The Laughing Policeman

I had read and heard several things over the last several months about film being more form than content. There was Paul Schrader's book on what he called "the transcendental style" in film, and the commentary on the Criterion DVD of Bresson's Pickpocket which noted that the storyline was fairly ordinary. David O. Selznick wanted to do a remake of The Bicycle Thieves and have Gary Cooper star, which seemed absurd, like he missed the whole point of the movie, but the difference between the original and a technicolor Hollywood remake would have been entirely stylistic. The story would presumably have been identical except for him going to his Communist Party cell for help. There was Eric Rohmer's comment in an interview that the grim secret of film is that it's form without content, although I'm not sure exactly how he meant that.

I don't know why this bothers me.

Now I've been listening to radio shows, most from the '30s, '40s or '50s. I was surprised to find there were still radio dramas in the '60s and '70s. In England, it seems that they're still producing them for BBC radio. Maybe it's because the British have to pay a large tax for owning a television. They have to do SOMETHING for the growing numbers who can't pay.

Radio is the opposite of film. It's all content and no form. It's all verbal. 

Some things bother me. Like any episode where someone pulls a gun. Crime shows and westerns were popular so there was a lot of that. There's no way to make this clear on radio without someone saying, "Where did you get that gun!" or "That's right. It's a gun!"

They should have worked on ways to make it sound less direct.

"Didn't Nancy Reagan have a gun like that? Those are for ladies. Do you carry it in your purse?"

Maybe have all the violence take place off-stage:

"I shot him in the leg. I didn't think it'd be a big deal, but there was way more blood than I thought and it killed him. I won't do that again!"

I listened to a 2014 British radio production of The Laughing Policeman, based on a Swedish detective novel from the late 1960s. I had never seen it, but Hollywood made a version of it in the early '70s set in San Francisco starring Walter Matthau.    

Someone with a submachine gun had killed everyone on a city bus late one night. One was a young police detective who had apparently been investigating an old murder case on his own without anyone's knowledge.

A police procedural. There were a few specifically Swedish or European things. The murder weapon was an old Finnish submachine gun, for example.

Radio dramas are faster-moving than films. It was 57 minutes.

Available here.