The Next Voice You Hear

 A baffling response to the world's post-war trauma, William Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear (1950) is a remarkably melancholy fable, a sort of "magical realism" ten years before the genre was invented.  With a wholly straight face, Wellman documents the sudden eruption of the divine into the disenchanted, enervated years immediately following the convulsion of World War II.  God starts sending messages to Los Angeles, and, in fact, every place in the world with radio transmissions over the air-waves.  Radios turn into instruments of divine revelation.  The film measures the impact of these supernatural declarations across the period of seven days as the Word, as it were, acts on Everyman, a middle-class working stiff named Joe Smith, his wife, Mary, and their son, an all-American boy with a paper route who looks a bit like Brandon DeWilde in Shane, but is played by another, similarly pretty, child actor.  The film's plot and sentiments are mawkish, but the movie is notable for its portrait of post-war malaise in America.  For God to intervene, things must be pretty bad -- and, indeed, the Everyman and family who are at the center of the movie are remarkably dysfunctional and depressed almost to the point of suicide (or, at least, violence.)  The Next Voice You Hear is significant for its unwavering (until its last act) portrait of suburban discontent and alienation.  The film purports to resolve this unhappiness, which is particularly poignant because it is quotidian and undramatic, but the happy ending rings false.

Joe Smith labors in a plane factory.  He has a sour, judemental boss who lectures him daily with the slogan "A day's work for an honest dollar."  For Joe, the war never ended.  He's trapped with a platoon of co-workers, buddies, as it were, on the industrial battlefield where air planes are manufactured.  Joe has a door-mat wife played by Nancy Davis (later to become Nancy Reagan).  When we first see her, she is the exact opposite of a Hollwood glamour girl flat-chested in some sort of shapeless frock -- apparently, audiences in 1950 would have immediately perceived this dowdy garment as a maternity dress.  (I couldn't read the code until Mary mentions that she is pregnant and, not, just a little bit -- she's a week from delivering her child.)  The film proceeds through a series of static repeated shots, documenting the family at breakfast, Joe at work, and, then, their activities at night -- the same camera angles and set-ups are used to signify that the family is trapped in a nightmarish routine and that none of them really like one another very much.  Joe, in particular, is an example of the "quiet desperation" that Thoreau identifies as an uniquely American pathology.  Every day is the same for him -- each morning, he eats Happy brand cereal with his wife and son; his car's starter is busted and he can't get the vehicle to reliably fire-up.  (The routine is so engrained that, at one point, Johnny, the son, mimics precisely every move that his father has to make to get the old jalopy running.)  Joe is always late and is harassed by an officious patrol cop who pulls him over for recklessly backing out onto the road in front of his house or for speeding -- of course, these stops only make Joe more late to work and engender more sarcastic lectures by the boss, Mr. Branham.  The family lives in a dispirited-looking suburb, one of those nondescript acres of tract housing that you see under construction in Laurel and Hardy movies of the mid-thirties.  Joe bullies his wife and, even, snatches buttered toast from her so that she won't gain weight -- and this while she is pregnant.  (Of course, as soon as he departs for work, confident that his male prerogative has put the little woman in her place, she immediately takes another piece of bread to butter and eat.)  Joe perceives himself as hapless, poorly paid, and just barely making ends meet -- the whole enterprise seems just barely afloat and Joe is unhappy about expecting a new mouth to feed.  There's no whiff of sexual attraction between Joe and the frumpy Mary.  His wife's sister, Aunt Edna comes to visit -- Joe detests her and the feeling is mutual:  she says Joe should go on a diet because he's gaining weight "under his heart."  (Later, Joe actually strikes her -- the role is conceived like the maiden Aunt played by Agnes Moorhead in The Magnificent Ambersons).  Everyone is oddly clumsy -- people stumble, get in each other's way, trip and almost fall down.  Hopelessness pervades Joe's life on all levels, including the fact that he seems to be barely able to navigate his kitchen without colliding with his wife.  One day, when Johnny is too sick to deliver the papers on his route, Joe has to take over this task.  In one yard, he's attacked by a vicious dog -- the dog doesn't seem to be acting and is legitimately vicious; oddly enough, this is the most convincing attack by an animal that I've ever seen in a movie and the audience winces when the dog lunges (and keeps lunging) at Joe.

Some religions are iconoclastic and forbid the representation of God.  The Next Voice You Here follows this doctrine.  We don't ever hear God's voice; the film devises various ways for us to know what message God has delivered each night, but without our actually hearing the broadcast.  (I presume that this is because our imagination is more powerful in devising for us the timbre and phrasing that the deity uses than any recitation by an actor could possibly accomplish.)  God intervenes on all the radios in the world, tailoring his words to the language spoken by each listening.  His declarations occur every night at precisely 8:30 pm.  Initially, people think its a hoax or that Orson Welles is up to his old tricks -- this gets mentioned about four times.  But within a few days everyone becomes a believer.  Even Branham, Joe's nasty boss at Atlas Airplanes is converted from atheism to discipleship.  At first, God's messages are ambiguous and a little hard to interpret, but as the movie progresses through its 83 minutes, the revelations become more clear and more obviously maudlin.  Ultimately, it seems, God wants everyone to get along and to perceive every day life in the suburbs as a miracle.  At one point, God seems to threaten wrath and there's a rainstorm that blows up out of nowhere that causes mass hysteria -- people think its a reprise of Biblical flood.  Joe's increasing terror leads him into a bar where he runs into Mitch, the archetypal old outlaw war buddy -- although Wellman never mentions the war in the film;  Mitch buys Joe innumerable drinks and tempts him with his nihilism.  Mitch and  a floozy who flirts with Joe are the only people in the world not tuned into God's evening broadcast.  Staggering drunk and infused with bitter self-pity, Joe goes home, horrifying his wife and son with his inebriation.  Of course, his timing is bad -- Mary has had false-labor a few days earlier and she's primed to have her child any hour.  (Her mother died in child-birth of her second infant and everyone is afraid that Mary is doomed.)  God performs some miracles but the only one we see is that the deity repairs Joe's starter on his old car.  On Monday, the seventh day everyone has gathered in churches and other places of worship.  But God inexplicably ceases his broadcasts -- there's silence on the air-waves.  Mary goes into real labor and, with the escort of the pesky highway patrolman, Joe and Johnny take her to the hospital.  A daughter is born. This is an every-day miracle.  The film ends with a tight close-up of Mary's beatific face.  (Throughout the movie, she has become ever more pinched, unhappy-looking and seems prematurely aged -- she has found a grey strand in  her hair; but the film rejuvenates her to smooth-faced girl-next-door splendor in its next-to-last shot, followed by an image of the sky suffused with light.  

Most of the actors are people who would become ubiquitous on TV in the next decade.  Stewart Whitmore plays Joe.  He does a superb job at persuading the viewer that his character is depressed and enraged, possibly to the point of suicide.  The scene in which Whitmore gets drunk and blunders around like indignant ape is very effective.  (He has one of the strangest hairdos ever seen in films -- his big head of hair is all bouffant and puffed up except at the front of his forehead where he sports a little carefully mowed fringe of bangs.)  The movie's premise is so startling and emotionally engaging that the movie really has nowhere to go -- it's all premise with no delivery.  Once God starts speaking the movie can't figure out what to do with its surfeit of piety and it's (mostly) played totally straight -- no one could make a movie like this today without generous dollops of irony but The Next Voice you Hear is wholly without irony or  humor of any sort. The film resembles an Italian neo-realist picture, indeed something like Miracle in Milan (Vittorio de Sica, 1951).  It is absolutely dour, brutally realistic, and frumpy, shot in old-style Academy ratio.  I recall a moving tribute to Rossellini in which a critic said that he (Rossellini), alone, among the Italian neo-realists wanted to show that some good, that a better society, could arise from the horrors of World War Two.  Wellman seems to show that the war accomplished nothing, that men and women remain trapped in social relations that demean and wound them, and that the only way out of this impasse, the alienation suffusing the post-war world, is the direct intervention of God Almighty.