Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920-60. By Jeffrey Richards.

Abstract

I will begin this review with a confession: I am a bit of a fan of Jeffrey Richards. Like many film historians, I began by reading his Visions of Yesterday (1973). When one wanted to read solid and insightful histories of British cinema and culture, one read Jeffrey Richards. Nearly 40 years on, despite the massive development of film studies and the dozens of books on British cinema and cultural history published each year, there is still Jeffrey Richards. His latest book, Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60, represents what I expect and look forward to in his writings: a wide-ranging, informative, engagingly written, comparative media history. While many film historians and theorists continue to analyse film in relative isolation from other media, Richards argues, ‘the power of films in the imaginative lives of audiences can only be properly understood when films are located within the wider cinema culture, which comprised film magazines, cigarette cards, postcards, cheap biographies, the book of the film, the sheet music of the film and above all radio’. Richards has done sound research on the different industrial and creative relationships between film and radio in the USA and Britain. As he explains early on, while Hollywood, after some initial nervousness, forged a strong and even ‘symbiotic’ relationship with the radio networks, Britain and its media monolith the BBC were less influenced by British film culture and the demands to showcase its film stars. Richards’ history of America's interconnected radio and cinema audiences ranges widely over the vision of David Sarnoff, head of RCA and later RKO Radio Pictures, Orson Welles, John Michael Hayes, Lucille Ball, and Howard Koch. He reveals how certain popular radio dramas such as Sorry, Wrong Number with Agnes Moorehead (1943, repeated a record seven times), became popular films (with Barbara Stanwyck in the lead, 1948), and how, despite the critical consensus that women's radio programmes constructed a limited, house-bound narrative for America's women, a number of programmes featured working women who stayed in the workforce (The Story of Mary Marlin, 1937–43). But as Richards points out, there were far more male Hollywood stars than female stars with their own radio programmes during this period, and the industry was almost entirely run by men.