Saroyan on Screen - Hello Out There
Immediately after The Time of Your Life, Saroyan’s plays had some difficulty on Broadway. Love’s Old Sweet Song did not deliver the expected returns, and the following shows, The Beautiful People and Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning, did not fare much better.
In 1941, as Saroyan was about to embark on his sojourn to Hollywood, John Houseman and David O. Selznick premiered a new Saroyan play: Hello Out There. The play featured few characters, and many reviews called it Saroyan’s most realistic play. The initial stars, Harry Bratsberg and Phylis Walker, were also well-received. The Santa Barbara News-Press praised Bratsberg, then added, “but more sensational was the gifted performance of an amazing newcomer named Phylis Walker, under contract to David O. Selznick.”
An interesting note is that neither of the leads is best known by the name they appeared under. Bratsberg is better known as Harry Morgan; Walker is known as Oscar-winner Jennifer Jones. By 1949 both were far better known by their more famous monikers.
The one act play displays the interactions between Photo Finish, a young man being held in a jail cell who is accused of rape, and Ethel, a lonely young woman who is a cook at the jail. The two strike up a conversation where Photo Finish reveals his predicament while Ethel sympathizes and becomes enamored. Photo Finish appears to be falling deeply in love at first sight, though at some points it seems that it might be merely a ruse to get her to help him escape. The entire scenario barrels towards an end which appears to be clear once we have the full view of Photo Finish’s situation.
The show came to Broadway, produced by Saroyan and the Theatre Guild, in 1942. As one-half of a double bill, the play starred the leads of The Time of Your Life’s initial stars: Eddie Dowling and Julie Haydon. Slightly before the Broadway opening, a tour of three short plays appeared in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The play was popular as a show that was simple to stage and gave ample space for actors to create memorable performances.
By the late 1940s, short films were being produced not only by the major studios, but by smaller producers. One of those producers was a millionaire owner of the A&P grocery chain, Huntington Hartford. He had made a massive fortune and moved to Hollywood to break into the movie business, much like Howard Hughes. He first attempted to buy established studios. His attempts to purchase RKO and Republic were rebuffed, and so he went out on his own. He produced an Abbott & Costello film, Africa Screams, which ran over budget but ended up making some profit.
In the UK, a compilation film, Quartet, was released. It took four short films based on stories by M. Somerset Maugham, and packaged them as a single feature film. That approach was quite successful, and led to a sequel, Trio. This led to American producers considering the same thing. Hartford decided to create a series of short films based on one-act plays. Hartford put together a team starting with the director, James Whale.
Whale was one of the most influential directors of the 1920s and 30s. He helped define American Horror with his direction of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. He directed a star-studded version of Show Boat, and was a major director whose career faltered following his 1937 film The Road Back. The film was the sequel to All’s Quiet on the Western Front, and during the filming process, it came to the attention of the local representative of the Nazi Party, Georg Glyssing. He sent a letter of protest to Universal, the production studio, claiming that it presented an “untrue and distorted picture of the German people.” This led to the Nazis sending letters threatening future career difficulties for those involved, and especially Universal. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Screen Actors Guild came to the defense of the film, and of Whale himself, and the German government backed down. The initial test screenings were very successful. The tested version was Whale’s final edit of the film, but at some point, between test screenings and release, the picture was altered. First, new scenes were shot and added, and others cut entirely. All the alterations were done without Whale’s knowledge. Whale complained, and Universal’s head, Charles Rogers, tried to get out of Whale’s deal with the studio. Whale refused, which led to Rogers assigning him to a string of lower-budget pictures. His last significant film, The Man in the Iron Mask, was a success. After that, he retired from directing films in 1942, though did return to attempt to shoot a single training film for the Army.
Whale had been a stage director, and leaned into that profession after his time in Hollywood. His theatrical work wasn’t successful, but he did keep working. He had investments that allowed him to live well and travel the world.
In 1948, Hartford approached him to direct one of the episodes of his anthology film. He had already cast one of the roles, even before Whale came on board: Marjorie Steele, who happened to be his wife.
Steele had appeared in a single film prior, Tough Assignment, though had studied acting at The Actors’ Lab. To make ends meet, she worked as a cigarette girl at a Hollywood club, Ciro’s, and there caught the eye of Huntington Hartford. He courted her, and they were married in 1949, when she was 19. He cast her in two of the three short films that would make up the anthology picture Huntington was producing, including the lead in Hello Out There.
It’s not certain when the casting took place, but the choice to play Photo Finish actually had a deep connection to the initial production of the play in Pasadena. The character was portrayed by Harry Bratsberg, already going by Harry Morgan at that point. Morgan’s association with Saroyan’s work started with that production of Hello Out There, and he had been Saroyan’s first choice for the lead in The Good Job, though he ended up being unavailable. He had worked with The Group Theater in New York, but had come to Hollywood and immediately found work in films like The Ox-Bow Incident and Orchestra Wives. He was a likable figure and highly respected as an excellent actor, though he seldom got the chance to play the lead on film. He did host a radio program, Mystery on the Air, which starred Peter Lorre. He was a working actor, and absolutely knew the material here and how to approach it.
This does bring up a question: what involvement did Saroyan have with the production?
Digging through the Saroyan papers at Stanford, there are letters between Huntington Hartford and William Saroyan, though only after the production had wrapped. There are none between Morgan or Steele and Saroyan.
It’s clear that they approached the material in much the same way that Saroyan wrote it. Long stretches of the piece mirror the stage version exactly. The performances read much like those noted in the reviews of the Dowling-Hayden Broadway version. It would seem very much like the source material, especially the dialogue, was highly respected and allowed to remain present in the picture.
The short was created in early 1949 and shot at the studios of Los Angeles’ oldest TV studio: KTLA. It was a single set, a jail cell and the area in front of it. That is a difficult constraint for a film, as various locations help keep the audience from feeling confined. The solution to this is dynamic shooting, which is something James Whale insisted on in Frankenstein (working with cinematographer Arthur Edeson) and that his cinematographer on Hello Out There, Karl Struss, had incredible talent at providing.
Struss had been shooting films since 1920, and had been an art photographer prior to that. His work on the film Sunrise, directed by F.W. Murnau, was known for its cinematography and German Expressionist style. That style lends depth and texture through the high contrast of the filming, and it certainly is what’s on display here. The shadows that Photo Finish and Ethel are surrounded by are deep, and serve to isolate them. The look of the short is wonderful, and it makes good use of the bars as a defining element which both characters interact with. The collaborative form of film production means that it is not only the cinematographer and his team who must understand the look of the film, but the entire team. The set designer must understand the desired lighting so as not to obscure important detail. Here, the bars of the jail cell are not a simple square, but a complex shape, somewhat pinched at one end, with the top leaning forward, creating those longer shadows. The costumers must understand what will be highlighted and masked. The costumes are incredibly simple here. The director must guide the actors through the emotional states that will work with the script. James Whale knew how to put his stamp on everything he would direct, and here it is clear that he got it, that he gave the film a dynamic that calls to mind his work on Frankenstein and the doctor’s lab.
The actors must come to the idea that they are inhabiting a world where this is how it looks. That might be the most difficult part of things for expressionistic pieces like Hello Out There. The lighting is, often, unnatural, and that can mean that performances must eschew the traditional emotional reactions to setting, and character. Here, we see Morgan’s Photo Finish almost duplicate the lighting palette with his performance. He is emotionally high-contrast; his anger is heavy and dark, the passion and caring light and illuminating. Some have seen this as a weakness in Morgan’s performance, though I think audiences of the time would have latched on to the idea that this is a complicated character and the performance would actually have landed much harder, and with less questioning, with the audiences of the late 1940s.
Steele’s performance is interesting. Many modern critics and viewers indicate that she feels like an amateur, especially in contrast to Morgan’s highly disciplined, if at times bombastic, performance. I could not disagree more on that matter. Emily (in the original play called ‘Ethel’) is supposed to be inexperienced, naïve, timid at points. She is at least somewhat easily led by Photo Finish, and here, that plays out in Steele’s performance. The commentary on current versions of the film available on YouTube and other platforms take on Steele’s performance as weak, but I believe they are approaching it with the idea that late 20th century acting as the basis for those comments. What is interesting in that regard is that both Morgan and Steele were trained in techniques that actually take similar approaches based on their training. The Group Theatre was one of the birthing grounds for Method acting, while Steele had studied under the Actors’ Lab, which also worked within early ideas of The Method, but with a more political edge, foreshadowing the philosophical approach of mediation of performance through analytical power dynamic expression and reaction. She seems to put this into play throughout, as the dynamic between an incarcerated man and a free woman is explored simply and cleanly.
The film was never officially released. Huntington Hartford’s two other films for the intended feature, The Secret Sharer and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, were eventually paired and released as Face to Face in 1952. It’s not certain why Hartford did not include Hello Out There in the film, as originally intended, but some point to the dark atmosphere and more artsy style of the film not being a strong fit with the other two, more naturalistic films.
It’s not clear how the film came to public awareness, though by the 1960s, Hartford was showing it himself, sometimes at the museum he had built at 2 Columbus Circle in New York: The Gallery of Modern Art. It was in some circulation among collectors by the 1980s and 90s, but it wasn’t until 2024 that it became generally available via YouTube.
Huntington Hartford would go on to fund arts and building projects for the rest of his life. He and Steele divorced in the early 1960s. He continued philanthropy, and some say a one-sided feud with Howard Hughes, throughout the 1960s and 70s. Hartford passed away in 2008.
Harry Morgan would continue acting and in the 1960s take a recurring role on Dragnet, the radio program. He so impressed the crew, especially creator and lead actor Jack Webb, that he was cast in several other of Webb's projects, and then brought on permanently to play Bill Gannon, partner to the legendary cop, Sgt. Joe Friday. He would reprise the role in the 1987 comedy film Dragnet, with Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks. He would go on to greater fame playing Col. Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H, another series where he played a one-off guest star only to be brought on later as a main character.
Morgan continued acting through the 1990s, and passed away in 2011 at the age of 96.
James Whale, one of the most influential filmmakers of the early sound era, never worked in film again after Hello Out There, though he did produce and direct at least one touring play, Pagan in the Parlor. Personal and professional setbacks mounted, and in 1957, Whale drowned himself in his pool in Pacific Palisades, California.
Hello Out There has had a long history of productions since the 1949 filmed version, including some very important productions. In 1951, famed director Preston Sturges directed a version in Los Angeles that received rave reviews. Al Pacino’s first starring stage role was in Hello Out There in 1963. In 1960, composer Jack Beeson created an operatic version of the play, using almost the entire original script Saroyan had written. The opera was released as an LP and was revived on-stage in the 1980s and early 2000s. Versions in various languages have been produced, both for stage and screen, and it is still a piece often used for theatre directing capstone projects at universities. There are a dozen versions available on YouTube, ranging from a 1980 videotaped version to a Philadelphia stage version from 2024.
Perhaps the most interesting adaptation was a Latvian rock opera, Ei, Jus Tur. It was created in 1971 by Imants Kalnins. It was not produced in a theatre for six years, until the Liepaja Theatre produced it with the Latvian rock back Līvi. A version was filmed in 1986 and is available on YouTube today.
Hello Out There remains one of Saroyan’s most adapted works, alongside The Time of Your Life and My Heart’s in the Highlands for his plays, and arguably his most adapted work within its realm is a song, co-written with his cousin, Ross Bagdasarian. In the early 1950s, Saroyan began shopping around a treatment for a film based on the song, and in our next episode, we’ll be looking at what could have been the film Come Ona My House.
