The Public Arts: Media Translation

Film

The paperback-LP combination of My Fair Lady and Pygmalion is not the only current instance of what Marshall McLuhan calls exercises in media translation. A number of Broadway plays are currently appearing in movie houses under varying degrees of revision. Luckily, the plays are available in cheap paper editions: Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, William Inge's Bus Stop and Picnic, William March's The Bad Seed, Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll. Now these plays are obviously too mature for class assignment in most instances, yet they can provide the raw material for individual themes that can solve a growing dilemma for many teachers.

The dilemma is this: we know that many of our students read literary and sub-literary material far beyond the sophistication allowable by either school boards or the median awareness of most classes. Yet we also know our avoiding these controversial areas in the classroom in no way keeps such reading matter from affecting our students. If we ignore their actual reading habits, we implicitly encourage them to lead unexamined lives; if we bring mature material into the typical classroom, we scandalize immature students and alienate community policymakers who are understandably shocked by our lack of prudence.

It seems to me that individual reading assignments can solve most of this dilemma. Encourage students to write criticism of their movie experience; then when the maturity of the writer warrants it, suggest in your critical comments that the student analyze, say, Robert Anderson's film translation of his own play, Tea and Sympathy. George Seaton's "A Comparison of the Playwright and the Screen Writer," The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, X (Spring 1956), will prove enormously useful in giving you ideas on how to go about analyzing film translations of printed literature.

Seaton directed such films as Song of Bernadette, The Country Girl, and The Proud and the Profane. In fact, other articles in the same issue make the cost ($1.25) reasonable: John Houseman (Stratford, Conn.'s Shakespeare director) on "How-and What-Does a Movie Communicate?"; John E. Twomey's "Some Considerations on the Rise of the Art-Film Theater"; an excerpt from editor Kenneth MacGowan's forthcoming book, The Film of Yesterday and Tomorrow; and Robert Herridge's "'Camera Three'-An Adventure in Education," an analysis of that experimental program. Write to the University of California Press, Berkeley 4, California.

For more background, see Cosmopolitan's special movie issue, October 1956, 35' (The Hearst Corporation, 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, New York 19). This issue, which, sampled, looks surprisingly good, contains an excellent summary of Hollywood's economic plight, "The Movie Business," alone worth the 35?. There are other features on great movies of the past; the star system, past and present; the people of Hollywood; a profile on a flourishing chain of "art houses" in New York City; and, most important for teachers who would like to anticipate forthcoming popular films for "media translation" purposesa two-page forecast of projected new films. In some schools, a class unit based on student use of this magazine could prove a most stimulating introduction to the film as an art form.

The October 1 issue of the "Green Sheet" (Joint Estimates of Current Entertainment Films) contains Sarah Thorwald Stieglitz's study guide for War and Peace. (Free copies. Write Dr. Joseph Mersand, Jamaica High School, 168th St. & Gothic Drive, Jamaica 32, N.Y.)

Broadcast

Greer Garson, whose reputation as an actress has been earned through decorous and ladylike roles, will have a chance to break this typecasting when she plays Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, to be colorcast on "Hallmark Hall of Fame," December 16, 7:30-9:00 P.M., NBC-TV. George Schaefer will produce and direct the TV adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play about a rapacious family in the Deep South in the 1900's. Miss Garson has expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the chance to portray the personally venomous sister constantly at war with her two conniving brothers over the family fortune. Tallulah Bankhead played the role on Broadway in 1939; Bette Davis was Hollywood's choice in 1941.

"Camera Three" (CBS-TV, Sundays, 11:30 A.M.) continues to please the TV viewer in search of mature perspectives on all the arts. Both producer Lewis Freedman and writer John McCiffert have taught English; this experience should make their December plans all the more interesting. They will present a four-part study of Victorianism on December 9, 16, 23, 30. Because this series should be the English teacher's ideal introduction this season to "Camera Three," I will publish detailed information on the content of each program in my weekly Scholastic Teacher broadcast schedule, "Listenables and Lookables."

"Omnibus" has moved to a new network, ABC-TV, Sundays, 9:00-10:00 P.M. Its time strikes me as more convenient for Monday morning assignments. Its subject matter would certainly merit inclusion in any upper-grade English class. Already this year, Walter Kerr, the program's new drama consultant, has shown what we can expect under his tutelage: Bert Lahr in Androcles and the Lion and Tallulah Bankhead interpreting the "Southern Belle" as seen from different dramatic traditions from Kerr's own script. A long-awaited highlight: Christopher Plummer in Oedipus Rex, January 9.

Olivier's Hamlet will be telecast in two parts on ABC-TV, "Famous Film Festival," November 24 and December 1, 7:309:00 P.M. "Ford Star Jubilee" for December on CBS-TV is Sidney Kingsley's Men in White, a ninety-minute, live adaptation. Amahl and the Night Visitors gets its traditional presentation over NBC-TV on December 16. John Huston's production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is planned for "Producers' Showcase," January 7, 8:009:30 P.M. The American premiere of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace is tentatively set for January 13, NBC-TV, a fine opportunity for your Audrey Hepburn fans to compare different artistic presentations of a great novel they may someday read.

Recordings

"As scarce as tickets to My Fair Lady" has become the Broadway superlative of 1956. To unlucky souls long resigned to "seeing musicals" at the local movie or at home with a phonograph, this special kind of Gothamite anxiety is hard to sympathize with. Still, perhaps the Lady is a special case. After having listened to the Columbia original cast LP (12" OL 5090, $3.98) many more times than I should have, I found myself rationalizing my delight in this record (and the uncorrected themes) on professional grounds.

Wasn't My Fair Lady the perfectly natural way to introduce my students to the art of musical comedy? Based on Shaw's Pygmalion (available in a 50? Penguin edition, 3300 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore), preaching in Shaw's irresistible way about the social matrix and relevance of the English language, and already touted as the major musical in this genre's short history, My Fair Lady seemed like a Shavian conspiracy to insinuate the disreputable popular arts into our English classrooms.

Fearing I had been victimized by the sounds of my Sam Goody hi-fi, I picked up a paperback of the play. The reading that followed was a new experience: it had a special flavor. For I found myself vicariously translating the play into the musical. Here is where that song came from; there is something he didn't use, I wonder why; and why don't they do this more often? Such pleasant reflections added an entirely new dimension to my reading of the play.

And, it suddenly dawned on me, this play was actually a printed aid to the complete appreciation of the musical. For the student unfamiliar with the Pygmalion story, the play is a necessity for complete enjoyment of the recording. For the teacher whose memory of the play needs freshening, the paperback is very handy. A printed aid democratizes appreciation of fast-paced popular arts like film, TV, and theatre, for with the printed reference slower students can go back and mull over what they missed. Without the printed play, most students will not hear a "musical" at all; they will merely listen to a series of hit tunes. A reading of Shaw thus ties together the separate performances of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, and Stanley Holloway on the recording into a quasi-artistic whole; that's the closest we can approach this superlative musical until Hollywood puts all of it on celluloid for all of us.

When I learned that Coward-McCann was about to publish Alan Jay Lerner's book and lyrics, I became convinced that this musical had been foreordained for the English classroom. Now all we really needed was an imaginative gesture from Penguin Books, offering teachers, say, twenty-five copies of the paper-covered play, the Columbia LP, and the Coward-McCann book at a bargain price. When I had definitely decided to teach the play and the musical together, I felt I had better test this decision by becoming my own devil's advocate. How justify music in an English classroom? But what, in the last analysis, were ballads? Nevertheless, if you can justify teaching a musical, you can justify anything; the English classroom then becomes a sideshow or vaudeville stage.

On the contrary, I am merely using my students' awareness of excellence in popular culture to deepen their understanding of a literary classic. What could be more respectable ? But wouldn't it be too much fun for an English classroom? Oh, come on now, devil, you can do a better job of confusing our profession than that. "Wouldn't It be Loverly" if those Penguin people would help out? While we wait for them to make an offer, we can fortify our background on Shaw with G. K. Chesterton's biography, just out in a new paperback line, "Dramabooks." Send 95? to Hill and Wang, Inc., 104 Fifth Avenue, New York 11, N.Y.

Follow up your class discussion of Maurice Evans' production of Man and Superman with a class audition of the unstaged third act of the play, "Don Juan in Hell" (Columbia LP, 2-12", OSL, $10). If your class used the Penguin paper edition (50?) for the TV performance, they can easily follow the Paul Gregory-First Drama Quartette production with Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorhead. Allow four days for recording and discussion, a side a day; each side takes between twenty and thirty minutes. Side 1, pp. 126-141; side 2, pp. 141-149; side 3, pp. 148-161; side 4, 161-175, with slight deletions on pp. 144, 162-164, 169, 174, 175.

For more suggestions on Columbia Records suitable for school use, write for Records for School, Volume 1, Secondary Education, compiled by Florette Zuelke, Educational Department, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York 19, Free.

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 45, No. 9 (Dec., 1956), pp. 562-564