In both the book and radio adaptation, D’Arcy is a famous columnist visited by his old parish priest. The priest received a threatening visit from someone seeking two Bibles marked “E.B.” and referenced “the walls of Jericho.” The priest had no idea what the visitor was referring to but when he reported the visit to his bishop was met with skepticism and told not to involve the police. D’Arcy agreed to help the priest but shortly after when he went to meet him at his home found the priest murdered.
From there, the two stories diverge. To streamline the novel into a half-hour a number of characters were dropped. In the book, D’Arcy is menaced by a criminal mastermind disguised as a priest, his henchman, a femme fatale, a man posing as the fatale’s father, and that man’s lawyer. The first two were eliminated entirely from the radio play.
The book is very breezy - you could read it in one sitting, it’s a very light-hearted and skillfully written mystery novel. Of course, it’s difficult to keep from thinking of the definitive crime-mystery novel, the Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. As in that novel, everyone is seeking a mysterious object of great value that’s been all but forgotten by history. An attractive woman with a fabricated story is after it, but her partner wants it for himself; there’s a mastermind after it with a murderous thug doing his bidding; at one point one of the criminals tries to search the hero’s office but is easily overpowered and treated as a joke by the hero; the hero is motivated to find the identity of his friend’s killer. And so on.
There are a few half-hour versions of the Maltese Falcon that successfully featured all of the most relevant characters and scenes, but such is not the case with the Suspense adaptation of The Walls Came Tumbling Down. Many important scenes and characters were eliminated or merged with others. D’Arcy is made to reach his conclusions with such speed in the radio version (deciding he needs to find the burial place of Joshua Nunn, declaring the walls will be found in Greenwich Village) that he seems to making huge leaps in logic, when in reality he’s making huge leaps in deduction, skipping over the moments where D’Arcy pieced the clues together in the book.
A lot of what William Spier cut was right to be cut, such as all the scenes in the book involving a bookseller (D’Arcy has no idea what makes the Bibles worth killing for initially and so goes down the wrong track when a bookseller friend suggests these might be rare Bibles stolen from the British Museum). In the radio version, D’Arcy learns the purpose of the Bibles fairly early on. In the novel, the clues lead to a valuable mural which everyone expects to find painted on a wall; it turns out to be on the ceiling, in a neat twist. But in the radio version the mural is on a wall and the climax is entirely different.
The novel was also adapted into a 1946 motion picture, but the film took even more liberties with the source material, changing D’Arcy to “Archer” and changing the mural to a lost Da Vinci painting, among many other changes. My instincts that Eisinger was a great fan of Hammett seem spot-on as his other writing credits include “The Kandy Tooth,” a radio sequel to the Maltese Falcon written for the Adventures of Sam Spade and also heard on Suspense. He was also producer-director of the 1947 radio series the Cases of Mr. Ace, which has an episode that is ridiculously similar to the Maltese Falcon, almost to the point of parody; I’ll have to do a radio recap on that series.
I recommend the book as a good piece of fun, but I think the Suspense adaptation is inferior, despite the flourish of Wynn’s performance and the always-strong production values expected from William Spier.
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