NRR Project: Arch Oboler’s Plays
“The Bathysphere”
Broadcast Nov. 18, 1939
30 min.
Arch Oboler was a very talented S.O.B. (Don’t look at me; his curmudgeonly reputation is attested to in John Dunning’s definitive radio encyclopedia On the Air. Read this book).
This prolific radio writer came to prominence due to his work on the network horror program Lights Out. This series was created by Wyllis Cooper, “the unsung pioneer of radio dramatic techniques,” himself an innovator in making radio compelling. That show started in April 1934. In May 1936, Cooper left the show and Oboler took over, and ran the show until July 1938.
Under his leadership, Lights Out produced such memorable chillers as "Cat Wife," "Revolt of the Worms," and "Chicken Heart." The show helpfully urged easily frightened listeners to turn off the show before it began . . . then told those who remained to “turn out your lights!” Boo!
Oboler had a new idea: wanting control over his product, he proposed writing, producing, and directing a series of half-hour radio plays himself. NBC bought it, and soon he became the head of “the first series of varied radio plays ever given to the works of one radio playwright.”
From March 1939 to March 1940, Arch Oboler’s Plays dealt with two main themes: horror and Oboler’s hatred of Hitler and Naziism, and he split his productions between these two poles. World War II had not begun when the show started, and some derided him for his anti-fascism. But Oboler could see the evil for what it was, and he denounced it steadily during his year on the air.
“The Bathysphere” is a typical Oboler offering; it contains excellent performances, spare but effective sound effects, and a nimbus of dread that hung over the proceedings. Oboler himself chants, to the chiming of a clock, “It . . . is . . . later . . . than . . . you . . . think!” Again, he encourages the timid to tune out.
It’s a two-player script. There is the Leader (George Zucco), a dictator looking for ways to aggrandize his name. With him is Eric (Hans Conreid) a marine scientist who takes the Leader down to the bottom of the sea in a bathysphere (as it sounds, a small round metal submersible which can sink to great ocean depths) to set a new world record.
The craft hits the seabed. Eric informs the Leader that radio communications have been cut, and that he has released the bathysphere from its connecting cable. He hopes to make the Leader go mad with fear. Interestingly, however, the Leader keeps his composure and defies Eric. He even demands a blunt instrument to smash the vessel’s glass in with.
Eric then reveals that, though he intended to kill the Leader and himself, he couldn’t go through with it. “What would have been the good of it? A fool and a figurehead die together. No good of it,” he says. He was bluffing. The Leader tells him he intends to have him shot when they get back to the surface.
It’s bleak and cynical, defeatist really, an odd direction for Oboler to go in, but you can see him resist taking the easy path of having the Leader come unglued on air. Oboler was trying to move through and past horror to real conversations about power, rebellion, and fate. His ambition is admirable.
One more episode of this series deserves to be remembered: the broadcast of March 9, 1940, featured an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. This horrifying and deeply moving story of a soldier made into an extreme invalid was distinctly NOT the kind of fare the network wanted. But Oboler got his way – and he got James Cagney, who does a fantastic job, to star in it.
The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Carousel of American Music.
