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  • Research Notes: The Trial of Vivienne Ware

    It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to keep them to ourselves. Thanks Mike!

    This week’s research notes are about: THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE (William K. Howard, 1932), screened on August 31, 2022 in a 35mm print from the Museum of Modern Art as part of CFS Season 28.

    ★ Taglines ★

    SENSATIONAL / The Most Amazing And BREATH-TAKING INSIDE STORY / Of Men, Women Caught In A Whirlwind Of Passion … Detouring The Wheels Of Justice … Of Desires That Changes The Lives Of Eight People

    JOAN BENNETT / You Will Sing Her Praise Anew in This Tense Emotional Radio Drama That Electrified the Air

    This Seat is for you! / on the jury in The TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE / Sit on this jury.  Come and learn the Truth regarding the story that has thrilled millions of radio listeners … The court is ready .. The trial is about to start.  The Solution is Near, on what has been one of the most widely discussed trials of all time … It’s Different!  It’s Sensational!  It’s great entertainment!

    Envied by every woman … A match for any man … You peer into the heart and soul of humans who dare. / Thrilling and dazzling you in a maelstrom of drama … It’s sensational and revolutionarily different … truly a “hit” picture of the year.

    “NO! NO! .. I AM NOT A MURDERESS!” / At last!  The true story of the sensational radio mystery that has baffled millions!

    Millions pried open her soul … nothing of her life was kept sacred, except the love she kept locked in her heart!

    Millions pried into her soul … millions called her guilty … yet her only guilt was love

    The Radio Drama that Electrified the Air

    Production Notes:

    THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE originated from a pair of radio dramas that were broadcast from New York’s WJZ, both having to do with the fictional murder of “millionaire architect” Damon Fenwicke. 

    The first, “The Trial of Vivienne Ware,” was broadcast over six consecutive nights in late November 1930.  Presented as a trial of “socially prominent New Yorker” Vivienne Ware for the murder, the story was told “in such a manner as to give the invisible audience a clear picture of the chain of evidence involving Miss Ware.

    Furthermore “the radio audience is to be given no verdict in the case, but, will, on the contrary, act as the jury” with prizes to be awarded for those offering the best explanations of their verdicts.

    According to an article in the Rome Sentinel, the cast included “prominent members of the New York Bar, a United States Senator and a notable cast of actors from the legitimate stage and broadcasting studios.” 

    (“Internationally famous lawyer” George Gordon Battle played the counsel for the defense; Ferdinand Pecora, former first assistant district attorney of New York County, portrayed the prosecutor, and sitting U.S. Senator Robert F. Wagner (NY) portrayed the judge.)

    The unusual premise and high-profile cast attracted attention to the production, according to the Syracuse Journal:

    The unusualness of the broadcast and the presence in it of Wagner, Pecora, and Battle became the talk of the town.  Play producers were intensely interested in the enterprise.  The dean of the Law School of New York University requested tickets for its performances for his students, that they might observe at first hand the technique, faithfully reproduced, of an actual murder trial.

    Policemen crowded into radio stores to hear its sessions on loudspeakers.  A general hushing took place in millions of homes each night as the time of the broadcast approached.

    People stopped their bridge playing, their backgammon, awoke from their naps to listen.  It was like the reading of an unusually exciting continuous story.  One did not want to miss the next installment.

    When the series concluded, the audience was virtually unanimous in their judgement via their letters that Vivienne Ware was innocent and that the guilty party was instead one of the witnesses, Dolores Devine — prompting a second radio drama in January 1931 (“The Trial of Dolores Devine”) which was also broadcast over six successive nights.

    Both broadcasts were adapted into novels that year, written by the radioplay’s author, Kenneth M. Ellis, and published by Grosset & Dunlap. The first was titled “The Trial of Vivienne Ware” (copyright February 4, 1931) and the second titled “Dolores Devine, guilty or innocent?” (copyright June 25, 1931).

    From the dust jacket of “Vivienne Ware”: “Something New Under the Radio Sun / A Murder Trial on the Air! / This is the story that held millions of listeners spell-bound when it was produced over the air … In all the large cities over the country the radio, newspaper and legal worlds have joined together to make this one of the most unusual broadcasts ever offered to radio listeners.  … This is the first radio novel, an innovation in both the radio and publishing worlds.”

    In February of 1932, it was noted in the New York Times that both works had been purchased by Fox for “immediate production” and would be merged into a single film, with Joan Bennett likely to play the lead.  Later on, the New York Times noted that “it is believed to be the first motion-picture adaptation to be made from a radio mystery play.”

    An article in the Schenectady Gazette published around the release of the film noted that the film was shot in just 22 days, and described director William K. Howard’s methods for shortening the length of the shoot:

    In adapting story and dialogue he timed the action to exact footage with a stop watch.  The clocked script showed the time of each scene.  On rehearsals of these scenes, Howard double-checked the time consumed.

    This care eliminated waste.  There have been instances in the past where the gross footage of 6,000 feet featured has approached 130,000 feet.  Howard’s gross footage of “The Trial of Vivienne Ware” barely exceeded 25,000 feet.  This was reduced to 5,200 feet when ready for release.

    Speed is also a noticeable quality of Howard’s actual direction.  Fadeouts are virtually dispensed with.  The story is told by a rapid succession of scenes and flashbacks.  The camera moves constantly, bringing the spectator into the action.

    …

    Approximately 2,000 extras were employed by Howard.  Of these, 1,100 were used in the courtroom scenes.  Howard introduced them in shifts.  This was to give an air of reality by avoiding a repetition of the same faces in court on successive days.

    The original radio drama was revived at WINS in New York on April 25, 1932 (four days ahead of the release of the film there!).  The New York Times noted that it “has an unusual history as a drama written especially for the microphone.  It is the first radio drama to find its way into book form and to be made into a motion picture.”

    Release:

    THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE opened in New York on April 29th, 1932 at the 6,200 seat Roxy theater, accompanied by a “massive, colorful spectacle of dance and melody” called “RUSSIA”, which was presented in “four magnificent scenes” on the Roxy’s stage, and in which the Roxyettes were described as “the personification of youth and precision in their Cossack costumes” by Mordaunt Hall.

    The film also opened in Washington D.C. that day at the 3,400-seat Fox, where it was accompanied by “10 Big Acts in the Greatest Show of the Year.”

    THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE opened in Chicago on May 6th at the Chicago Theater, but was definitely second-billed compared with the theater’s stage show “Three’s a Crowd”. 

    This stage production was described as “The complete Musical Revue–intact–all the songs, girls and comedy New York and Chicago raved about … All the Sets — All the Girls — All the Comedy –All the Songs — All the Scenes — All the Fun” with “the original stars” Fred Allen and Tamara Geva plus “Their Big Broadway Cast.”

    (To be fair, according to the ads, seeing this production at the Chicago was quite a bargain: “A $4.40 Musical Comedy Smash Hit at Our Regular Popular Prices” — i.e. 35 cents before 1 p.m.)

    Other films in Chicago around that time included THE STRANGE CASE OF CLARA DEAN at the McVickers, the second week of SYMPHONY OF SIX MILLION (“all the glory of love – the anguish of heartbreak — in this truly great drama of human hearts”) at the State-Lake, Elissa Landi and Victor McLaglen in DEVIL’S LOTTERY (“drama of a beauty whose love was fatal to many men … yet who nearly lost the love she desired!”) at the RKO Palace, THIS IS THE NIGHT (“romance as mellow as the Venetian Moon!”) at the United Artists, and Barbara Stanwyck in SO BIG (“the screen’s glowing epic of American Womanhood!”) at neighborhood theaters. 

    Moviegoers could also see “exotic stage and screen star” Anna May Wong (“the most colorful personality in America”) in person at the Oriental in a “lavish, entertaining stage sketch,” which accompanied the film feature THE WOMAN IN ROOM 13, starring Elissa Landi.

    Other courtroom dramas in theaters around that time included Walter Huston in NIGHT COURT (“They were so happy – like two love birds!  And then she was framed by the agents of the night court!”), Warren William in THE MOUTHPIECE (“He points a blazing gun at Justice through Loopholes in the Law!  He’s New York’s most notorious criminal lawyer–exposed at last!”), and John Barrymore in STATE’S ATTORNEY (“One day he was counsel to crooks … the next he hunted them down.  But in love — an outlaw always!”)

    Reviews:

    In the New York Times, Mordaunt Hall called THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE a “hectic and unconvincing narrative [where] in the end that which one anticipates comes to pass” and noted that “a good deal of the testimony is portrayed by flashbacks, which are more interesting in themselves than the actual tale.”

    The following week, he also included this film in a list of “several peculiar pictorial  stories” playing on Broadway screens (including LETTY LYNTON, ROADHOUSE MURDER, and BEHIND THE MASK), and in so doing, described VIVIENNE WARE as “another shamelessly implausible affair” and a “tedious bag of tricks.”

    His larger purpose for lumping these films together was to decry the fact that — with one exception: SO BIG — there were no films in current release that were fit for children to see, and noted that the result was that adults, too, were staying away.

    Hall went on to say that “there may be a fortune in store for the producer who concentrates on making pictures for the young, not silly sentimental tales but really good ones … to appeal children in a wholesome fashion, motion pictures actually need to be less childish than many of them are at present.”

    Mae Tinee in the Tribune, on the other hand, praised the film: “if you like your melodrama fast and as full of a number of things as a Christmas fruit cake, you’ll go for ‘The Trial of Vivienne Ware’ in a big way.   From opening till closing moment surprise after surprise is sprung … as a whole, the film is well cast and it has been directed with zestful intelligence.”

    She concluded “if you buy movie seats to sleep in, don’t be getting them at the Chicago this week — because ‘The Trial of Vivienne Ware’ is the sort of movie that keeps you awake.”

    Further Research:

    Casey Long’s blog post at the UW Cinematheque has some interesting details about the gestation of the film.

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    Introduction Everyone brings their own personal baggage to the movies, and I don’t think I’m alone in treating them too readily as literature. Much of the vocabulary we apply to film comes from long-ago high school English classes. We assume that every detail is a puzzle piece that leads inexorably to a deliberate display of……

  • Swap Meet Cinema: Sheet Music and the Movies

     Can we learn about film history through non-filmic means? By most metrics, this week’s film, Thanks a Million, is not a very familiar title. It hasn’t screened theatrically in Chicago—or anywhere else, for that matter—in many years. I don’t know of any video release, and I can’t recall many TV airings. It doesn’t have much……

  • IB, Therefore …

    Between fuzzy adolescent memories and Amazing Dreamcoats, getting a real fix on Technicolor has always been difficult. A dizzying example of total branding supremacy, Technicolor was not just a process but cultural shorthand for a certain kind of overripe, retina-scarring engagement with the world around us. (It was a Hollywood fantasy, and an irresponsible one.)……

  • Early Talkies: A Primer

    Acquired Tastes If one wanted, for whatever reason, to sketch a dividing line between the casual movie fan and the serious cinephile, the early talkies are probably the place to do it. Their stars are unfamiliar—flashes-in-the-pan whose popularity is more mysterious and unaccountable than those that came immediately before and after. (Modern audiences instinctively understand……

  • Instant Cinema: Home Movies and the Avant-Garde

    Since avant-garde movies first attracted a substantial audience in America under the auspices of indecency and subversion of established ideas about politics, art, society, and especially sexuality, many don’t expect that such films can also be exceedingly gentle, even reverential towards their subjects.

  • The Demon in the Machine: Approaching Tony Scott

    “Sometimes miniature electric train cars simply will not stay coupled. At some crucial tunnel, curve, or grade, the locomotive charges forward, leaving uncoupled cars behind and possibly derailed. It often seems that extra exertion at switches, curves, and grades has something to do with the uncoupling. “Much, perhaps most, of the film footage that you……

  • More on Programming: Not on Video

    Our sixth (and best?) season starts on Wednesday at the Portage with Hands Across the Table. The occasion affords us an opportunity to talk about a programming issue that’s usually not critically aired in public—the impact, presumed or otherwise, that a film’s presence on home video has on its viability in a repertory slot. Programming……

  • Resurrecting Stage Struck

    If a major American studio falls in the forest, does it make a sound? To the average movie fan in 1956, probably not. For those who got their Hollywood news from Hedda Hopper’s syndicated newspaper column, RKO’s Stage Struck sounded like business as usual, with casting news and production leaks coming at regular intervals. Early……

  • Who Wants To See Old Movies?

    Last week the Los Angles Times published an unusual op-ed about young peoples’ attitudes towards movies from Neal Gabler, the writer responsible for such insightful social histories as An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. I call the article unusual not because its topic is especially exotic (more on that in a……

  • Moving Pictures That Move: House of Bamboo in CinemaScope

    Would some films not exist at all but for their aspect ratios? Put another way: although we tend now to think of aspect ratios as somewhat perfunctory aesthetic choices made during the preproduction process, the equation was almost exactly reversed at the dawn of the widescreen era. The shape of the screen was the engine……

  • Invasion of the Aspect Ratios

    This week’s feature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has long been regarded as a political hot potato. Like High Noon, it’s either a preachment for vigilance in the face of a Communistic menace or a cautionary allegory of a conformist overreaction to that selfsame menace. But for a certain kind of cinephile, the aspect ratio……

  • The Cinema-Century

    In 1995, cinema celebrated a distinctly ambivalent centenary, with most activity occurring at the intersection of Europe’s cinematheques, universities, and state-funded production centers. The collective commemoration yielded renewed scholarship on early cinema and even a few productions, such as the omnibus Lumière et compagnie and the BFI-commissioned ‘Century of Cinema’ documentary series. (Stateside, we made……

  • Radical Spinach: Wild Boys of the Road

    Who was this movie made for? Often the answer is obvious enough (housewives, teenage boys, the Friday night drive-in bumpkin, the half-conscious grindhouse denizen, etc.), but in some special cases, the interrogation itself opens up and deepens the mystery of the film in question. In those instances, the absence of a readily identifiable target audience……

  • What Reanimated Russian Dog Heads Can Teach Us About Programming: The Legacy of Amos Vogel (1921-2012)

    Last week’s news of Amos Vogel’s death, at 91, brought the expected—and deserved—tributes for the enormous influence of two ventures that he co-founded: Cinema 16, the New York-based film society that ran from 1947 to 1963, and the New York Film Festival, which Vogel programmed from 1963 to 1968.  (In these ventures, equal credit must……

  • Programming: Selecting/Unselecting

    The Northwest Chicago Film Society is starting its fifth season this Wednesday with a 35mm print of The Trouble with Harry, a film that has the strange distinction of usually being regarded as ‘minor Hitchcock’ despite the fact that most everyone quite likes it, especially around these parts. After that, we’re embarking on a collaborative……

  • Waiting to See Au hasard Balthazar: The Case for Snoozing and Other Bad Behavior in the Movie Theater

    Bill Everson, close friend of many decades, writer, historian and teacher, at a film festival announced that his notion of hell would be to have all the films in the world but no projector. My own hell would be to have a projector and all the films but no one around to see them with……

  • ‘A Mental and Emotional Red Sea’: The Ten Commandments (1923)

    Tonight we’ll be screening an original IB Technicolor 35mm print of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at the Portage. This 1956 epic is unequalled in its elemental power—its confusing mix of knotty, alien carnality and religious fervor has rightly frightened generations of children. (It’s also sufficiently iconic and hip enough to earn a nod……

  • You Ain’t Done Nothing If You Ain’t Been Called a Red

    When Reds was released in late 1981, its admirers tended to downplay its political dimension. It was a sweeping romance that happened to be about Communists—a perhaps necessary bluff (or a revealing delusion) after American politics had taken a sharp swing towards the right. “It is that personal, human John Reed that Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’……

  • Is a Film More than the Sum of Its Reels?

    Sometimes even I wish that the digital conversion would just hurry itself up, if only so that we could forever forsake the journalistic convention of punning on matters of real and reel. You know, or could make up, the headlines: Professor examines reel history, Local woman finds reel love, Reel inflation fears send real a-reeling.……

  • Closed City: Give Us This Day

    What do they call this place we are going to? Paradise. No, I mean, other people. Oh, they call it Brooklyn. What to do with a picture like Give Us This Day? For one thing, it stands up very well as a domestic drama, a successor in certain ways to King Vidor’s The Crowd. It’s……

  • Programming: How to Do Things with Films

    Those of us who put in full-time hours (and often more) in the repertory cinema game are sometimes apt to lose sight of just how limited our ‘specialty aud’ looks these days. Old movies, once a staple of theater bills, are now relegated to a handful of screens. When was the last time a studio……

  • “…but I can’t be Sherlock Holmes”

    Spend the night with Sherlock Holmes Hold me tight like Sherlock Holmes Just pretend I’m Sherlock Holmes … I can dance like Sherlock Holmes I can sing like Sherlock Holmes But I can’t be Sherlock Holmes. It’s no fresh insight to declare the 1960s the most schizophrenic and unsatisfying decade in Hollywood history. It’s certainly……

  • Forty Years of Film Preservation: A Conversation with David Shepard

    This week we’ll be screening So’s Your Old Man, one of the finest examples of the elegant craft that characterizes Paramount Pictures’ silent output. Along with Universal Studios, they’re celebrating their one-hundredth anniversary this year. These days that means reissuing library chestnuts on spiffy new Blu-ray editions, but this level of attention to corporate heritage……

  • 2011 in Review, Part II: Challenges

    Earlier this month we offered a review of the seismic shifts in exhibition that characterized the last year. This week we offer a personal assessment of the films themselves. Moviegoing is most exasperating at the end of the year. The anointed awards contenders trickle out and carry with them a sense of obligation. I wind……

  • The Living Newspaper: …one third of a nation… from Stage to Screen

    In 1939, sociologist Margaret Farrand Thorp called the movies “the vampire art” and it’s not difficult to see where she’s coming from. With Hollywood at the height of its powers (economic, cultural, political), everything bowed before the movies. They cannibalized and superseded competing media with finesse. Screen rights to big novels were snatched up before……

  • 2011 in Review, Part I: Confusions

    You might get the impression from the films we program at the Northwest Chicago Film Society that we aren’t especially interested in new cinema. Actually, though, we don’t show films from the 1930s to retreat into an uncomplicated past, to shut ourselves off from the present. If anything, we’re often interested in these films for……

  • The End of The Village Voice and the Future of Film Criticism?

    By now we’re sure you’ve heard that the Village Voice has laid off J. Hoberman, senior film critic since 1988 and a regular Voice contributor since 1977. This is a devastating decision, but not entirely an unexpected one. After all, the Voice has also blithely sacked Robert Christgau, Nat Hentoff, and a number of other……

  • Sullivan’s Travels: A Very Serious Film, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously

    Most every account of Sullivan’s Travels describes the movie as being something between autobiography and artist’s testament. It’s easy to see why: the central character, John L. Sullivan, is a comedy director whose string of uncomplicated hits has pleased the studio but left the man deeply unsatisfied. Sullivan sets out to make his first serious……

  • The Projection Booth, the Radical Seat

    Recently, David Bordwell devoted a post on his blog to a crucial but undervalued question: where do you sit in the movie theater? Speaking for myself, I can’t fathom sitting anywhere but the first five or six rows, making some allowance, of course, for the design of the space. Many first and second row seats……

  • If I Had a Million: Paramount’s 99 Percent

    Most people talk about movies on the basis of stars, directors, plots, sometimes genres. In some ways, though, the surest indicator of tone, style, and resonance, if not overall quality, is the production company. Film programmers tend to think about this rather often. More than we like to acknowledge, repertory screenings are dictated by the……

  • The Sudden Death and Life of Film

    The emulsion is on the wall, so to speak. Film is finished as a mainstream exhibition format after more than a century. Roger Ebert, a long-time video projection skeptic, proclaimed as much a little over a week ago. One can see where he’s coming from. High-end digital projectors have overtaken 35mm in the multiplexes. Kodak……

  • TV on Film: A Historical Sketch and an Ode to the Eastman 25

    There has always been an artificial divide between cinema and television. The latter, it was prophesized, would bring about the death of the former. Movies quickly embarked on out-flanking TV with innovations like widescreen, stereo imagery (3-D) and stereo sound (four-track magnetic playback), Eastmancolor, and, eventually, sex and violence that would make any network censor……