War of the Worlds 1/6 (Válka světů, 1950)

Přidal: Premek |

Září 21, 2018

Herbert George Wells. Dramatizace románu. Produkce David H. Godfrey.

Osoby a obsazení: Nicholson (Anthony Hawtrey), Ogilvy (Peter Coke), Stent (Deryck Guyler), Holroyd (Stanley Groome), Dora Nicholson (Dorothy Green), první chlapec (Ursula Hirst), druhý chlapec (Brian Weske), poručík (Manning Wilson), plukovník (Laidman Browne), desátník (Lewis Stringer), starý gentleman (J. Hubert Leslie), Parson (Raf De La Torre), první mluvčí (Hamilton Dyce), druhý mluvčí (Howieson Culff), muž (Ronald Sidney), dívka (Joan Hart). Dále účinkují David Kossoff, Alan Reid, Basil Jones, Joan Matheson, Margaret Vines a Hugh Manning.

Natočeno 1950. Premiéra 30. 5. 1950 (BBC, 21:00 – 22:00 h) – 4. 7. 1950 (BBC, 21:30 – 22:00 h), nedochováno.

Obsah: 1. The Red Planet. Premiéra 30. 5. 1950 (BBC, 21:00 – 22:00 h) – 2. The Heat Ray. Premiéra 6. 6. 1950 (BBC, 22:15 – 22:45 h). – 3. The Fighting Machines. Premiéra 13. 6. 1950 (BBC, 21:30 – 22:00 h.) – 4. The Black Smoke. Premiéra 20. 6. 1950 (BBC, 21:30 – 22:00 h) – 5. The Red Weed. Premiéra 27. 6. 1950 (BBC, 21:30 – 22:00 h) – 6. The Bacillus. Premiéra 4. 7. 1950 (BBC, 21:30 – 22:00 h).

Lit.: anonym: War of the Worlds radio broadcast (BBC, 1950 and 1967). In web War of the Worlds, b.d. (článek). – Cit.: The War of the Worlds was first adapted by the BBC in 1950. Tragically, like so much of their early output, the 6 part series appears to have been lost to posterity, but we can find some detail in the BBC listings magazine of the time. The Radio Times lists 6 episodes, the first of which, The Red Planet, was broadcast at 9.30 pm on Tuesday, May 30th 1950. The writer was Jon Manchip White, who has been kind enough to help me fill in some of the blanks on this production and the subsequent 1967 version.

White is by now the author of nearly thirty books of fiction, history, travel, and biography, but in 1950 had just joined the BBC Drama Script Unit as an editor. He had very definite ideas about the production as he made clear in a feature he wrote at the time for the BBC Radio Times magazine. „Out of respect for the Martian Fighting-Machines – a bit obsolescent by the standards of jet-planes and anti-tank guns – the dramatised version of The War of the Worlds has not been brought up to date.“

In personal correspondence with me, Mr White further comments „I had kept the Victorian setting and as much of Wells‘ wonderful atmosphere and dialogue as I could. As for the music, it was not radiophonic, but I selected it myself – as I took care to do in all my radio and TV plays. So I opened with Mars, The Bringer Of War, from Holst’s great suite The Planets, which provided a suitably rousing, indeed frightening, introduction.“

In the first episode, Anthony Hawtrey, the son of the great Charles Hawtrey, starred as the hero Nicholson, Peter Coke (famous for his portrayal of the detective Paul Temple) was Ogilvy and Derek Guyler played Stent.

The episodes titles and broadcast times are as follows. (Click on the links to see the original BBC Radio Times entry for each). (….)