Hello Out There (Huntington Hartford Productions, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The final film in our re-evaluation of the James Whale canon was the only filmmaking work he did in the last 15 years of his life: Hello Out There, produced under really quirky auspices and a film shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Before reading the latest edition of James Curtis’s biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, I had been under the impression that it was made for the KTLA Channel 5 L.A.-based TV station, shot in their studios and totally lost and unknown. It was actually produced by Huntington Hartford, an independently wealthy man who basically ran through his entire fortune subsidizing various art projects. He dabbled in commercial filmmaking – probably his most famous film, and certainly the easiest one to obtain since it fell into the public domain relatively quickly, is the 1948 Abbott and Costello film Africa Screams – and he bankrolled this film intending it to be released as part of a feature. In 1948 a British studio had released a compilation film called Quartet, based on four stories by W. Somerset Maugham, and it was such a big hit worldwide that they followed it up with Trio, and other studios started greenlighting features that were essentially compilations of shorts based on short stories, sometimes by the same author and sometimes with some sort of thematic connection.

Hello Out There began as a short play by William Saroyan, who judging from our recent viewing of James Cagney’s (as star and producer) film of Saroyan’s The Times of Their Lives, spent his whole life trying to be Eugene O’Neill and not quite making it. Hello Out There takes place in the rural small town of Matador, Texas, where a man identified in the imdb.com cast list only as “The Young Gambler” (Henry Morgan) has been incarcerated in a prison cell whose bars are installed at such offbeat angles to each other it looks like he’s being held in The Jail of Dr. Caligari. We eventually learn that he’s in jail for assaulting a woman – his defense is that she came up to him in a bar, started walking with him, offered to take him up to her place but then demanded money for doing so, and when he found she was a prostitute he angrily rejected her – and he was arrested when her husband sneaked up behind him with a lead pipe and knocked him out. Now he’s been taken to a jail in another town but the husband has not only followed him there, he’s organized a lynch mob and intends to kill him without any of those bothersome ideas like due process and a fair trial.

He calls out, “Hello out there?,” and he’s answered by Ethel Smith (Marjorie Steele, then Mrs. Huntington Hartford) – the imdb.com page lists her character’s name as “Emily” but “Ethel” is what is clearly heard on the soundtrack, though she’s clearly not the Hit Parade organist of that name. She’s just turned 17 (making her “of age” under Texas law) and she’s instantly attracted to the prisoner. He pleads with her to help him escape before the lynch mob comes to get him, and she tries but is unable to – it’s after hours, all the doors at the jail are locked, and she goes home to grab her father’s gun but can’t find it. The pair are clearly two lost souls – she works for the jail as a cook and gets 50¢ a meal, and got the job because her father runs the place – they talk a lot about running off together and settling in San Francisco (a place she’s romanticized even though she’s never been there) – who instantly fall in love and are obviously meant for each other, but of course their romance is not to be. The husband (Ray Teal) arrives with his wife (Lee Patrick from The Maltese Falcon) and leaves the lynch mob outside the jail so he can dispatch the hapless prisoner who first tried to pick up his wife and then insulted him further by calling her a whore. He shoots the prisoner just as Ethel arrives back at the jail after her unsuccessful attempt to get him her dad’s gun.

Hello Out There is a film that works stunningly despite some big flaws – notably Saroyan’s sometimes convincing but sometimes overwrought dialogue, a one-note performance by Henry Morgan (fans of his Col. Potter on the M*A*S*H TV show are going to be startled not only by how much younger he looks here but how relentlessly he overacts) and Marjorie Steele’s virtual incompetence (she makes Marion Davies look like Katharine Hepburn by comparison) – mainly because of Whale’s staging. In addition to directing, he designed that amazing set and did the lighting himself, and despite the limitations of the cast he had to work with (let’s face it, the actors at the time who would have been “right” for the male lead, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, would both have been way beyond Huntington Hartford’s budget) Hello Out There emerges as quite effective theatre and yet another intriguing indication of a Road Not Taken in Whale’s career.

According to Curtis, Whale had husbanded his money well enough he didn’t have to work again – though he would occasionally direct a play either in the U.S. or on one of his periodic trips to Britain – and he also had his mid-life crisis in his 60’s instead of his 40’s, breaking up with his long-time partner David Lewis (whose career had, ironically, been destroyed by a debacle of a flop, Arch of Triumph, based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque – the same author whose The Road Back had been equally disastrous for Whale’s own career – and whose final break with Whale came about because he was so busy rehabilitating his own career he turned down Whale’s desire for the two to go on vacation together), picking up a boy-toy named Pierre Foegel in France, bringing him back to the U.S. and then when that relationship went sour installing a swimming pool in his backyard, using it as a lure to invite attractive young men but apparently, like Andy Warhol in his “Factory” days, getting off (in both senses) more from watching them cruise each other than going after them himself. He eventually drowned in that swimming pool – it was ruled an accident but it was really suicide, though that wasn’t known until the note he wrote to David Lewis was revealed after Lewis’s own death in 1985 – and, with typical bad Whale timing, he offed himself just six months before Universal released their old horror films to TV on a package called Shock Theatre and film buffs once again began talking about James Whale.