Night of January 16th

Rand drew inspiration for Night of January 16th from two sources. The first was The Trial of Mary Dugan, a 1927 melodrama about a showgirl prosecuted for killing her wealthy lover, which gave Rand the idea to write a play featuring a trial. Rand wanted her play's ending to depend on the result of the trial, rather than having a fixed final scene. She based her victim on Ivar Kreuger, a Swedish businessman known as the "Match King" for the matchstick-manufacturing monopolies he owned, before he was found dead in March 1932. When Kreuger's business empire became financially unstable, he shot himself after being accused of executing underhanded and possibly illegal financial deals. This incident inspired Rand to make the victim a businessman of great ambition and dubious character, who had given several people motives for his murder.[1]

Rand wrote Night of January 16th in 1933.[2] She was 28 and had been in the United States for seven years after emigrating from the Soviet Union, where her strong anti-Communist opinions had put her at risk.[3] Rand had never written a stage play, but had worked in Hollywood as a junior screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille, and later in RKO Studios' wardrobe department.[4] In September 1932, Rand sold an original screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios and quit RKO to finish her first novel, We the Living.[5] She wrote the stage play with the hope of making money from it while finishing her novel.[6] By 1934 her agent was trying to sell the play and the novel, but both were repeatedly rejected.[7] Red Pawn was shelved and Rand's contract for rewrites on it expired.[8] Rand's husband, actor Frank O'Connor, was getting only minor roles with little pay, leaving the couple in financial difficulties. With the last of her money from Red Pawn exhausted, Rand got an offer for her new play from Al Woods, who had produced The Trial of Mary Dugan for Broadway. The contract included a condition that Woods could make changes to the script. Wary that he would destroy her vision of the play to create a more conventional drama, Rand turned Woods down.[9][10]

E. E. Clive staged the play as Woman on Trial in 1934.

Soon after she rejected the offer from Woods, Rand accepted an offer from Welsh actor E. E. Clive to stage the play in Los Angeles. It first opened at the Hollywood Playhouse as Woman on Trial; Clive produced, and Barbara Bedford played Andre. The production opened on October 22, 1934,[11] and closed in late November.[12]

At the end of the play's run in Los Angeles, Woods renewed his offer to produce the play on Broadway. Although he was a renowned producer of many famous plays in a career of more than three decades, Woods had lost much of his fortune in the early 1930s[13] and had not produced a hit in several years.[14] Being refused by a neophyte author shocked him and increased his interest.[9][15] Woods still wanted the right to make script changes, but he made adjustments to the contract to give Rand more influence. She reluctantly agreed to his terms.[16][17]

Rand arrived in New York City at the beginning of December 1934 in anticipation of the opening in January. The play's financing failed, delaying the production for several months[18] until Woods arranged new financing from theater owner Lee Shubert.[19] When work resumed, Rand's relationship with Woods quickly soured as he demanded changes she later derided as "a junk heap of worn, irrelevant melodramatic devices".[17] Woods had made his success on Broadway with low-brow melodramas such as Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model and risqué comedies such as The Demi-Virgin. Woods was not interested in what he called Rand's "highfalutin speeches",[20] preferring the dramatic conflict to focus on concrete elements, such as whether the defendant had a gun. The changes to Rand's work included the creation of a new character, a gun moll played by Shubert's mistress.[19][20]

The contract between Woods and Rand allowed him to hire collaborators if he thought it necessary, paying them a limited portion of the author's royalties. He first hired John Hayden to direct, paying him one percentage point from Rand's 10-percent royalty. Although Hayden was a successful Broadway director, Rand disliked him and later called him "a very ratty Broadway hanger-on".[19][20] As auditions for the play began in Philadelphia, Woods demanded further script changes and was frustrated by Rand's refusal to make some of them. He engaged Louis Weitzenkorn, the author of the previous hit Five Star Final, to act as a script doctor. Rand's relationship with Weitzenkorn was worse than hers with Woods or Hayden; she and Weitzenkorn argued over political differences as well as his ideas for the play. Woods gave Weitzenkorn another percentage point from Rand's royalties without informing her. Rand filed a claim against Woods with the American Arbitration Association; she objected to Weitzenkorn receiving any portion of her royalties, and told the arbitration panel Weitzenkorn had added only a single line to the play, which was cut after the auditions. Upon hearing this testimony, one of the arbitrators responded incredulously, "That was all he did?"[20] In two hearings, the panel ruled that Weitzenkorn should receive his agreed-upon one percent,[21] but that Woods could not deduct the payment from Rand's royalties because she had not been notified in advance.[19][20][22] Despite the disputes between Rand and Woods, the play opened at Shubert's Ambassador Theatre on September 16, 1935, where it ran successfully for seven months. It closed on April 4, 1936, after 283 performances.[23]

Producer Al Woods brought the play to Broadway in 1935.

When the play's success on Broadway was clear, Woods launched productions of the play in other cities, starting with San Francisco. It opened there at the Geary Theater on December 30, 1935, and ran for five weeks with Nedda Harrigan in the lead role.[24] Harrigan stayed with the show when it moved to the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, where it opened on March 1, 1936.[25] After the Broadway production closed, Woods started a road tour that included productions in Boston and Chicago.[26][27]

International productions of the play included shows in London, Montreal, and Sydney. The production in London opened on September 29, 1936, where Phoebe Foster took the lead role for her first appearance on the London stage. It closed after 22 performances.[28] A production in Montreal opened on June 16, 1941, starring Fay Wray as Andre and Robert Wilcox as Regan.[29] In Sydney, the play opened at the Minerva Theatre on June 19, 1944, with Thelma Grigg as Andre.[30]

Night of January 16th was first published in an edition for amateur theater organizations in 1936, using a version edited by drama professor Nathaniel Edward Reeid,[31] which included further changes to eliminate elements such as swearing and smoking. Rand disavowed this version because of the changes.[32] In 1960, Rand's protégé Nathaniel Branden asked about doing a public reading of the play for students at the Nathaniel Branden Institute. Rand did not want him to use the amateur version; she created a revised text that eliminated most of Woods' and Reeid's changes. She had her "final, definitive version" published in 1968 with an introduction about the play's history.[33]

In 1972, Rand approved an off-Broadway revival of the play, which used her preferred version of the script, including several dozen further small changes in language beyond those in the 1968 version.[34] The revival also used her original title, Penthouse Legend. It was produced by Phillip and Kay Nolte Smith, a married couple who were friends with Rand. Kay Smith also starred in the production under the stage name Kay Gillian.[35][36] It opened at the McAlpin Rooftop Theater on February 22, 1973, and closed on March 18 after 30 performances.[36][37]

Night of January 16th was the last theatrical success for either Rand or Woods. Rand's next play, Ideal, went unsold,[38] and a 1940 stage adaptation of We the Living flopped.[39] Rand achieved lasting success and financial stability with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead.[40] Woods produced several more plays; none were hits and when he died in 1951, he was bankrupt and living in a hotel.[13][41]

Advertisements invited patrons to join the play's jury.

The selection of a jury from the play's audience was the primary dramatic innovation of Night of January 16th.[12] It created concerns among many of the producers who considered and rejected the play. Although Woods liked the idea,[17] Hayden worried it would destroy the theatrical illusion; he feared audience members might refuse to participate. Successful jury selections during previews indicated this would not be a problem. This criticism dissipated following the play's success; it became famous for its "jury gimmick".[20]

The play's jury has sometimes enlisted famous participants; the Broadway selections were rigged to call on celebrities known to be in the audience.[52] The jury for the Broadway opening included attorney Edward J. Reilly—who was known from the Lindbergh kidnapping trial earlier that year—and boxing champion Jack Dempsey.[56] At a special performance for the blind, Helen Keller sat on the jury.[62] The practice of using celebrity jurors continued throughout the Broadway run and in other productions.[note 2]

Woods decided the jury for the Broadway run would employ some jury service rules of the New York courts. One such rule was the payment of jurors three dollars per day for their participation, which meant the selected audience members profited by at least 25 cents after subtracting the ticket price.[14] Another was that only men could serve on a jury, although Woods made exceptions, for example at the performance Keller attended. He later loosened the rule to allow women jurors at matinee performances twice a week.[66] Unlike a normal criminal trial, verdicts required only a majority vote rather than unanimity.[63]

Rand described Night of January 16th as "a sense-of-life play".[67] She did not want its events to be taken literally, but to be understood as a representation of different ways of approaching life. Andre represents an ambitious, confident, non-conformist approach to life, while the prosecution witnesses represent conformity, envy of success, and the desire for power over others.[67][68] Rand believed the jury's decision at each performance revealed the attitude of the jurors towards these two conflicting senses of life. Rand supported individualism and considered Andre "not guilty".[69] She said she wanted the play to convey the viewpoint: "Your life, your achievement, your happiness, your person are of paramount importance. Live up to your highest vision of yourself no matter what the circumstances you might encounter. An exalted view of self-esteem is man's most admirable quality".[70] She said the play "is not a philosophical treatise on morality" and represents this view only in a basic way.[70] Rand would later expound an explicit philosophy, which she called "Objectivism", particularly in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged and in non-fiction essays, but Night of January 16th predates these more philosophical works.[71]

Several later commentators have interpreted the play as a reflection of Rand's early interest in the ideas of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Literature professor Shoshana Milgram saw elements of Nietzsche's morality in the descriptions of Bjorn Faulkner, who "never thought of things as right or wrong".[72] Others found significance in Rand's admiration of the play's criminal characters. Historian Jennifer Burns said Rand "found criminality an irresistible metaphor for individualism" because of the influence on her of "Nietzsche's transvaluation of values [that] changed criminals into heroes".[9] Rand maintained criminality was not the important attribute of the characters; she said a criminal could serve as "an eloquent symbol" of independence and rebellion against conformity, but stated, "I do not think, nor did I think when I wrote this play, that a swindler is a heroic character or that a respectable banker is a villain".[67] Rand biographer Ronald Merrill dismissed this explanation as a cover-up for the play's promotion of Nietzschean ideas that Rand later rejected. He called the play "a powerful and eloquent plea for the Nietzschean worldview" of the superiority of the "superman"; this is represented by Faulkner, whom Merrill interprets as rejecting external moral authority and the "slave morality" of ordinary people.[44] Biographer Anne Heller said Rand "later renounced her romantic fascination with criminals", making the characters' criminality an embarrassment for her.[12]

Ellen Drew starred in the 1941 movie adaptation.

The movie rights to Night of January 16th were initially purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in October 1934 as a possible vehicle for Loretta Young. They hired Rand to write a screenplay, but the project was scrapped.[16] After MGM's option expired, Woods considered making a movie version through a production company of his own,[91] but in 1938 RKO Pictures bought the rights for $10,000, a fee split between Woods and Rand. RKO considered Claudette Colbert and Lucille Ball as possible stars, but they also gave up on the adaptation. The rights were resold to Paramount Pictures in July 1939 for $35,000.[92][93][94] Paramount released a movie in 1941; Rand did not participate in the production. The film was directed by William Clemens, and Delmer Daves, Robert Pirosh, and Eve Greene were engaged to prepare a new screenplay.[16][95]

The new screenplay altered the plot significantly, focusing on Steve Van Ruyle (Robert Preston), a sailor who inherits a position on the board of a company headed by Bjorn Faulkner (Nils Asther). Unlike the play, in which Faulkner is already dead, he appears in the film as a living character who is apparently murdered. Suspicion falls on Faulkner's secretary Kit Lane (Ellen Drew); Van Ruyle decides to investigate the alleged crime. Faulkner is discovered hiding in Cuba after faking his own death.[94][95][96] Rand said only a single line from her original dialog appeared in the movie, which she dismissed as a "cheap, trashy vulgarity".[97] The film received little attention when it was released, and most reviews of it were negative.[98]

In 1989, Gawaahi, a Hindi-language adaptation of Night of January 16th was released. Indian actress Zeenat Aman led a cast that included Shekhar Kapur and Ashutosh Gowariker.[99][100]

Night of January 16th was adapted for several television anthology series in the 1950s and 1960s. The first was WOR-TV's Broadway Television Theatre, which aired its adaptation on July 14, 1952, with a cast that included Neil Hamilton and Virginia Gilmore.[101] On CBS, the Lux Video Theatre presented a version of Night of January 16th on May 10, 1956, starring Phyllis Thaxter as Andre.[102] In the United Kingdom, Maxine Audley took the lead role for an ITV Play of the Week broadcast on January 12, 1960; Cec Linder played the district attorney. The broadcast had been scheduled for October 6, 1959, but was delayed to avoid its possible interpretation as political commentary before the general election held later that week.[103][104][105] A radio adaptation of the play was broadcast on the BBC Home Service on August 4, 1962.[106]