In 1939 the United States was on the threshold of a new era, but all the experts were prisoners to the Great Depression just behind and blind to the coming implications of World War II…
Among books the great political and public success of the year was The Grapes of Wrath, which perhaps still stands as the culminating social record of the decade. Among the hits of the Broadway theatre were Abe Lincoln in Illinois, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Philadelphia Story, and Hellzapoppin’. But the really big media of popular entertainment were radio and the movies, which, having not yet encountered their postwar nemesis, television, were having a golden age- in the financial sense, anyhow. The number of radio sets in use in the nation was one of the few statistics that had risen steadily and inexorably through the depression. In effect, all but those living in the direst poverty or those possessed of heroic cultural perversity now had at least one radio. What did they have to listen to?
—short film starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, the courtroom comedy, Nut Guilty (Lloyd French, 1936). At this point, Bergen and McCarthy had appeared in a few shorts, including The Eyes Have it and At the Races, but within the year they had landed a contract for their own radio show that would keep them on air, with huge audiences and a string of major guest movie stars, for almost two decades. Many people find it odd that ventriloquists performed on radio, but it’s not so strange. Ventriloquism is only partly about the visual illusion of two voices emerging from two separate bodies; also important is the creation of two distinct voices, and the aural illusion that you’re hearing a back-and-forth conversation rather than a monologue. —click image for source…
Because of international events, 1939 was the year when radio news coverage really came into its own, and millions sat anxiously straining to understand broadcasts from Europe, above the rush of static and interference. But the most popular programs were drama and variety shows, and the most popular program of all was the Chase and Sanborn Coffee Hour. All over the country, even in the most remote frm areas, young and old alike tuned it in to keep up with that odd phenomenon, an invisible ventriloquist. Edgar Bergen’s perky, irreverent puppet, Charlie McCarthy, was quite possibly the most widely known figure in American show business up to that time.
—George Cukor is best know as a director of women’s films. His deft hand guided many classic films centered on women. Such as Camille, Little Women, The Philadelphia Story, Susan and God, Holiday, Gaslight, parts of Gone With The Wind and of course the 1939 all star classic film The Women. That film had a dream cast of nothing but women as not one single man ever appeared in any parts of this wild and rollicking comedy. But it’s ironic because men are all what these ladies talk and fight about. The cast features Norma Shearer as Mary Haines,…click image for source…
Daytime radio programming was a simple matter- soap operas took up 85 per cent of network time, as against 31/2 per cent for news.; it was clear enough that the millions of wives who kept the radio blaring while they cleaned house would rather keep up with Ma Perkins than with the fall of Europe. ( to be continued)…
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