The Hard Way

Lux presents Hollywood. The Lux Radio Theatre brings you French O'Tone, Miriam Hopkins, Anne Baxter, and Chester Morris in The Hard Way. Ladies and gentlemen, your producer, Mr. Cecil B. DeMille. And greetings from Hollywood ladies and gentlemen.

Ambition can be a wonderful thing, and a terrifying thing. It drives men and women to magnificent achievement, and to frightful destruction. That's the stuff good drama is made of. And tonight we have it in the Warner Brothers picture, The Hard Wave.

This week the names of four artists blazed brilliantly on the marquee of the Lux Radio Theatre. Reading from left to right those names are Trancho Tone, Miriam Hopkins, Anne Baxter and Chester Morris. The hard way is a drama of tempestuous emotion.

We'll go backstage into the life of the theatre, behind the scenes of glamour, to discover what one woman's ambition can do to those she loves. There's always a fascination for me in the story of the theatre.

All my life had been spent there from the time I was six or seven years old and hung around backstage watching my father and David Belasco at the business of staging plays until these latter days when Luxe Tarlet's Op has made it possible for fine radio drama to reach an audience father and Belasco never even dreamed of.

There's no greater thrill than watching young people climb the heights than the thrill that comes when a new actress makes a dark, cold theater vibrate with life, or when a screen test reveals some radiant new personality.

Even the novice seems to know how much of that radiance depends on a lovely complexion, and like millions of you, finds the solution in three little words, lux toilet soap. In three other words, curtain going up, launches the first act of the hard way.