REANIMATING PEYTON FARQUHAR: THE ADAPTATIONS OF
AMBROSE BIERCE'S "AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE"
IN AMERICAN RADIO & TELEVISION
IN
THE "GOLDEN
AGE" of American radio (early 1930s
to the late 1950s), the dramatic output was extraordinarily prolific,
not least because the anti-recording policies of the time
required that all broadcasts be live. Horror and suspense
were particularly popular genres; as Martin Grams Jr. notes,
by the late 1940s, “U. S. radio . . . fired at least 80
programs of horror and bloodcurdling adventure at its listeners
every week.” [1] While some notable
original works were produced for this new medium (such as Lucille
Fletcher’s “Sorry,
Wrong Number” for Suspense in 1943), the sheer
number of horror and suspense shows requiring material meant
that the adaptation
of literary fiction was an extremely important option available
to the radio dramatist. Although some examples of horror adaptation
were clichéd and expedient, some – perhaps most
famously the Mercury Theater on the Air’s “Dracula” (July
1938) and “War of the Worlds” (October 1938) – remain
landmarks of cross-media transformation. In the many examples
of horror literature selected for adaptation, some source texts
lent themselves extremely well to radio dramatization; as Jim
Harmon remarks, Edgar Allan Poe would not have known it, but
in “The
Tell-Tale Heart” he had written “a beautiful radio
script.” [2] It might be argued
that Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge” (1890) is
a tale that warrants equal status. Jack Sullivan celebrates “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” for the following reasons: “Experiments
in language and temporal relativity are brilliantly handled in
this story.” [3] These qualities,
together with its concision, focus, and
manipulation of suspense, combine to make the story excellent
material for radio drama. However, as we shall see in the course
of this essay, as much as the story is a superb basis for radio
drama, it is just that: a basis. Adapters may have had
a gift in working on “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,"
but they were nonetheless obliged to expand the story or embellish
it with additional material and extra characters when it came
to transforming the work into dramatic media.
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” first appeared in golden
age radio on The Witch’s Tale in an adaptation
by Alonzo Deen Cole entitled “The Deserter” (January
23, 1933; revived May 30, 1935). No recording of this adaptation
exists,
but fortunately several versions of the superb dramatization
by the major radio writer-producer William N. Robson do. Robson’s
adaptation – loyally entitled "An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge” – premiered on Escape (December
10, 1947, starring Harry Bartell) and was revived three times
on
Suspense (December 9, 1956, starring Victor Jory; December
15, 1957, starring Joseph Cotton; and July 19, 1959, starring
Vincent
Price). Although all three performances ostensibly used the same
script, close scrutiny reveals a number of differences between
the scripted text and each performance, a result of live
broadcasts and the individual stamp given to the central role
by actors as diverse but equally accomplished as Joseph
Cotton and Vincent Price. Regardless of the peculiar nuances
and differences between the various performances, the impact
of Bierce’s tale is undiminished. Indeed, the bleak, ironic
twist of Bierce’s most famous short story creates a paradigm
in radio horror which is repeated, copied, or honored in countless
other examples of the genre. The statement in the preamble to
the Escape broadcast that “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge” is
"one of the great short stories in American literature” becomes,
by the time it is revived and revised for Suspense,
an assertion to the listener that the story is a “true
classic," the great exception in a literary world of short
fiction in which “few
are memorable, fewer still are classics."
For
one of the “true classics” of fiction, “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is remarkable for its
economy: Bierce’s short story is characterized by its
concision (it is considerably less than 4000 words in length)
and a quality
of honed yet vivid description that is almost imagistic. Like
an Imagist poet, Bierce believes in the efficacy of the “hard,
clear image,” [4] yet can startlingly
shift gear into a descriptive mode which could even be described
as
impressionistic; for example, “Objects were represented
by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color.” [5] The
economy of the story is not simply with regard to description;
it is a simple tale with minimal exposition,
its three short sections painting three detailed scenes or
three dramatic episodes. The grotesque finale of the story
is like
a “punch line” to bitter Bierce’s hideous
joke. The story reveals, as Cathy N. Davidson writes, “the
fatal presumption that war can have a happy ending.” [6] The
tale ingenuously exploits the reader’s
naiveté in
hoping for one. In hindsight, all the clues to the ending are
there: the ages it takes Farquhar to awaken after falling into
the water and his other deliriums; his impossibly microscopic
visions and the fact that his run through the forest “seemed
interminable” (312);
the haunting “whispers
in an unknown tongue” (312). The story
is also an exploration of mortality in universal terms: the
precision
of Farquhar’s vision when he resurfaces from the creek
may be mocking irony or it may be a revelation of the return
to dust. In other words, the “audible music” (310)
of spider’s legs and “the prismatic
colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass” (310)
signify that Farquhar is at one with creation. Similarly, with
the benefit of hindsight, the story has a mythic connotation.
The “Federal scout” (308) is a Grim
Reaper, the bringer of death who ultimately visits everyone,
while the river of life and escape is really the River Styx,
the dizzying “vortex” (311) that
represents Farquhar’s journey into oblivion. Despite
such mythic connotations, the fact that the story is set in
a Civil War context lends the
work, on first reading, the possibility of being real and even
anecdotal – a tale of real life adventure and survival – although
at the end of the story specific history crumbles and universal
horror prevails.
William N. Robson’s radio adaptation of Bierce’s
mythic story presents a highly complex narrative. The radio
play broadly shares the same structure – indeed, in one
of the broadcasts it is specifically described as having three
acts.
However, the first act adapts section I of the short story
along with some of section III (the breaking of the noose and
the beginnings
of Farquhar’s escape). This is because Robson’s
adaptation reworks Bierce’s tale as a suspense thriller
in what was a highly competitive market; radio drama needed
to hook the listeners
and ensure that they can resist the temptation to retune their
radios. Therefore, the first few minutes (approximately four
minutes) are highly dramatic and suspenseful: we need to know
what will happen and, even if we are familiar with the original
tale, we still need to know how the tale will be told.
Another important technique employed by Robson is a shift in
narrative
point of view. We, the listeners, are often implicated: you
are Peyton Farquhar; the bullet lodges under “your
collar,” not “his
collar." At the same time, the action
is framed – and occasionally interrupted – by an
objective account and description of Farquhar. Occasionally,
Farquhar becomes
a first-person narrator. In the 1959 Suspense version,
these moments are given heightened treatment with Vincent Price
using a mechanical
filter which distorts and distances his voice to emphasize
that it is a moment of interior monologue, as well as lending
it an
uncanny quality. The adaptation also develops a significant
amount of exposition and narrative embellishment. Frequently,
this is
achieved as an expansion on existing Bierce material. For example,
the adaptation develops some of the short story into a highly
lyrical and even philosophical mode. As Farquhar awaits his
execution we hear his thoughts from the brink of death:
Who has come back from the dead
to tell what dying is like? I don’t recall any childhood memories
now. The past does not engulf me in this naked moment. I am only
aware of what’s
here, now: those Yankees lined
up on the bank; the captain’s
tired eyes; that turkey buzzard circling
up there, waiting for me . . .
Such material adds dimensions to Farquhar’s character.
Other expansions have a more expositionary function, simply
making the story clearer and, for a performance in the genre
of suspense,
more gripping. There is, for instance, a major expansion of
the retrospective section II in which the “gray-clad soldier” (307)
arrives at the Farquhar plantation. The few, succinct lines
of dialogue in the short story are embellished in Robson’s
adaptation to create a fuller dramatic scene with Farquhar,
his wife and, as the adaptation has it, the “confederate
corporal” underneath
the “magnolia trees” on the plantation. This includes
Civil War detail such as a discussion of the war and the corporal
describing the Alabama regiment he belongs to (later in the
play he is revealed to be a lieutenant in a Massachusetts regiment).
The scene concludes with a clear set-up for Farquhar’s
entrapment, the corporal riding off on his horse after coaxing
Farquhar into sabotage with the words “You couldn’t
do a greater service for your country.” The substantial
expansion of this scene in the process of adaptation creates
a more dramatically gripping episode inasmuch as it develops
the sense of conspiracy and covert sabotage in a style similar
to the many adventure, espionage, and hardboiled crime dramas
of the same period. A scene like this is designed to hold the
listener’s attention and awaken their curiosity, making
one wonder “Will Farquhar see it through? What
will go wrong?” and so on.
If the plantation scene is an example of the expansion of original
Bierce material, some other scenes are complete additions.
Robson adds a scene in which Farquhar is entrapped and summarily
tried.
This partly serves to reinforce the Civil War setting of the
play but it also intensifies the drama, permitting Farquhar’s
desperate plea for his life in the presence of an officer who
sentences the “southern patriot” Farquhar to death
for his intended treason. This scene evokes pity for Farquhar
(another strategy to hook the attention of the listener), yet
the most important addition to the play is morally complex
and is condemnatory of Farquhar – a decision which ultimately
enables
the listener to assuage the shock and horror of Farquhar’s
grim fate. When Farquhar clambers out of the water, he is
assisted by a man on the riverbank fishing for catfish. The
man turns
out to be Jethro, Farquhar’s former slave. The narrator
informs us that Farquhar – or rather “you” – sold
Jethro knowing that he was dying of consumption. Farquhar is
astonished that Jethro is still alive, but rather than being
riddled with remorse, the increasingly unpleasant and egotistical
Farquhar believes that Jethro will exact revenge. But Jethro
is imbued with altruism and forgiveness, declaring, “I’m
free! I’m free at last!” Farquhar’s inner
narrative responds with contempt that Jethro has subscribed
to Abraham
Lincoln’s “traitorous emancipation proclamation.”
The fact that the terminally ill Jethro is still alive is a
clue to Farquhar’s genuine fate, but Robson promptly
steers us away from any further suggestion of the supernatural
when
the dreaded “gray-clad soldier” returns on horseback
looking for the fugitive Farquhar. Jethro helps Farquhar hide,
after which the latter swiftly departs, interpreting Jethro’s
drawn knife as a sign that “he’s gonna do you in
himself” despite the former slave’s assertion that
he is merely going to “slit up them catfish."
The most successful plays in the genre of suspense radio are
able to reach an unambiguous climax. The radio listener must
be able to comprehend lucidly what is happening in the denouement
of the play, no matter how ironic, fantastical, or downright
implausible it may be. Robson’s play succeeds in doing
this in an inexorable final section that builds from the narrator’s
question “How
long have you been running down this endless road?,”
a line that serves as Robson’s equivalent to Bierce’s “interminable” forest.
The listener is cast into absolute darkness which is either
night or “blood bursting into your congested eyeballs.”
However, a burst of lightning (accompanied by the classic and
ever-popular radio sound effect of thunder) reveals a world
of fierce Yankee soldiers “aiming at your heart,” Jethro
baring his knife and his teeth and, ultimately, nooses swinging
from all the branches. The sequence ends in a piercing scream
and then the glorious sunshine as Farquhar finds himself in
his garden. The moment of reunion with his wife is expanded
into
a romantic and lyrical scene accompanied by appropriately sentimental
music: all the agonies of Farquhar’s journey and fatigue
are nothing compared to the “sanctuary of these arms,
the security of these lips.” However, Robson is merely
deploying a strategy of misdirection. The seemingly happy ending
is a technique
to heighten the shocking final line: “Peyton Farquhar
was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side
to
side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.” The
line is uttered by the framing narrator and is accompanied
by the rhythmically creaking sound of the swinging noose.
The creaking sound of the noose is one of the finest moments
in Robson’s elaborate soundscape. The adaptation and
the brilliant skills of the live sound effects technicians
variously
create the sounds of the waters of Owl Creek (varying from
a gentle lapping to the frenzy of a whirlpool), the echoing
sounds
of military commands, the crack of muskets and the boom of
cannons, the croaking frogs on the riverbank and even an exact
replication
of Bierce’s description of “the humming of the
gnats” (310). Similarly, the use of orchestral music
(once again performed live on air) enhances the production.
On Escape,
the score uses a register that is both lyrical and harmonious,
with
the interjection of dramatic chords as a punctuational strategy.
The music for Suspense, however, is more consistently
sinister, using eerie dissonances merging with military bugle
sounds.
In both programs, descriptive music, such as descending scales
for
Farquhar’s fall into the creek, is used. In Escape and
all but the final production on Suspense, an ingenious
dramatic twist makes use of music: the narrative is accompanied
by the
increasing, rhythmic beating of timpani, which is explained
thus: “it’s
your heart, of course, you hear, stepping up its cadence, pounding
under the forced graft of fear."
Despite
differences in music, William N. Robson’s adaptation
of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” remains
broadly unchanged across Escape and Suspense.
The actors cast as Farquhar
all capture and convey a distinct southern accent, although
the broadness of dialect may vary. It is, arguably, at its
most broad
in Harry Bartell’s performance on Escape,
although, in contrast, Jethro’s accent in the same
production is less broad than in the 1950s versions. Probably
the least
pronounced
accent is Vincent Price’s in the 1959 production. Although
Price adds considerable southern “drawl” to certain
words, such as “writhe” (lengthening the word
emphatically). Overall, the lack of heavy accentuation on
Price’s part
retains the distinctive quality of his own voice: Price was
one of the leading stars of golden age radio, not least as
the lead
star on The Saint (1947-51), and in notable horror
plays such as “Three Skeleton Key” (several productions
on Suspense in the 1950s). Any radio producers who
secured Price would not
want their listeners to be in any doubt as to the identity
of the leading actor. In addition to Price’s performance,
the other notable feature of the final production of “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” on Suspense is
that it is considerably shorter. The Escape and
other Suspense productions
are all around the 25-28 minute range. In contrast, the 1959
Suspense production is around a mere eighteen minutes,
very short for the standard “thirty-minute slot.”
This major reduction primarily dispenses with some of Robson’s
longer descriptive material and lyrical exposition, although
it retains
the additional scenes such as the entrapment retrospective
and the encounter with Jethro. What this sharper adaptation
produces
is a succinct, thrilling journey that never lets up its thunderous
pace and is perhaps more in keeping with the concision and
pace of Bierce’s original.
Although the last adaptation of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge” in the golden age of live radio may have aimed
for unprecedented concision, the most significant radio adaptation
after the golden age could not have been more different.
Sam Dann’s dramatization of Bierce’s tale for
the pre-recorded
CBS Radio Mystery Theater (June 4, 1974 and repeated
on August 24, 1974 and September 15, 1979) is near the forty-five
minute
mark in duration and turns the story into a full drama with
several characters, lengthy exposition, and substantial embellishment.
These embroideries reflected the ambitious attempt, during
the
1970s, to revive American radio drama: the longer time slot
made demands on narrative sweep. The actions of, in this
version, “Peyton
Forrester” are not part of a cunning entrapment but
a calculated collaborative sabotage in which his accomplice
is killed. Forrester’s
attempt fails, but he escapes Union custody and attempts
to blow up the bridge again. In another major plot change,
the moment
that Forrester thinks he has succeeded in blowing up the
bridge is the moment he hangs, dead, from Owl Creek Bridge.
Dann’s
adaptation also develops the drama of the Civil War, including
the domestic ructions caused by a nation at war (“We’ve
lost, we’ve lost, Peyton!” says Forrester’s
wife, disapproving of her husband’s terrorist plot).
Similarly, Dann uses the development of several other characters
to expand
the setting and scene of the play. At the start, for example,
a Union officer supports a young soldier who declares “I’m
gonna be sick!” as the execution is about to occur.
However, as laudable and rich as Dann’s adaptation
is, it does diminish the intensity of Bierce’s original
tale and the live radio versions. Similarly, although the
slightly different ending may
be ingenious, it is not as powerful, poignant or disturbing
as Bierce’s sex (Eros) and death (Thanatos) ending
with Farquhar – in
the cruellest irony of frustrated desire – dying as
he is about to embrace his wife.
As well as providing great source material for radio adapters, “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” established a paradigm
for performance horror: namely a narrative with a surprise
ending in which it is revealed that the vivacious protagonist – who
often miraculously “survives” a gravely perilous
situation – has in fact been dead for most of the story.
Numerous characters in golden age radio’s finest suspense
and horror plays, such as the car driver (Orson Welles) in “The
Hitch-Hiker” (Suspense, September 2, 1944),
the scheming adulterers in “Broadway Here I Come” (The
Mysterious Traveler, June 17, 1945), and the taxi driver
(Ernest Chappell) in “Take Me Out to the Graveyard” (Quiet,
Please,
November 3, 1947), are all hapless souls who, like Peyton
Farquhar, do not realize that they are already dead. These
plays may have
been produced some fifty years before The Sixth Sense (M.
Night Shyamalan, 1999), but they come, nevertheless, fifty
years after
Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
Bierce’s masterpiece did not just inspire radio drama;
it also enjoyed two major television adaptations. The tale
was adapted by Harold Swanton for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (December
20, 1959) and by Robert Enrico, whose film was broadcast
as an episode of
The Twilight Zone (February 28, 1964). The Alfred
Hitchcock Presents version “presented stark performances
grabbing the attention of critics and viewers alike,” and
the memorable spectacle of Hitchcock giving his host introduction
from the inside of a cannon,
declaring
that the Civil War was a time when “space travel was
in this primitive means.” But the Oscar-winning version
featured on The Twilight Zone is "generally
considered superior,” and it is to this version that
we will now devote our attention. [7]
As Marc Scott Zicree explains, in the
fifth and final season of The Twilight Zone (1963-64),
producer William
Froug discovered that the series was running seriously over
budget. The solution Froug came up with was an ingenious
one. Froug had
seen La Rivière du Hibou (1962), the French
film adaptation of “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which had won first
prize for short film at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. Froug
was so
impressed by Enrico’s film that he secured all
American television rights to it (for a mere $10,000). Froug
did not acquire
the rights to Enrico’s film with The Twilight Zone in
mind, but the television series’ financial crisis
suggested to him an unusual idea. He proposed
that the short French
film be used as an episode of The Twilight Zone,
an unprecedented move, since all previous episodes had been
produced “in-house” by
CBS. For their part, CBS executives were uneasy about screening
a French film on American primetime television, but the prospect
of the instant budgetary solution that Enrico’s short
film promised was sufficient to override any misgivings.
In fact,
the gamble paid off: thanks to the screening of Enrico’s
film, the financial crisis of The Twilight Zone was
not only solved immediately but, by the end of the season,
the series
had come in under budget. Moreover, the episode was extremely
well
received by critics and audiences. Indeed, Enrico’s
film went on to win the Oscar for Best Short Film in 1964,
and had
obviously not been done a disservice by being screened on
The Twilight Zone. As Variety remarked,
thanks to The
Twilight Zone,
Enrico’s film “undoubtedly received more exposure
than any such candidate in Oscar history.” [8]
CBS’s concerns about broadcasting a foreign language film
as part of a popular series would have been justified if
the dialogue were plentiful. The soundtrack could have been dubbed,
although such a decision would have been at aesthetic odds
with
the frequently high caliber of production on display in The
Twilight Zone. However, Enrico’s film version
has barely a line of dialogue and includes a ballad sung
in English. The film is
dominated by the visual – from (as in Bierce) a sense
of broad landscape to the microscopically detailed – and
is enhanced by an impressive use of sound. Enrico uses numerous
strategies
and codes of film, and his work remains an outstanding essay
in film technique. The film offers experiments in perspective
and distance (long shots of the creek and close-ups of a
caterpillar on a leaf), light and shade, but is perhaps most
impressive in
relation to time with the use of ellipsis and slowdown. As
such, the film replicates the proto-modernist techniques
of Bierce’s
fiction such as the assimilation of a journalistic style
with abstract imagery, and the infusion of a precise historical
setting with
mythic connotations. In its turn, the film has moments that
are documentary in their realism and then other moments of
anti-realistic
alienation, especially in the long, final sequence of Farquhar
in his garden, running toward, but never quite reaching,
his wife.
As Jack Sullivan says, “Horror is not a motif or even a
genre in Bierce but a totality, an end in itself.” [9] Such
pure and all-encompassing horror is never better displayed
than in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge."
Works such as “A Tough Tussle” may feature a
grim creature who is a remarkable precursor to the modern
zombie,
but the simple tale of Peyton Farquhar is not a tangential
or neglected link but an essential horror tale that has and
will
continue to loom over horror culture. “An Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge” presents a universe of horror
in which the moment of death may seem to be a final quest
for hope, but
is rather a hideous irony in which the creaking rope of a
noose mocks the laugh of freedom. The tale continues to be
an archetypal
paradigm of horror with a special appeal for the performance
media: a story that succeeds, impressively, whether the subsequent
adaptation is dependent on the pure dialogue and sound of
radio, or on the visual and audial language of cinema. 
WORKS CITED
1. Martin
Grams, Jr., Inner Sanctum Mysteries: Behind the Creaking
Door (Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing, 2002), 34.
2. Jim
Harmon, The Great Radio Heroes (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 75.
3. Jack
Sullivan, ed., The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the
Supernatural (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 33.
4. J.
A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979), 324.
5. Ambrose
Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," The Complete Short
Stories of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska
Press, 1984), 311. All citations hereafter appear parenthetically within the
text.
6. Cathy
N. Davidson, Foreword, The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose
Bierce, 3.
7. Martin
Grams, Jr. and Patrik Wikstrom, The Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Companion (Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing, 2001), 40, 56.
8. Marc
Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion (Los Angeles:
Silman-James, 1992), 426-7, 427.
9. Sullivan, The
Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, 34.