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Now I'm walking round the city just waiting to come to
It annoys me very much that Alexander Knox's The Closing Door (1949) performed so dismally on Broadway that it never had a chance at a film option, since it would have made a neat little semi-noir addition to the catalogue of mid-century cinema that isn't totally pants about mental illness. Psychiatrically it suffers from the inevitably explanatory trauma and narratively from the climactic restatement of the moral that any audience with half an attention will have gathered for themselves, but not more so than some similarly oriented narratives from its era and certainly less than many. Otherwise and the critics who were bored by it can bite me, its representation of mental illness is remarkable for its ordinariness. Until the last-act decompensation which is explicitly stress-tipped over, Vail Trahern has no blackouts, freakouts, or delusions worth the name; he's a tired, nervous, lucid man who's frightened all the time without being able to say of what and whose ability to hold a job, never fabulous, has deteriorated to the point where he's lied for a month about losing the last one so as not to feel any more of a failure in front of his family than he has for years. He has some odd, jerky triggers, decisions easily overwhelm him, he can tell it's bad when stumbling into his son's photo-finish camera-flash leaves him in the childish pain of a nightmare. "I used to have some kind of a card index in my mind, now the cards are blowing about like snow." He's so terrified of being institutionalized that it makes even setting up an outpatient evaluation a minefield, which per the author's note is much of the social message even without the half of the family that views treatment as a more brazen stigma of lunacy than genteelly hushing the whole thing up. It has a more uncertainly open ending, but the frustrated insistence that mental illnesses should be regarded no more sensationally than physical ones reminded me directly and surprisingly of The October Man (1947), still my gold standard for the subject in its decade. At least on the page, it should not have been a two-week flop. It is never so much of a sociological treatise that it doesn't function as a character study; it doesn't need to be tricky to be tense because the stakes of sanity and autonomy are high enough. Knox wrote the central couple of Vail and Norma Trahern for himself and his wife Doris Nolan and while I am unfairly ill-equipped to imagine her performance, having seen her only as the chic deep freeze of Holiday (1938), he should have been very good as the disconnected, not inhuman Vail. I have not been able to find more of a visual record than the production stills accompanying the published text, which after years of just about every playscript or screenplay of interest to me turning out to be inaccessibly stashed in universities or special collections, I was genuinely shocked to find reproduced in full in the May 1950 Theatre Arts. The sparsely furnished loft which post-war signals the Traherns' poverty—accessible by service elevator, its wall of a studio window overlooking the surrounding roofs with their night-flashing signs—would have gentrified into the millions these days.
It isn't just the jack-of-all-trades quality: his career as an actor looks weirder with every fact I learn about it. I had known that he did a season with the Old Vic in the late '30's, but I had not understood it was 1937–38 which made him part of the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Vivien Leigh as Titania and Robert Helpmann as Oberon, of which I have seen photos and caricatures and considered burning a time machine ticket on. He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. He did first-run late Shaw in the West End and at the Malvern Festival, where his own first effort as a playwright premiered. He did television so early for the BBC, his appearances couldn't be burninated because it was not yet technologically possible to record them. For a while as both director and performer, he was involved with a company that did sort of experimental masques. Like any character actor worth their chameleonism, he played older than his own age from the start, at least once diegetically, already like a meta-joke. Except that he happened to be on Broadway in 1940 where it was easy for him to come to the attention of Hollywood, it starts to feel confusing that he got into American films at all, although even less surprising that he fit so badly into the Lego-set style of the studio system. He did post-war, post-blacklist theater in the UK, too, such that I have to hope for the survival of his televised 1970 When We Dead Awaken with Wendy Hiller. It feels existentially incorrect that the two of them were never in the same Shaw at the same time. I refer often to the hell of a good video store next door, but for some people you want the extra-dimensional expansion to the time machine.
In the meantime, it seems I can't read any of the detective novels he published pseudonymously in the early '30's when he was living by writing rather than acting, not because he was after all successful in taking their titles with him, but because even though Mystery*File made the connection back in 2015, short of incredible luck in a used book store the never-reprinted pulp of Ian Alexander's The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (1933) looks impossible for me to get near without Canadian interlibrary loan. The possibility that Alex Knox was the creator of the first fictional Indigenous detective is fascinatingly random except that it fits with the interests of his much later, mostly historical adventure novels published under his own name. I am used to the phenomenon where actors not all that infrequently double as directors or screenwriters, but obscure crime authors is a new experience.
It isn't just the jack-of-all-trades quality: his career as an actor looks weirder with every fact I learn about it. I had known that he did a season with the Old Vic in the late '30's, but I had not understood it was 1937–38 which made him part of the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Vivien Leigh as Titania and Robert Helpmann as Oberon, of which I have seen photos and caricatures and considered burning a time machine ticket on. He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. He did first-run late Shaw in the West End and at the Malvern Festival, where his own first effort as a playwright premiered. He did television so early for the BBC, his appearances couldn't be burninated because it was not yet technologically possible to record them. For a while as both director and performer, he was involved with a company that did sort of experimental masques. Like any character actor worth their chameleonism, he played older than his own age from the start, at least once diegetically, already like a meta-joke. Except that he happened to be on Broadway in 1940 where it was easy for him to come to the attention of Hollywood, it starts to feel confusing that he got into American films at all, although even less surprising that he fit so badly into the Lego-set style of the studio system. He did post-war, post-blacklist theater in the UK, too, such that I have to hope for the survival of his televised 1970 When We Dead Awaken with Wendy Hiller. It feels existentially incorrect that the two of them were never in the same Shaw at the same time. I refer often to the hell of a good video store next door, but for some people you want the extra-dimensional expansion to the time machine.
In the meantime, it seems I can't read any of the detective novels he published pseudonymously in the early '30's when he was living by writing rather than acting, not because he was after all successful in taking their titles with him, but because even though Mystery*File made the connection back in 2015, short of incredible luck in a used book store the never-reprinted pulp of Ian Alexander's The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (1933) looks impossible for me to get near without Canadian interlibrary loan. The possibility that Alex Knox was the creator of the first fictional Indigenous detective is fascinatingly random except that it fits with the interests of his much later, mostly historical adventure novels published under his own name. I am used to the phenomenon where actors not all that infrequently double as directors or screenwriters, but obscure crime authors is a new experience.
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Searching Kaleidoscope's website for When We Dead Awaken gives us bad news, it appears to be lost.
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I am sure the Production Code would have done something stupid to it, but I'd still have taken the chance!
Searching Kaleidoscope's website for When We Dead Awaken gives us bad news, it appears to be lost.
I am indeed not gladdened to hear it. Fingers crossed for the forgotten tape in someone's attic. Thanks for letting me know the current status, though.
[edit] It was great, apparently, much good that does me!
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Love the way you write about the play and its portrayal of mental illness:
Until the last-act decompensation which is explicitly stress-tipped over, Vail Trahern has no blackouts, freakouts, or delusions worth the name; he's a tired, nervous, lucid man who's frightened all the time without being able to say of what --too, too real.
"I used to have some kind of a card index in my mind, now the cards are blowing about like snow." --That's a great line, and since you tell me he wrote the play, I can credit the image and insight to him--NICE.
He's so terrified of being institutionalized --Also too, too real.
He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. --I love the somehow quaint language in which the second of those linked notices is written (I would need to log in to read the first, which I may do after), and I'm grinning at "Sir Larry" because "Larry" was how Alex referred to him when I was visiting, to my embarrassed star-struck delight. Now I feel chagrin: supposing current-day you could have been the one visiting: he could have had a fan who was all about *him*.
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I hope the answer is at least "did actual research."
Love the way you write about the play and its portrayal of mental illness
Thank you! I love that the play turned out to be so interested in the realism of it, which is much more persuasive and upsetting to me than Gothic derangement because it is, as you underline, too real. Even Vail's break from reality is a horrible brief snap, not some kind of melodramatically irreversible collapse into madness. Three out of four of the contemporary reviews I have been able to find seem to have been disappointed in the lack of conventional scariness, which feels to me like completely missing the point. He was given much more credit as an actor than as a dramatist. I don't even know how a person is supposed to deal with that kind of review.
--That's a great line, and since you tell me he wrote the play, I can credit the image and insight to him--NICE.
It was my favorite line in the play. I'd have used it for the pull quote if it had belonged to a film I could review.
--I love the somehow quaint language in which the second of those linked notices is written (I would need to log in to read the first, which I may do after)
Apologies! I was able to read the relevant pages without borrowing the book, so made the mistake of assuming it would be the case for anyone else. As follows:
"The revelation of this production, after Helpmann's Oberon, was the emergence of an unknown young character actor, Alexander Knox, in the tiny part of Snout. Knox, a Canadian-Scot, had made his first appearance at the Vic as Catesby in the Emlyn Williams Richard III: a secret, dour-lipped performance which left one guessing as to the actor's real capabilities. After A Midsummer Night's Dream one guessed no more. Snout leapt to life as a 'character': mournful of face, with a voice dripping melancholy, and a shy nervous habit of running his hand through his hair and down his side. His was the very lyricism of woe, and his frightened lisp in Wall's rhyme—
"And this the cranny is, right and sinister
"Through which the fearful lovers are to whinisper
"has, so to speak, 'dropped into the language.' I have heard it repeated in at least one production since, but the personality of the actor remains unique."
Which may be even quainter, but incredibly complimentary. He understudied both Richardson and Olivier! He was not regarded as a lightweight! He looks as though he was on track to become a vivid figure of the British stage like so many of that cohort of the Old Vic and instead he diverted to America, which I cannot personally complain about, but it's a hell of a road not taken.
and I'm grinning at "Sir Larry" because "Larry" was how Alex referred to him when I was visiting, to my embarrassed star-struck delight. Now I feel chagrin: supposing current-day you could have been the one visiting: he could have had a fan who was all about *him*.
I have an uncle who produced at least two multi-platinum records and still works as a record producer to this day and I have never asked him what it was like to tour with a superstar rock band in the 1970's. I may know exactly one story about that period and my mother is the person who told it to me. I think this sort of thing happens with relatives. Anyway, you have given me to understand that your sister thought he was pretty cool.
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Thank you!
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I found one! And it seems to be available at the BPL! Will report back, this kind of search is my idea of fun! <3
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That is an excellent pulp cover. Thank you! I looked into The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth just in case it would turn up in the extraordinary stacks of the Malden Public Library, but it was no go. If you can turn it up, more power to you. I think I glitched on checking for the Crozier titles because I was exhausted.
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The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth looks like a properly obscure book: a brief search here turns up nothing beyond 'well, the legal deposit libraries have it'. Hoping for that incredible luck in a used bookstore, then!
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Isn't it? I like the cover for Kidnapped Again too! This one, the Ian Alexander one, the Blackledge one and his other plays don't seem as easy to find as his other books, but I hope they'll turn up eventually!
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You're welcome! The play really surprised me and everything else sort of precipitated from there.
The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth looks like a properly obscure book: a brief search here turns up nothing beyond 'well, the legal deposit libraries have it'. Hoping for that incredible luck in a used bookstore, then!
Much appreciated! Knox seems to have deliberately obscured them in his lifetime: he would admit readily in interviews to having written as many as three to five detective novels, but not under what names. I suspect when a whole lot of digitized copyright information hit the internet is when it became possible to start to match them up.
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Old Master (1939) at least appears to have gotten a standard acting edition, however out of print. It had Alastair Sim and Ernest Thesiger and Betty Marsden in the cast! And Knox cast himself as the American. Even if it were only a mediocre debut, I'd want to see all of those people in the same place.
(The Blackledge one might be a misattribution! The plot thickens.)
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All I've found are bits and pieces of it here!
It really does! (Check out #18 and #30, isn't that a bit of a coincidence?)
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Okay, those are all aphorisms, but I like "It takes almost as much practice to be able to recognise the truth as to state it."
It really does! (Check out #18 and #30, isn't that a bit of a coincidence?)
The Library of Congress Catalogue of Copyright Entries only seems to be helping me out as far as titles that got a U.S. publication. You got a UK equivalent?
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I wish! In the UK, there's not a copyright register (how I'd love to be proven wrong!) The WATCH database was a good lead, but none of his pen names get results! I did look up the Blackledge book in the NLS and the British Library (because of them being copyright libraries... I ran out of steam before tackling the rest!), and the misattribution is still a mystery, because the BL credits it to Blackledge Lippmann, but the NLS to Blackledge. I wonder how the mix-up happened exactly?
ETA: In case you haven't found this already, look!
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(I still want a 1937 civic planners’ map of Lodz, size dining table, the telephone book and my spreadsheet. I have two of the three.)
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This is only peripherally related, but pursuant to the Mystery*File post and the list therein about Native American investigators, I perked up at the mention of the Manly Wade Wellman story, as I knew him in the last few years of his life and am a fan of his work. The story mentioned is the one that won first place in an Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine story contest where Faulkner -- yeah, that Faulkner -- came in second. But I didn't know anything specific about Wellman's story until now. There's a very entertaining piece about the contest here. Unfortunately it appears the Wellman story has never been anthologized.
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I did see that! And starring Dane Clark, even.
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Thank you!
I perked up at the mention of the Manly Wade Wellman story, as I knew him in the last few years of his life and am a fan of his work.
That is extremely neat. We had numerous of his books in the house when I was growing up, but that's as personally close as I got. "A Star for a Warrior" (1946) looks to have been reprinted in Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg's's The Ethnic Detectives: Masterpieces of Mystery Fiction (1985) and more recently in Sarah H. Shaber's Tar Heel Dead: Tales of Mystery and Mayhem from North Carolina (2005) which someone should probably tell the ISFDB about. The former credits the character as the first fictional Native American detective, which I had not realized until this weekend was such a vexed question.
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You're welcome! It occurred to me because I've been spending a lot of time in the Internet Archive. I wish you luck with finding the anthology and an excellent time in the bookstores no matter what.
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Thank you! I still think a judicious quantity of time machine would not go amiss.
(I still want a 1937 civic planners’ map of Lodz, size dining table, the telephone book and my spreadsheet. I have two of the three.)
(And then Lodz would go boom.)
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Yes, and yes.
Shame. Someone must have filmed the TV screen, hopefully.
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Possibly hearsay.
Why do you hate fun.
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I forgot to ask the obvious question: do you remember any of the stories he told about Olivier?
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