Australian TV Plays: Wicked is the Vine (30 March 1949)

The first Australian play shot for American television?

It was a 1947 radio play. Elliot then adapted it for US TV when he moved there in 1948.

Plot

Two sisters hate each other. It results in two murders and one attempted murder.

Synopsis from here. A story of two sisters, Sarah Vinson and gentle Ellie, who grow up on a farm together. When Mrs. Vinson dies, Sarah takes over the management of the house, and engages as handyman a village boy, Joe, who is considered a little simple. Joe and Ellie become friends, for Ellie is touched by the boy’s innocent pleasure in animals, birds, amd all living things.

When Ellie is 25 she and Howard Barlow fall in love, and decide to marry, but Sarah is furious that her younger sister should be marrying before her. Some time later Mr. Vinson decides to sell the house, despite Sarah’s opposition.

Enraged by her father's refusal to do as she wamts, Sarah kills him. She plans to pin the blame on Joe, and tries to force Ellie to support her story. When Ellie refuses, Sarah threatens to say that it was Ellie who committed the murder. The police arrive and Sarah sticks to her scheme . . . Ellie wavers and Sarah calls to Howard.

Now the gentle sister realises that Sarah means to tell Howard that the girl he is engaged to is a murderess.

Joe murders Sarah.

Ellis is reunited with Howard.

Radio show

The play starred Neva Carr Glynn and Brenda Dunrich, who had just returned to Australia from England. It was based on the Lizzie Borden case.

Lux normally did adaptations of movies but this was an original commissioned by Harry Dearth. I think it was specifically written with Neva Carr Glynn in mind see here.

Elliott's biographer Sharon Clarke suggested Elliott may have been influenced by the fact his two aunts were warring sisters. See here.

It aired in August 1947.

One listener wrote in complaining saying the show was "well acted and well produced, we grant, but what a thing to inflict on people trying to escape for one brief hour from the real life tragedies of these troubled times. Open any newspaper any day and you can get your callous murders and your shootings and your wicked people without having to go to the radio plays for it. Wicked Is the Vine gave us two murders and one attempted murder, complete with the horrible sounds of blows on a human head, shots, screams, gaspings for breath, and groans... Truly wicked is the man who chose Wicked Is the Vine."

A nasty review from Smith's Weekly is here which says Elliot writes like "a backward Bronte sister... As the stark affair wore on, however, you began to have the uncanny notion that you’d met all the folk in this play before. And then you realised that of course you had! You’d heard them, . every one of them, babbling the same parrot- cries of passion and . moaning the same old dreary words of love to each other, not once, but a hundred times. In fact, you’d been meeting these tiresome puppets several times a week over the past ten years in the serials of Mr. George Edwards. Yes, indeed, “Wicked Is the Vine” was nothing more or less than a dropsical soap opera, enormously distended by Master L-E, and rendered gruesomely true to type by the hysterical whinneying of Miss Elly, arid the grating threats of her sister, Miss Sarah,, (Misses Dunrich and Carr-Glynn respectively.) There was also a village doctor, a village idiot, and a big strong lover, out of whom the malevolent Sarah scared the living daylights."

Another bad review is here from the Adovcate which called the play "painful" and said "the characters were completely improbable, the working out of the plot was improbable, and the bow of pink ribbon with which the play was finally tied up put it in the class of “My True Romance.” The author is capable of really outstanding work, but he should stick to subjects that he knows."

It won best one hour play of the year 1948 for the Australian Federation of Commercial Broadcasting Stations. This was awarded in Feb 1949.

Elliot wrote a stage version.

It was re-recorded in 1952. This was the first General Motors Hour play produced in Adelaide. The Daily Telegraph said "This particular melodrama did little except provide Miss Neva Carr-Glyn with a heaven-sent opportunity of I doing a great deal of screeching... and for the others to go , g through the usual gamut of I groans, grunts, and wheezes, which, in many radio folk, pass for passionate acting. For the average listener this sort of emotionalism is at once too loud, too loose, and too long. Or to sum up in Mr. L. E.’s own mystic style — Wicked is the Vine . . . Mighty is the Gab . . . Tender is the Ear drum."

My thoughts on the radio play I've read a copy of the play at Sumner Locke Elliott's papers via the University of Boston. It begins with Ellie in a psychiatric hospital, being interrogated by a kindly doctor, Frobisher, at the behest of Inspector March. They inject her with a drug, narcosynthesis, and the action flashbacks to Ellie's childhood, then growing up.

TV Version

In October 1948 it was announced Elliot sold the script to Kraft Theatre. (It was reported in Variety in November see here.)

The cast included Ron Randell (Howard), Joan Stanley (Ellie), Margery Maude, John Hamilton, Michael Everett (Joe), Janet Fox, Ann Donaldson and Margaret Phillips (Sarah). Stanley Quinn directed.

According to this listing in the Stanley Quinn Papers, Howard Lindsay and Ed Rice "adapted". Not sure what that means.

The play was well received enough for the same show to buy another Elliott play, The Crater. See here. His biographer points out that the play was a turning point in Elliott's US career see here.

Aired 30 March 1949 in Pennsylvania, New York etc see here. It aired in LA on 27 April 1949 see here.

Elliott later said he was not enthusiastic how the play turned out but found it a useful learning experience see here.

Theatre Version

It was a stage play performed in England in 1953 see here.

Elliot said this in 1950

“Radio as we know it to-day is doomed,” he said in an interview during the week. He added that from the writer’s viewpoint television is incomparably more interesting. “It’s a combination of movies and the theatre . . . with additional problems of its own,” he said. “You have to be far more ingenious and careful in writing for television. There must be adequate time for changes of cos- tume and scenery, without resorting to padding. A writer experienced in the theatre finds television easier than one who has done all his work for radio. “Actually, it is a return to the days of the one-act play. Shows written especially for television are invariably more successful than adaptations of novels or long plays. “Costume dramas are least successful. A television screen can contain only about two people at a time, and that doesn’t exactly make for opulence.”

LOCKE-ELLIOTT was not very enthusiastic about the way “Wicked Is The Vine” turned out, but it was valuable experience. “The only catch,” he said, “is that no one has been able to decide exactly what are the rules of television. You are experimenting all the time. Sometimes you make a mistake, and the result is a mess; but when you are successful you feel you have really achieved some-thing.”

Elliot talks about diff between US and Oz radio here. And here