Heart of Darkness on Playhouse 90 [Media Notes 26]

This is a strange adaptation of Conrad’s novella that appeared on the CBS anthology series, Playhouse 90, in 1958. Boris Karloff is trader Kurtz; he ‘goes native’ while amassing ivory. Roddy McDowall is his adopted son, Marlow, who has become a Buddhist, and fights his desire for his sister. Eartha Kitt is Kurtz’s African mistress, who gets killed by other Africans. The pilgrims have been compressed into a single minister.

Kurtz is still crazy. He enters late in the play, as he does in the novella, uttering the line, “My ivory, my station, my jungle, my people, my earth,” which is more or less from Conrad. And that, from my point of view, is perhaps the single most interesting this about this production, as it indicates the power of that line and its centrality to Conrad’s original.

I don’t know what to make of this. It reeks of high culture. A bit of Dickens (A Christmas Carol no less). 1984 – the rats? There are skulls, a whip, drums.

You can criticize Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for failing to present Africans as full human beings. But it is also a scathing critique of imperialism and colonialism. The Playhouse 90 version doesn’t touch imperialism and colonialism in any meaningful way and instead collapses in a heap around crazy white-folks’ fever dreams of Africa and Africans.

Marlow to his dead father: “Your greed is my greed. Your lust is my lust. I can never deny them. Not any more, because they happened to me. Only by admitting them and their terror be overcome and a choice be made. And choice is the divinity in man.” I believe Freud was big in the 1950s.

Interrupted by commercials.