Rebecca

[Briggs]

Broadcast December 9, 1938, the first Campbell Playhouse show.

A question about the radio-show Rebecca: After the show Welles talks to Margaret Sullavan. Twice he calls her by her name, a third time he says "Miss Haywood". Does anyone have an idea what may be behind that?

[Roger Ryan]

Margaret Sullavan was married to producer Leland Hayward at the time so perhaps Welles referred to her as "Mrs. Hayward" during the broadcast.

[Le Chiffre]

It's been argued that REBECCA is something of an inferior Jane Eyre clone, but according to a couple of Welles books, David Selznick told Alfred Hitchcock to listen to the Welles broadcast in preparation for the film, so he must have been impressed. One thing about both film and broadcast is that both were a bit watered down because each had to play down the novel's insinuation that Rebecca was a lesbian and that she and Mrs. Danvers were lovers.

This show is available in excellent sound at the new Lilly website,
https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/items/show/1975
but then, it's also been available in excellent sound for many years on Criterion's 1989 Laserdisc set, "Theater of the Imagination", also available in CD-rom:
https://www.amazon.com/Theatre-Imaginat ... 1559406488

[Terry]

I think it was the laserdisc that had the best sound previously. That CD ROM had very compressed and lossy audio.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Theatre-of-the ... 3626fefccd

[Terry]

Here's the CD ROM on an abandonware site. At the least we should be able to extract the mp3s from it and see how they compare to our other copies. This is a Mac archive file, which should please mteal.

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/225 ... magination

[Le Chiffre]

Sorry this post got by me Terry. I actually switched to Windows for awhile, right around the time you posted this, but now I'm thinking of drifting back toward Mac again, mainly for the more integrated software, like iMovie and Garage Band. I gave Rebecca a listen from the Criterion Mercury radio laserdisc recently, and it sounded quite good. Nice to see the old technology still holds up.

As for REBECCA, It's a very well done show, given how much they had to cram into a one-hour format. The main thing it doesn't have that the Hitchcock film has is the macabre suicide of Mrs. Danvers at the end. Maybe too gruesome for radio at that time. Margaret Sullivan's voice was not as piercing as Welles and the Mercury regulars, but she does a fine job with the lead role.

I believe this is the only Campbell show without a commercial break at the beginning of the show. There was too much introduction to do, so the three breaks come at 18:00, 38:00, and at the end, instead of the usual beginning middle and end.

[tonyw]

I think "Daph" herself appears at the end of the broadcast still teasingly refusing to give the heroine's name!

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, that's said to be a live transmission, but since it was 3am in London at the time of the broadcast, I'm skeptical that it wasn't just a recording of DuMaurrier, played to by Welles and Sullivan. How could anyone tell the difference?

[Wich2]

It might have been...

Then again, it's sometimes hard for us to recall just how much the the very idea of, "live, from a world away!" was still a Big Deal then, so she might have done it that way.

- Craig