From Tight Spot (dir. Phil Karlson, 1955), spoken by prison inmate Sherry Conley (Ginger Rogers):
“Television should be so good that when you close your eyes it sounds like a radio.”Tight Spot is available from the Criterion Channel.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
TV as radio
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comments: 9
But . . . this cannot be true, or even useful. Television is the combination of visual and audio. Sometimes the sound carries the story, sometimes the pictures. You could as easily say "Radio should be so good that when you close your ears it reads like a newspaper." I believe it's possible to be empathetic through print, and through sound, but I really think the combination of pictures (seeing faces and emotion) and sound on television has changed the way we process and understand news and world events.
I don’t think it’s meant as more than a funny line, from a movie that takes several swipes at television. (The TV in the hotel room where most of the movie takes place is a true idiot box.) It made me think of the old joke: with radio, the pictures are better.
So that's where all the good movies are--the Criterion Channel.
How have I missed it all these years? I know you've mentioned it before...
I guess I just wasn't motivated to pay for movies instead of going to theaters.
Now I am.
Just signed up for the free 14-day trial.
--Fresca
I will come to your defense: it started only last year, sometime after TCM shut down Filmstruck. If you have a library that’s bought in, Kanopy is really good too (free for the user, but expensive for libraries — my library gets Kanopy films streamed only by request). If you have the appropriate device (e.g., Roku), you can watch both on the big screen.
I'm reminded of how the first or second wave of television scholarship contended that TV was more about sound than picture. I first encountered this argument as an undergraduate in an article by Tania Modleski and it blew my mind. Her basic contention, as I remember it, was that a lot of golden age TV viewers, during the daytime at least, were housewives watching soap operas while they did housework. (The 1983 movie Mr. Mom mines this fact for laughs.) Thus, they weren't so much watching TV as they were listening to it while they cleaned up, made food, etc. Tight Spot seems to anticipate this argument, but then, artists are often ahead of academics.
Thanks for that, Matt. It’s certainly news to me, but it helps to explain why so many of us end up “watching” TV with phone in hand.
My guess was that the line in Tight Spot probably had something to do with the damage television was doing to film attendance, but I don’t know if that was (still) a timely issue in 1955. It’s funny too that even someone just out of prison should be ready to find fault with television.
This won't fit in with the smart comments above, but if anyone's interested, here's one of my favorite TV on the Radio tunes, called "Dancing Choose." As Michael says by way of Sonny Rollins, it might help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBhQ22CfJJ0
That’s a pretty lively number. I had no idea there was a group with this name, though I do know (from way back) that video killed the radio star.
The song comes from one of their recent records, called Dear Science. I should have mentioned that very apt title.
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