February 16, 1951 Pitts-Post
Radio and Television in Review:
By JOHN CROSBY
“Young people are children
callously pulling the wings off butterflies. The chief purpose of education is
to impart an understanding of the butterfly’s viewpoint ,” observed Dr. William
Todhunter Hall, president of Ivy College.
<John Crosby>
That fairly well sums up the point
of view of “Halls of Ivy” a surprisingly sophisticated one, on which RonaldColman impersonates Dr. Hall, and Mr. Colman’s real wife, Benita, engagingly
plays his liberal and humanitarian philosophy expressed in “Halls of Ivy,”
(NBC-KDKA, 8 p. m. Wednesday) is not anything that would provoke controversy
even in the bar of the Union League Club. Just the same, it is a rare and
wonderful thing to find such mature and worthy sentiments expressed so
repeatedly and so wittly on a radio program.
* * *
“Halls of Ivy” has been on the air
a year now and—let’s face it—it is the most literate charming and intelligent
comedy in radio. It is also—and this is even more remarkable—enormously successful,
boasting a contented sponsor (Schlitz Beer) and an excellent rating.
This happy blending of
intelligence and popularity is the result of a combination of circumstances. The
show is written by Don Quinn is not only man of wit and integrity; he is also a
real pro in the radio writing game, having been head writer for (and almost the
inventor of) Fibber McGee and Molly these many years.
However, all of Mr. Quinn’s skill
would I believe, be wasted with the urbanity and extraordinary competence of
Mr. Colman, Ronald Colman can –as if he’d thought of them that minute—toss off
lines which a good many actors would have difficulty even comprehending. Recognizing
and taking full advantage of this, Quinn studs his scripts with epigrams, an
almost vanished literary form.
“While some folks have no enemies,
none of their friends like them either.”
“When people say ‘Let’s be
realistic.’ It means that a price tag has just been tied to an ideal.”
“When it comes to business, his
head rules and not his heart. He finds that you can’t read the fine print with
tears in your eyes.”
As a college president, Dr.
William Todhunter Hall—to get to the heart of the matter—finds himself in an unending
struggle with the trustees, the alumnl, the faculty and the students to
preserve the higher principles of learning against the blandishments of the
football stadium, wealthy but dimwitted benefactors or anything else. In this
he is vivaciously abetted by Vicki whose aims coincide with Dr. Hall’s but
whose reasons are somewhat different. When, for example, there is talk of
abolishing the observatory for economy reasons, Dr. Hall fights to preserve it
because of his profound belief in the value of astronomy; Vicki, on the other
hand, wants it preserved as an “open-ended tunnel of love.”
“Things happen to a girl on
observatory hill which never happen anywhere else,” she observes.
* *
*
Along with the laughs, of which
there are a great many, the script is occasionally illuminated by flashes of a
not unhealthy bitterness. Concerning the low pay of teachers in this country,
Mr. Quinn comments: “When you read that we in this country spent $20,000,000
for bubble gum last year, you begin to wonder how much the American people care
what goes into their children’s heads.”
However, Dr. Hall’s (or Mr. Quinn’s)
sagacity extends far beyond the confines of education and is delightfully perceptive
and occasionally sharp as a blade, as witness: “It’s an old American custom when
an individual achieves pre-eminence in any particular field, to ascribe to him
a wisdom and clairvoyance embracing the entire field of human activity. Thus a
millionaire bobby-pin manufacturer becomes an authority on Soviet expansion in
the near East and a ranking first baseman is automatically raised to the top
level of experts on agrarian economy.”
But you mustn’t get the idea that “Halls
of Ivy” is just a long philosophical discourse; it is fundamentally a comedy
and a very funny one, matchlessly played, brilliantly produced, and—above all—meticulously
written. Incidentally, Mr. Colman helps out with the writing, too. Once, just
for the hell of it, he wrote a whole script all by himself. Very good one.
The Montreal Gazette – Dec 17,
1949
New Colman Show
Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Colman,
appearing in their own network radio program for the first time, will be
co-starred in The Halls of Ivy, a new weekly situation comedy series which will
begin on the NBC network Friday, Jan. 6 (8:00-8:30 p. m.).
Colman will play Dr. William
Todhunter Hall, college president, and Mrs. Colman will be his vivaclous wife,
Victoria, a former English musical comedy star.
The script locale is the small
town of Ivy and Ivy College. The school (besides being mythical) is
co-educational, non-sectarian and old, and its student body is a pretty fair
cross-section of the country’s youthful seekers of knowledge.
The Halls Of Ivy was created by
Donn Quinn, who has been writing NBC’s Fibber McGee And Molly series since
1935. Quinn and Walter Brown Newman will write The Halls Of Ivy.
Nat Wolff will direct the program,
which will be produced by Sam Fuller for the Young and Rublcam, Inc.,
advertising agency. Archie Scott will be the NBC producer. Ken Carpenter will
announce, and NBC music director Henry Russell will provide the orchestral
interludes.
Ronald Colman’s screen career
spans 27 years of acting. His first starring role was opposite Lillian Gish In
The White Sister. He was one of the few silent picture stars to adapt
successfully to talking films.
The Meriden Daily Journal – May 7,
1952
“Halls Of Ivy” Author Never Got
Past 10th Grade
BY ALINE MOSBY
Hollywood, May 7 –(UP)– The man
who writes that intellectual radio program about college, “Halls of Ivy,”
confessed today he never got past the tenth grade himself.
Don Quinn, the dean of all radio
writers, departed school at the age of 15, and hasn’t been inside a classroom
to open a book since.
Yet two years ago he launched the
show that stars Ronald Colman as a college professor and features $10 words and
long – hair discussions.
The program is one of the
phenomenal successes of the airwaves.
“I’m just a self-made illiterate,”
Quinn said. “But my wife went to Northwestern University.
“So when I get stuck I ask her
what English I or English V means, or what is an auditing class. I found out
that’s for standing by students.”
Quinn wrote the “Fibber McGee andMolly” program for 17 years on which, he said, “McGee says ‘I aint got this or
that’ and the script is very simple.” Then, “as a revolt,” he began the scripts
about the college prof and his wife played by Colman’s real-life wife Benita.
“There I was writing a show with
three—syllable words,” he grins. “At first the sentence construction scared me.”
So far, college experts haven’t
guessed that Quinn has no sheepskin at home. Fans of his show include the
president of Pomona College and the president of Purdue University. Once the
entire National Society of College Deans of Women showed up as guests of the
program.
He even had Colman fooled for a
while.
“I have him giving quotations from
the Duke of Tuscany. Who is the Duke? I am, I just make them up. Once Colman
went home and looked all through his reference books trying to find those
quotations.
“or the real quotations, however, I
use about 60 reference books.”
Quinn hopes to remedy his lack of
college education one of these weeks. He plans to go to the University of
California for a few courses.
“Once I lectured at the university
on radio writing, and the students said why should they go to school since I had
done all right. I told them the script would be easier to write if I were a
college graduate.”
“But, actually, it doesn’t really
matter. I wrote a farm program for four years in Chicago and I’d never been off
the city streets.”
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