. Sadly the French film of THE BURNING COURT is the only film adaptation of that book I have seen though I’ve heard the SUSPENSE radio adaptation with Charles Ruggles.
Maybe an early television adaptation will stir up some Woolrich reprints. He’s only barely represented in e-book form with most of the best known BLACK titles unavailable as yet.
I’ve found a few stories and NIGHT HAS 1000 EYES available in e book form.
May 1st, 2015 at 11:47 pm
I just dug out my old TV GUIDE for that week in 1960.
The Dow Hour Of Great Mysteries aired on NBC at 9:00 pm Central Time (Chicago edition), so you probably weren’t watching Maverick, which was on ABC two and a half hours earlier.
The network competition was George Gobel and What’s My Line? on CBS, and The Alaskans and Johnny Staccato on ABC; the Dow show was preempting Loretta Young and a local half-hour.
Dow‘s host was Joseph Welch, of Army-McCarthy fame, who was fresh off his Anatomy Of A Murder movie stardom.
Welch passed away roughly midway through the specials’s run, which possibly accounts for its short duration.
Say, Mike …
… remember a couple of years back, I put up a comment about an item I read in TV GUIDE’s Teletype from 1960; this had to do with an ABC pilot called Author, Author, which had the participation of Manny Lee (along with S.J. Perelman, Clifton Fadiman, and Rona Jaffe).
I put this up in 2013, and I was wondering if you’d ever had a chance to follow up on it …
No problem, just curious is all …
May 2nd, 2015 at 12:32 pm
Dear Mike Doran:
I’ve never seen an Author! Author! TV pilot and, unless my memory is playing me false, I’ve never heard of it except from you. Do you know if it really exists? Might it have been just a gleam in some network exec’s eye? Fred Dannay never mentioned it to me.
May 2nd, 2015 at 4:59 pm
This is a very informative article.
I’ve never seen any of these Carr adaptations.
But quite a few other Paul Nickell directed episodes oF STUDIO ONE are available on DVD.
I made some starter notes on Nickell, in this article:
http://mikegrost.com/nickell.htm
May 2nd, 2015 at 8:40 pm
Mike Nevins:
All that I know comes from the TV Teletype/ New York: Bob Stahl reports: that appeared on page 4 of TV GUIDE the week of February 13-19.
The cover featured the stars of Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky (the story was about Blake Edwards).
Once again, here is the paragraph in question, verbatim:
ABC’s mulling a new series about books, Author, Author, for next season. Writers CLIFTON FADIMAN, MARC CONNELLY, S. J. PERELMAN, RONA JAFFE, and MANFRED LEE took part in the audition tape …
… and that’s all I know about this – which is why I wrote to you about it.
I’m well aware that TV insiders often used the Teletype feature as a way of “blue-skying” ideas for shows that in many cases never got past the talking stage.
In this case, the specific mention of ABC and an “audition tape” would indicate that there was a little more than “blue-sky” to this.
It could have been that the “audition tape” was nothing more than an old recording of the radio show – except that I don’t think that Rona Jaffe was around back then (if I’m wrong, please correct).
What little I know about Clifton Fadiman says that he and his brother Edwin were entrepeneurs at heart (Edwin was behind the abortive CBS-Nero Wolfe series a few years before), and this would have been along the lines of The Last Word, which ran Sunday afternoons on CBS about this time.
But these last are speculation.
We’re back to that one paragraph, and how it came to Bob Stahl to be included in TV Teletype: New York in February of 1960.
The source?
Could have been somebody at ABC, or the Fadimans, or any of the named writers, or – somebody. Bob Stahl (along with his West Coast counterpart Dan Jenkins) had a reputation for accuracy to consider, so there must have been some kind of “there” there.
That’s why I sent this in a year ago; as I recall, you were having health and other problems at the time, which would account for your missing it back then.
But I still have that issue of TV GUIDE, 55 years after its appearance – and in 2015, it still has me wondering …
Any the hoo, it’s really no big deal, nothing to sweat over – but you gotta admit it is curious …
Seriously, all the best from your semi-namesake.