In this tenth installment of our ongoing From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 Years series (in conjunction with Sounding Out!), A. Brad Schwartz explores the connection between Orson Welles and Sherlock Holmes. From his earliest experimentation with radio as a student to his final radio performance in the 1950s (a BBC production of “The Final Problem”), Welles regularly turned to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.
Schwartz, who co-wrote the recent PBS special on the “War of the Worlds” panic, argues that echoes of the Holmes stories can be heard throughout Welles’s radio work, including his performance as the ethereal crime-fighter The Shadow. It was partly by learning from Conan Doyle’s example of great storytelling, Schwartz claims, that Welles reshaped the rules of radio drama.
Click here to read A. Brad Schwartz’s full post over on Sounding Out!.
This post is the tenth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang on Monday, January 20th.
Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.
Over on Sounding Out! this week, the ongoing Antenna–Sounding Out! joint series on The Mercury Theater On the Air and Orson Welles and his career in radio continues. This week, Debra Rae Cohen sinks her teeth into Orson Welles’s “Dracula,” the first broadcast in the Mercury series, and perhaps the play that solicits more “close listening” than any other. Back in 1938, Variety yawned at Welles’s attempt at “Art with a capital A” and dismissed his “Dracula” as “a confused and confusing jumble of frequently inaudible and unintelligible voices and a welter of sound effects.”
In this post, Cohen argues that Welles’s production reclaimed and exploited the media-consciousness of Bram Stoker’s original novel, a feature occluded in the play and film versions. She also asserts that Welles’s production of Dracula introduced several of the radio innovations we’ve come to associate with the Mercury Theater (and The War of the Worlds in particular): first-person retrospective narration, temporal coding, the strategic use of media reflexivity. Click here to read Debra Rae Cohen’s full post.
This post is the third in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on September 17th.
Miss the first two posts in the series? Click here to read Tom McEnaney’s thoughts on the place of Latin America in Welles’s radio work. And click here to read Eleanor Patterson’s reflections on recorded re-releases of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.