Breaking Walls

On Sunday January 1st, 1956 NBC’s Monitor broadcast New World Today.

1956 was a Presidential election year. At the time of this broadcast, Dwight Eisenhower, who’d had a heart attack in September, was still debating whether he would run for a second term. He’d decide in February, eventually winning re-election.

After the censuring of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, the Red Scare had subsided, overtaken by fear of communism in other parts of the world and general war with Russia.

Meanwhile, In January of 1956 Orson Welles appeared with The New York City Center Theater Company playing King Lear. He was finally home again.

In February he traveled to Las Vegas where he performed a variety act at the Riviera Hotel. Welles was then contracted by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to create a TV pilot for Desilu Productions.

The short film was written and directed by Orson Welles, based on the short story "Youth from Vienna" by John Collier. Joi Lansing and Rick Jason star as a narcissistic couple faced with an irresistible temptation concocted by a scientist. Welles was the on-screen narrator. It was called The Fountain of Youth and considered a dark comedy.

Desi Arnaz conceived the series, proposing to Welles that he host and narrate. Arnaz later wrote that before signing the deal he clarified the finances with Welles: "I am not RKO. This is my 'Babalu' money." Filming took five days in early May. The total cost was nearly fifty-five thousand dollars.

Arnaz reported that CBS gave the series a slot, with General Foods as a sponsor, but the challenges in getting Welles to commit to a series lasting more than thirty weeks were daunting. The series did not go to air. The pilot was later broadcast on September 16th, 1958, during NBC's Colgate Theatre.

That Spring, the Rock n’ Roll era officially arrived. On April 6th, 1956, Elvis Presely signed a three-film deal with Paramount Pictures. By the end of the month, his single, “Heartbreak Hotel” rose to the top of the charts. It would remain there into June.

Meanwhile, Orson Welles appeared as himself on October 15th, 1956 in a very famous episode of I Love Lucy.

Two days later, he was on the radio for a special one-off program adapting Philip Wylie’s 1954 novel about post-nuclear civilization. It was called Tomorrow and syndicated by ABC and the Federal Civil Defense Administration.

The next month, on November 13th, 1956, his daughter’s first birthday, Welles appeared on NBC Radio’s Biography In Sound for his old mentor Alexander Woollcott, who had passed away in 1943.

On February 13th, 1955 Orson Welles appeared on an episode of NBC’s Anthology in salute to Abraham Lincoln. Directed by John Malcom Brennen, produced by Steve White, and announced by Harry Fleetwood, Anthology offered dramatic readings of famous and lesser-known plays. Its last episode aired on June 12th, 1955, coinciding with the launch of NBC’s Monitor.

On May 8th, 1955 at Caxton Hall in London, Orson and Paola Mori tied the knot. Welles was simultaneously finishing the editing on a film that would be called Confidential Report in Britain and Mr. Arkadin elsewhere. He cast Paola as Raina in the film.

In Mr. Arkadin, American smuggler Guy Van Stratten gets a tip that Russian oligarch Gregory Arkadin, has a dark secret. Wanting to blackmail him, Van Stratten travels to Spain, striking up a friendship with Arkadin’s daughter.

The movie was shot throughout Europe in 1954, with scenes filmed in Spain, London, Munich, Paris, the French Riviera and at the Château de Chillon in Switzerland.

The story was based on several episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime and was originally released in Spain in October of 1955. Orson and Paola welcomed the birth of their daughter Beatrice Welles on November 13th, 1955. It was Welles’ third daughter.

By then, Welles was planning a return to the U.S.

On March 15th, 1955, Orson Welles premiered as Lord Mountdrago in the British Omnibus horror film, Three Cases of Murder. The film consisted of three stories, Welles appeared in the one titled after his character.

Ten days later he premiered in the french historical epic film Napoléon. He had a small part as Sir Hudson Lowe.

Then on April 2nd, Welles appeared for BBC’s TV network in the first of a six-part series entitled, Orson Welles' Sketch Book.

Written and presented by Welles, the fifteen-minute episodes present his commentaries on a range of subjects. The six episodes were called, “The Early Days,” “Critics,” “The Police,” “People I Miss,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Bullfighting.”

Later that year Welles took part in another series of shorts called Around the World with Orson Welles.

Between June 16th and July 9th, 1955 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, Orson Welles staged a two-act version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Welles used minimal design. The stage was bare, the props were minimal, and the actors, which included Christopher Lee, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Williams, Patrick McGoohan, and Gordon Jackson, wore street clothes.

Brooms were used for oars, and a stick was used for a telescope. The actors provided the action, and the audience's imagination provided the ocean, costumes, and the whale.

Welles filmed approximately seventy-five minutes of the production, hoping to sell it to Omnibus for a TV film, but he was disappointed in the result.

The next year, old friend John Huston cast Welles as Father Mapple in his 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick, which starred Gregory Peck.

Welles later cast John Huston as director Jake Hannaford in The Other Side of The Wind. The film wouldn’t be completed and released until 2018, more than thirty-three years after Orson’s death. Welles modeled Jake Hannaford on his good friend Ernest Hemingway.

In 1953 Orson Welles met Italian actress Paola Mori. She was twenty-four, beautiful, and had lived for eight months in a concentration camp during World War II. Her father, a colonel in the Italian army under King Victor Emmanuel III, was a member of the anti-Mussolini resistance. They were soon dating.

In early 1954, Welles played a small part as Benjamin Franklin in the French/Italian historical drama Royal Affairs in Versailles.

Later in the year he was cast by director Herbert Wilcox as the main antagonist in Trouble In the Glen, opposite Margaret Lockwood, Forrest Tucker and Victor McLaglen. It portended things to come, as Harry Alan Towers was still producing a series of Sherlock Holmes radio adventures, starring John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson.

On December 21st, 1954, Orson Welles appeared as Holmes villain Professor Moriarty in the last production of the series. The tale was called “The Final Problem.”

In September of 1952, Orson Welles worked with the BBC for a portrait of early American director Robert Flaherty. Flaherty, who directed the first docu-drama film, Nanook of the North in 1922, had passed away the previous July.

As Welles just mentioned, when he got to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he was fascinated by the early film people, and they were more than happy to share their stories with the then-Boy Wonder.

In April of 1953 the BBC hired Welles to read one hour of poetry from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

The next month the Italian comedy Man, Beast and Virtue debuted, in which Welles co-starred.

From September 7th into October, Welles was involved with Ballet de Paris at the Stoll Theatre in London for a production of The Lady in the Ice. In October the production moved to Paris.

Welles directed, wrote the libretto and was the ballet's costume and set designer.

He later told Peter Bogdonovich, “It was very successful in London, and only moderately so in Paris, where it was very badly lit — as everything always is in Paris. The plot is: a girl's been found, like dinosaurs have been found, in a block of ice. And she's on display in a sort of carnival. A young man falls in love with her, and his love melts the ice. And when she kisses him, he turns to ice. A little parable for our times.” It would be the only ballet Orson Welles’ ever directed.

In late September of 1953 Broadcasting Magazine reported that Harry Alan Towers had sold shows to both ABC and NBC for the fall. ABC would welcome Horatio Hornblower back for a second season, starring Michael Redgrave.

Meanwhile on NBC, a new half-hour anthology program starring Sir Lawrence Olivier called Theatre Royal would take to the air.

The program debuted on October 4th, 1953 with Orson Welles starring in an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.” Pushkin wrote “The Queen of Spades” in the fall of 1833. It’s a short story about how human greed can lead to madness.

Theatre Royal was developed to capitalize on Lawrence Olivier’s name. At the time the program launched, Olivier and then-wife Vivian Leigh were getting set to appear in Terence Rattigan's comedy, The Sleeping Prince in the West End. The play would run for eight months. It made Olivier temporarily unable to star in his own program.

Many fine actors of the British stage and screen were involved in individual episodes of Theatre Royal, like Robert Morley, Harry Andrews, Muriel Forbes, and Daphne Maddox. The music was credited to Sidney Torch.

Once Sir Lawrence Olivier could no longer appear, Sir Ralph Richardson took over as host of Theatre Royal.

Selected episodes were repeated, with a different series opening and closing on ABC Mystery Time in the late 1950s. The show remained in active syndication in the U.S. into the 1970s.

Welles briefly returned to America to make his first appearance on TV, starring in the Omnibus presentation of King Lear, broadcast live on CBS on October 18th, 1953. It was directed by Peter Brook, and co-starred Natasha Parry, Beatrice Straight and Arnold Moss.

One of the first projects Orson Welles undertook after moving to Europe was a film version of Othello. Despite Macbeth’s criticism, he was still confident he could produce a successful Shakespearean film.

However, filming was erratic. Its original Italian producer announced on one of the first days of shooting that he was bankrupt. Instead of abandoning filming altogether, Welles as director began pouring his own money into the project.

He took acting jobs to ensure continued production. He also raised money by going on the stage. In the summer of 1950 Welles appeared in Paris in his own play called The Blessed and The Damned, which consisted of a short film, called The Miracle of St. Anne, and two one-act plays. It received positive reviews.

In August he traveled to Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich, where he starred in An Evening With Orson Welles.

Filming of Othello stopped for months at a time to raise money. It took more than two years to complete and was shot in Morocco, Venice, Tuscany and Rome.

Before the film’s release, Welles played the Shakespearean drama on stage to audiences in Newcastle and London.

A dubbed version of Othello premiered in Rome In November of 1951. Welles' original English-language version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1952. It won the Grand Prix and was released in Europe thereafter.

When David O’Selznick got word that Harry Alan Towers had distributed The Adventures of Harry Lime to MGM, he refused to air it, so Towers took the series elsewhere. He quickly found out that MGM was now contractually obligated to provide a series with Welles to the Mutual Broadcasting System.

So, in 1951 Towers went to Welles with another radio series. He’d already produced a series called The Secrets of Scotland Yard with Clive Brook.

The new series would be called The Black Museum. It was based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard. Walking through the museum, Welles would pause at one of the exhibits, describing an artifact that led into a dramatized tale of a brutal murder or a vicious crime.

Towers visited Australia in the late 1940s and set up production facilities in Sydney. The Black Museum was produced there by Creswick Jenkinson. Ira Marion was scriptwriter and music for the series was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch.

Orson Welles's introductions were recorded on tape in London, then flown to Australia to be added to the locally recorded performances. This was the first series to be produced in Australia in this way.

The program was transcribed in 1951. In the U.S. Mutual Broadcasting carried the series, with more than five-hundred stations airing it. In New York it began airing Tuesdays at 8PM on New Year’s Day, 1952. Episode twenty-seven was called “The Notes” or “Kilroy Was Here.”

“Kilroy Was Here” is a graffiti scrawl or meme of debated origin that became popular during World War II. It was associated with GIs stationed in Europe, depicting a bald-headed man with prominent nose clutching at and peeking over a wall. Next to him was the phrase.

Robert Rietti played leads and Keith Pyott was often in the cast. Beginning In May of 1953, The Black Museum was also broadcast over Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not broadcast by the BBC until 1991.

The Black Museum aired for the calendar year of 1952 over Mutual. It was rebroadcast on KABC, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1964, and on KUAC—FM in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1967.

In 2002, Harry Alan Towers produced The Black Museum for TV, hiring Gregory Mackenzie to be director and showrunner. The anthology series used Welles’ original narration.

The adaptation was shot on location in London in a film noir style and the pilot starred Michael York as Scotland Yard Inspector Russell.

In 1948 author Graham Greene was in Vienna getting a tour of the city, its back alleys, less-reputable nightclubs, and even its sewers. He was also introduced by actress Elizabeth Montagu to Peter Smolka, the central European correspondent for The Times. Greene was working on a novella that would become a screenplay called The Third Man. Greene sold the film rights to producers Alexander Korda and David O’Selznick.

In the story a man named Holly Martins comes to Vienna to accept a job with his friend Harry Lime, only to learn that Lime has died. Martins is a writer. He’s told Lime was killed by a car while crossing the street.

​​At Lime's funeral, Martins meets two British Royal Military Police: Sergeant Paine, a fan of Martins' books, and Major Calloway. Martins thinks the death is suspicious, so he stays in Vienna to investigate the matter.

Orson Welles was cast as Lime with longtime Mercury Theater friend Joseph Cotton cast as Martins. Principal photography began in Vienna in early November of 1948 and lasted for six weeks. The rest was done around London and completed by March of 1949.

Then-unknown composer Anton Karas was hired to create the musical score, performing it on a zither.

The film was released in the UK in September of 1949, quickly becoming that year’s most popular.

When released in the U.S. audiences loved it. Time wrote that the film was "crammed with cinematic plums that would do Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre.”

At the 1951 Academy Awards, the film took home the award for Best Black and White Cinematography, while at the British equivalent, it won for Best British Film.

In the meantime Welles and Tyrone Power made The Black Rose in 1950, directed by Henry Hathaway. Welles played Mongolian warrior Bayan of the Hundred Eyes. Hathaway, who liked Welles, later said the casting was poor, with Welles purposely outwitting people during shooting.

While in England making The Third Man, Orson Welles became acquainted with Harry Alan Towers. Towers was a thirty-year-old radio producer whose company, Towers of London, was heavily into syndicated productions in British, American, Australian, and Canadian markets. His anthology series Secrets of Scotland Yard had proven that there was a lucrative market for high-end entertainment and, in Welles, he saw a personality and a talent that could quickly make his production company a leading one.

Towers and Greene had the same literary agent. Finding out that Greene hadn’t sold Harry Lime’s character rights when he sold the screenplay, Towers quickly bought the rights to the character with plans to put a syndicated radio series into production.

Welles signed with Towers to produce The Adventures of Harry Lime. They were prequel stories showcasing some of the more good-hearted things Harry Lime was supposed to have done.

Only sixteen of the episodes were acquired and broadcast by the BBC. It was the first time that the BBC broadcast episodes of a dramatic series that it did not produce. The full fifty-five episodes were syndicated to radio stations in the U.S.

Welles is credited as the author of ten scripts, including the first episode, “Too Many Crooks” which aired on August 3rd, 1951. The fifth episode was called, “Voodoo,” something Orson Welles had a lot of experience with, dating back to his time in South America during World War II.

In 1947, wanting to bring Macbeth to film, Welles teamed with producer Charles K. Feldman to convince Herbert Yates, President of Republic Pictures, to finance.

Welles guaranteed to deliver Macbeth on a budget of seven-hundred thousand dollars. When some members of Republic’s board expressed misgivings on the project, Welles agreed to personally pay any amount over the initial ask.

He brought in Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy as Macduff, and cast former child star Roddy McDowall as Malcolm. To cast Lady Macbeth, Welles visited longtime friend and radio legend Jeanette Nolan. The two had known each other since the 1930s in New York. Nolan and her husband, fellow actor John McIntire, were excited to work with Orson.

Welles made several changes to Shakespeare's original, like adding significance to the witches. They were played by two other Hollywood radio legends: Peggy Webber, and Lurene Tuttle.

Welles expressed frustrations with wardrobes and the tight schedule. He had the cast pre-record all their dialogue. Locations were leftover sets from westerns normally made at Republic. The entire production was done in twenty-three days in July of 1947. In September, Welles signed on to star in Gregory Ratoff’s Black Magic. Shooting would take place in Rome. He wouldn’t return until 1948.

Republic initially trumpeted the film as an important work, entering it in the 1948 Venice Film Festival. It was abruptly withdrawn after poor comparisons with Lawrence Olivier's version of Hamlet, also being screened. LIFE Magazine gave the film a terrible review in October of 1948, saying that Welles’ days as the “boy wonder” were long over.

When he returned from Europe in the Spring, Welles cut twenty minutes from the film at Republic's request and recorded narration to cover some gaps. But when finally released, it too was called a disaster.

In July of 1948 Welles signed on to co-star with Tyrone Power in the Italian film, Prince of Foxes. The film would be released in December of 1949. Welles’ last appearance in the 1940s on American radio was in a pre-recorded segment on Mail Call over the Armed Forces Radio Service, on October 13th, 1948.

Now thirty-three years old, Orson Welles had enough of Hollywood. He was in deep debt and needed to move to Europe, full-time. His first main stop would be in Vienna, to star with Joseph Cotton in a new film called The Third Man.

In Breaking Walls episode 140, we examine the under-appreciated radio career of the one and only Humphrey Bogart.

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Highlights:

• The Broadway Kid

• Lux Presents Hollywood

• High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon

• Bogie with Hope, Benny, and Vallée

• Casablanca

• Suspense, Lauren Bacall, and Command Performance

• Staying at Home for More Radio

• HUAC

• Fatherhood and Bold Venture

• The African Queen and The Academy Award

• The Final Years

• Looking Ahead to July and Orson Welles

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The WallBreakers:

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Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

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The reading material for today’s episode was:

• Lauren Bacall By Myself — By Lauren Bacall

• Humphrey Bogart — By Alan G. Barbour

• On The Air — By John Dunning

• Bogart: A Life in Hollywood — By Jeffrey Meyers

• Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

• Bogart — By A.M. Sperber & Eric Lax

As well as articles from:

• The Chicago Sun-Times

• The New York Times

• Variety

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On the interview front:

• Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall spoke with Edward R. Murrow in 1954

• Humphrey Bogart and John Huston spoke to George Fisher

• Humphrey Bogart also spoke to Ed Sullivan

• Morton Fine spoke with Dan Haefele for SPERDVAC in 1988

• Howard Duff and William Spier spoke to Dick Bertel and Ed Corcoran for WTIC’s The Golden Age of Radio. Here these interviews at GoldenAge-WTIC.org

• Lurene Tuttle spoke to Chuck Schaden. Here this chat at SpeakingOfRadio.com

• Ingrid Bergman spoke to the CBC

• William Holden spoke to Dick Cavett

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• Manhattan Serenade — By Richard Alden

• As Time Goes By — By Herman Hupfeld

• Danse Macabre — By Camille Saint-Saëns

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A special thank you to Ted Davenport, Jerry Haendiges, and Gordon Skene.

For Ted go to RadioMemories.com, for Jerry, visit OTRSite.com, and for Gordon, please go to PastDaily.com.

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Thank you to:

Tony Adams

Steven Allmon

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Earl Millard

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Ray Shaw

Filipe A Silva

John Williams

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WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

That brings our look at Humphrey Bogart’s life and career to a close.

Next time on Breaking Walls? Well… next time we head to Europe to follow someone who got out of dodge, just in time for HUAC.