NRR Project: 'The Fall of the City' (1938)

 

NRR Project: ‘The Fall of the City’

Written by Archibald MacLeish

Directed by Irving Reis

Performed on the Columbia Workshop, CBS Radio

Premiered April 11, 1937

30 min.

Commercial radio, at its conception, was thought of as mere entertainment (although much “elevating” classical music was featured on the airways in early years). Comedies, soap operas, detective shows, horror – genre shows were the norm, and network ambitions did not stretch beyond their confines.

However, there were a few people in radio who could see its potentiality as an aesthetic medium – one the virtues of which could be exploited in a new and unique way, to enlist the listener in the creation of imaginary landscapes and situations that could only be conjured by sound alone.

Such a man was Irving Reis, a former engineer who came to CBS with the idea for a 30-minute sustaining (meaning network-sustained, commercial-free) program that experimented with radio’s possibilities, both technically and dramatically. In July 1936, the Columbia Workshop was born.

CBS was always the more adventurous network. NBC had been established earlier, was more popular, and had gathered all the stars of radio into its schedules. (Such was its dominance that there were two NBC networks, NBC Red and NBC Blue – Blue was sold off and became ABC in 1942.) So CBS had to try harder, to attempt risky material and push the boundaries of the medium. Anyone who listens extensively to old-time American radio will find that CBS productions were sharper, from the writing all the way down to the sound effects.

Columbia Workshop brought the medium to the threshold of artistic significance with this production, mounted live on April 11, 1937. The drama, the first in verse on the radio, was crafted by the Pulitzer-winning poet and dramatist Archibald MacLeish.

“The Fall of the City” was inspired by the rapid takeover of weaker territories by fascist governments in the 1930s, most notably by Italy and Germany. MacLeish was also thinking of the overthrow of the city of Tenochtitlan by Hernan Cortes in 1521. It’s the story of a great city that capitulates to fear, abasing itself eagerly before a conqueror who is not as he seems. (The parallels with today’s American dilemma are not lost on this writer.)

The show was special – the production called for the sound of great crowds, mingling with a score by the great Bernard Herrmann. To stage it, CBS took over the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City, needing the reverberations its cavernous space could provide. A young Orson Welles, then rocketing to fame, took the part of the Narrator, working out of an isolation booth; a then-unknown Burgess Meredith held a key role as well. Two hundred extras, augmented by four taped crowd noises played at the same time, gave the impression of a huge, milling crowd in a sunbaked central city square.

The show almost didn’t come off. Tennis players wanted to use the space the day of the broadcast; so did the National Guard. Somehow the producers dissuaded these interlopers, and the show went off.

It’s a remarkable creation, very assured for all its being the first of its kind. The tension mounts as the Narrator describes the growing panic of the city as the conqueror approaches. A woman rises from the dead and declares “The city of masterless men/Will take a master./There will be shouting then:/Blood after!” Speakers rise up and decry the surrender of the citizens to fear, to no avail. The conqueror enters, clad in armor; the crowd falls to the ground. The conqueror raises his visor; there is nothing inside. “The people invent their oppressors,/Thet wish to believe in them./They wish to be free of their freedom/Released from their liberty/The long labor of liberty ended.”

The show was an amazing success, and proved that listeners had a hunger for more than mere entertainment. Orson Welles took note of this success, and it moved him and others to create The Mercury Theater on the Air a year later. Another young and ambitious radio writer, Norman Corwin, would take heart as well, and would soon be known as the resident bard of dramatic radio.

With the death of commercial radio in the late 1950s, the idea of producing content strictly for radio went by the by. (It continued in England, where radio drama and aesthetic innovation thrives to this day.) Still, “The Fall of the City” showed everyone what only radio could do – create, with the help of the listeners’ imaginations, fantastic and compelling new worlds.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Nest time: the crash of the Hindenburg.