Judy Garland: Radio Actor

In addition to her legendary career as a movie star, Judy Garland also spent a lot of time acting on the radio in the 40s and 50s. This part of her career often gets overlooked for a couple reasons. First, the size of her accomplishments on film (with classics like THE WIZARD OF OZ, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, and A STAR IS BORN) and onstage (she was one of the most popular performers of her era, culminating in her iconic 1961 live album JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL) simply dwarfs everything else she ever did. The other reason is because of the disappearance of the medium itself. Dramatic radio, a massively popular medium in the 30s and 40s, went into quick decline with the rise of television in the 50s. Everyone knows that the invention of TV hurt the movie business, but it laid waste to radio—particularly dramatic radio.

I’ve compiled the following annotated list of Judy’s dramatic performances on radio. Please note, this list does not include the hundreds of appearances she made on shows where she appeared as herself to do an interview or sing a song or two. This is a list of her work as a radio actor.

 

1940

10-28: Strike Up the Band - Lux Radio Theatre. With Mickey Rooney. An adaptation of their film of the same name. Judy did more work for Lux Radio Theatre than any other show, and happily most of these have survived.

1941

1-26: Love’s New Sweet Song – Silver Theater CBS. This full episode might be lost, though a brief clip of Judy singing has survived. According to author Scott Schechter, Judy cowrote the story for this show and cowrote the song she sings.

10-12: Eternally Yours -Part I – Silver Theater CBS. This one might also be lost. I can’t find much information about it. The program usually specialized in original dramatic works, but occasionally did movie adaptations, and I wonder if this wasn’t a production of the 1939 Loretta Young movie. Part one of two.

10-19: Eternally Yours -Part II – Silver Theater CBS. Part two of two.

11-9: Babes in Arms - Screen Guild Theater. With Mickey Rooney. An adaptation of their 1939 film.

11-17: Merton of the Movies - Lux Radio Theatre. With Mickey Rooney. An adaptation of the play of the same name. I think this might be the only time Judy and Mickey acted in a radio show that was not an adaptation of one of their films. 

1942

10-12: Morning Glory - Lux Radio Theatre. With John Payne.

12-28: A Star is Born - Lux Radio Theatre. With Walter Pidgeon. This is an adaptation of the 1937 David O. Selznik drama. It was Judy’s first attempt at the character of Esther Blodgett and inspired her to eventually tackle the role on film (as a musical) later on. 

1943

3-22: For Me and My Gal – Screen Guild Players, CBS. With Gene Kelly and Dick Powell. An adaptation of Judy and Gene’s 1942 film.

12-12: Ringside Table – Silver Theater, CBS. With Alan Ladd. This one also appears to be lost.

1946

1-28: The Clock - Lux Radio Theatre. With John Hodiak. An adaptation of Judy’s 1945 film.

9-14: Holiday – Hollywood Star Time. Not sure if this one has survived. An adaptation of the 1938 Katharine Hepburn film.  

11-21: Drive In – Suspense. This one is readily available and is a real treat. Judy does radio noir! Suspense was just about the best show of its kind and Judy’s episode—where she plays a carhop who makes the mistake of accepting a lift home from the wrong man—is a real nailbiter. It’ll make you wish she did more of this kind of thing.

12-2: Meet Me In St. Louis - Lux Radio Theatre. With Margaret O’Brien. An adaptation of Judy and Margaret’s 1944 film.

1950

11-5: Alice Adams – The Theater Guild on the Air, NBC. With Thomas Mitchell. An adaptation of the 1935 Katharine Hepburn film.  

12-25: The Wizard of Oz - Lux Radio Theatre. Do I even have to say? An adaptation of Judy’s 1939 film.

1951

2-15: Cinderella – The Hallmark Playhouse. Judy as the title character.

1953

2-16: Lady in the Dark - Lux Radio Theatre. With John Lund. An adaptation of the 1944 film. Pretty dated and sexist, but if you’ve seen BABYGIRL you’ll see some funny parallels with this story. This was, I believe, Judy's last dramatic role on radio. 

This is list is only complete in the sense that it has all the performances I know of, but, of course, I'd always love to discover more. Let me know of any I missed!

DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD (1951)

It’s easy to get in over your head when you’re only five foot two. Mickey Rooney found that out the hard way in the fifties. For much of the preceding decade he had been the chipper face of American optimism—the fast-talking little guy with the can do attitude. But Hollywood started to go dark around the time that Rooney’s star persona began to decline in public favor. Of course, the public would always like Mickey Rooney, but the postwar years coincided with the end of Rooney’s unnaturally long adolescence (only as he neared thirty years old did he age out of spunky teenager roles). He began taking on adult roles, and that meant occasional forays into Noir City. He made the excellent QUICKSAND in 1950, and then in 1954 he hit the jackpot with DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD.

           

In the film, Rooney plays Eddie Shannon, a mechanic and part-time race car driver. Without knowing it, Eddie’s caught the attention of a group of bank robbers led by Steve Norris (Kevin McCarthy). Norris needs a wheel man for a job he’s planning, a job which will require a driver of great skill. He dispatches his sexy girlfriend Barbara (Diane Foster) to seduce the little guy and talk him into helping them pull the job. Eddie balks at first, but he’s simply too in love with Barbara. He joins the gang for the bank heist.

What happens next is interesting. We might expect the bank job to go badly, or for Norris and his gang to stiff Eddie on the money, but the film makes a rather unexpected detour. The money, oddly enough for a film noir, isn’t really the sticking point here. The fallout and the violence that follows it are really over matters of love.

In QUICKSAND, Rooney played another mechanic who meets the wrong woman and ends up suffering for it, but in that film, he’s still got some spring in his step. Here, though, we find him playing a very different kind of role. Eddie Shannon is an odd little guy. The film uses none of the usual tricks to disguise the actor’s height. Everyone in the film, including Foster, towers over him. But the film uses his diminutive stature as a physical representation of his essential character. Shannon is quiet, even around his buddies at work, and Rooney is surprisingly effective as an introvert. Eddie Shannon is a lonely man, and the gang picks him out because he’s a lonely man.

This makes his relationship with Barbara all the more tense. What ratchets up the emotional stakes, though, are Barbra’s conflicted feelings about her assignment. She seduces the sad little mechanic, but it’s a seduction of the heart. The two don’t even share a kiss. They talk, and she invites Shannon to dream big dreams for the first time in his life. He falls in love, not lust. We get the sense this job would be easier on her if it was only physical. Dianne Foster didn’t make much of an impact in films before being relegated to television and then retiring in the mid-sixties, but make no mistake about it: she was a hell of an actress. Her performance here is topnotch.

The entire film is topnotch. The bank robbery, for instance, gains tension by staying in the car with the getaway driver. And the mad dash that follows the robbery, as Shannon and the robbers race down a twisted back road in order to get to the highway before roadblocks can be set up, is a nail-biting blend of back projection and stunt driving. This kind of thing was often done badly in older films (indeed, the first shots of this movie are a pretty poor display of sloppy back projection), but Shannon’s race through the desert is a fine piece of action direction.

The film was directed by Richard Quine and written by Quine and his frequent collaborator Blake Edwards (James Benson Nablo). Both Quine and Edwards started out as actors, and both usually specialized in comedy. This might explain the wealth of snappy lines in DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD, as when Norris tells a drunk girl at a party, “Dear love, why don’t you go somewhere and pass out like a lady?” It doesn’t explain, though, the aura of heartbreak that hovers over the film. This is one of the saddest of noirs — the story of lonely man who’s taken for a sucker by a gang of sharks. Throughout, Quine directs with intelligence and restraint. The final scenes here, as Shannon confronts the woman he loves and finds out the awful truth about her and the handsome bank robber, are both exciting and tragic. 

Richard Quine was himself a tragic case. A gifted director, his life was beset by misfortune. In 1945, his wife, actress Susan Peters, accidently shot and crippled herself in a hunting accident. As Peters fell into a deep depression, their marriage faltered and after they divorced in 1948, Peters got worse and in 1952 starved herself to death. Quine struggled to find his equilibrium. Working at Columbia he was confined mostly to comedies, though in 1954 he made both DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD and the excellent Fred McMurray/Kim Novak film PUSHOVER. During PUSHOVER, he had a brief but intense affair with Novak that ended with her leaving him at the altar. Quine eventually married actress Fran Jeffries, and directed a string of successful comedies, but he remained a fundamentally sad, troubled man. In 1989, he shot and killed himself in his home in Beverly Hills.

Rooney’s career continued its decline after this film, of course, and he never came close to reclaiming his box office mantle. Perhaps more importantly, he never really reclaimed his place in the culture. As the years have gone on, the Andy Hardy movies that made him an American symbol are more and more relics of the past. They have historical importance, of course, but I don’t get the sense that Mickey Rooney has had anything like the longevity of Shirley Temple or Judy Garland. A lot of kids still watch Temple. And every kid I know still loves the THE WIZARD OF OZ. Mickey Rooney, on the other hand, is just lucky that he got teamed so many times with Garland before she outgrew him.

All of which is to say that as Rooney’s big hits dim in the distance, there is more room to evaluate some of his later work. And his work in noir — particularly QUICKSAND and the 1951 musical noir THE STRIP — are very good. And one film, DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD — might be the best thing he ever did.

Note: DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD will be showing next week at Noir City Chicago.

Mickey Rooney Goes To Hell

In the forties, Mickey Rooney was the biggest (albeit the shortest) movie star in America. His massive success as MGM's perky All-American teenager Andy Hardy financed a decade of booze, racehorses, and beautiful women.

Then the fifties hit him like a bomb. His films tanked and his life fell apart. Where's a guy to turn when his luck runs out? Well, film noir, of course.

Read my essay on the surprisingly impressive--and largely unknown--noir career of Mickey Rooney, excerpted in its entirety here from the new issue of NOIR CITY.

After you read it, check out the website of the Film Noir Foundation and think about joining the fight to save lost noirs.

Quicksand (1950)

For most of its running time, Quicksand marches in lockstep precision toward its protagonist’s doom. That the film sputters out of gas toward the end is too bad, but Quicksand is hardly unique in that respect. Many of the films we call noir have the same failing. What is unique about this movie, however, is that while most noirs chart the gradual disintegration of their characters’ fortunes, few do it with such exactness.

The film stars Mickey Rooney, just three years after his penultimate Andy Hardy movie, as a regular guy mechanic named Dan Brady. In the opening scene Dan is eating at a greasy spoon and explaining to a couple of buddies why he’s been blowing off his girlfriend, Helen. He's just not ready to settle, he says. Then another woman walks through the door. She’s blonde and beautiful, and as cold as midnight. Her name is Vera, and like all women named Vera in film noir, she seems to have just wandered in from Hell looking for a man to take back with her. Dan volunteers to go with her because he’s too dense to see that all Vera really wants is a two thousand dollar mink coat. He can’t even afford to take her out to the boardwalk, so he lifts some money from the cash register at work. That sets into motion a nightmarish chain of events. Every move Dan makes only gets him in deeper and deeper, but most of the time his decisions seem to make sense. His mistakes are huge, but it’s easy to see how and why he makes them.

Quicksand is richly populated with nice character parts, a testament to the strong original script by Robert Smith (99 River Street). Peter Lorre plays Vera’s old boss—a sleazy boardwalk operator with whom she clearly had more than a working relationship. If Dan was smarter, he might ask himself why Vera would lead him to Lorre’s arcade on their first date. Art Smith plays Dan’s boorish boss, a guy who starts out as a jerk and ends up as a villain. And Taylor Holmes issues a curious performance as a lawyer near the end of the film. His character seems slightly sinister--something to do with the way he intones lines like, “Men don’t die easily. They take a lot of killing.”

At the center of the movie is Dan’s relationship with both the bad girl and the good girl. As Vera, Jeanne Cagney (baby sister of James no less) is a piece of work. She’s beautiful, but she’s got a hard edge from the beginning. Vera couldn’t fool just anybody, but she twists poor Dan Brady to her will without breaking a sweat. When the time comes for her to sell him up the river, it only seems natural.

As the good girl, Helen, Barbara Bates gives the film’s oddest performance. Helen isn’t just a sweet gal in love with a dope, she seems genuinely like a masochist. Near the end of the film, Dan confesses to a series of crimes that should send even most the lovelorn girlfriend screaming to the cops, but Helen responds by declaring a love for her man that lapses into delusion. She seems like one of those sad women who write love letters to imprisoned serial killers they’ve seen on the news. In real life, Bates suffered from a crippling depression which eventually led to the end of her career in films and later to her suicide in 1969. She makes for a sad, strange screen presence.

As Dan Brady, Mickey Rooney manages the difficult task of distancing himself from his iconic cheerfulness. He had been Hollywood’s biggest (albeit shortest) star for much of the thirties and forties, but by 1950 the country had taken a turn for the noir, and Rooney tried to go with it. At the time, the public wasn’t having it, but as the years go by I wonder if his noir work (Drive A Crooked Road, Baby Face Nelson) will have more longevity than his light thirties fare. Rooney never had a Wizard of Oz-sized phenomenon like Judy Garland, and I don't think he's had the staying power of Shirley Temple. (Does anyone watch Andy Hardy movies anymore?) Part of what Rooney brings to Quicksand is a little man’s insecurity and bluster. Dan’s a dope and doesn’t know it, and that’s exactly as it should be. I can’t tell how much of this quality is intentional and how much of it is Rooney’s forced attempt to be taken seriously as a leading man, but either way the results work.

Until the end, the entire movie works. Director Irving Pichel directs with style and restraint. The scenes in Lorre’s cheap arcade have the stink of cigarettes and sweat on them, and the big robbery scene is a taunt piece of suspense. Pichel keeps an oddball cast going strong, and the movie nearly makes it across the finishing line. Alas, it stumbles a bit at the end with a goofy deus ex machina (the lawyer’s final speech is pure hogwash), but like any good film noir, Quicksand has already made its point: an ordinary man can make one mistake that sets into motion a chain of events that will destroy him. Point taken.

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You can watch the film here.

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Rooney's chances of being remembered for his thirties work might be hurt by the fact that a huge part of the modern audience for old fashioned song-and-dance flicks are gay men. And Mickey's been vocal about not liking gay folks too much. Here he is expressing some political/social views that are unlikely to endear him to friends of Dorothy.