This is the first episode under the Suspense “big star” policy and it stars a favorite of William Spier and of the movie audience, Peter Lorre.
The story takes place in rural England. Lorre plays a foreign-born math professor who believes his wife has betrayed him in favor of a young American doctor. Lorre’s character lets his jealousy get to him.
The newspaper coverage of the change in the Suspense casting strategy was positive, but the description of Lorre was interesting. This ad for an upstate New York station described Lorre as “noted for his characterizations of weird types.”
1942-12-15 Rochester NY Democrat & Chronicle
His most recent and memorable role prior to the broadcast was in The Maltese Falcon in 1941, but was often playing odd foreign types. He was a Hungarian Jew who worked on stage and movies in Hungary and Germany prior to moving to the United States. His strangest casting to our modern sensibilities was as the Japanese agent and detective Mr. Moto in a series of movies. Such casting today would not be possible. Back then it showed the wide range of his acting abilities. His big role was as a serial killer of young girls in German director Fritz Lang’s M.
Lorre had a long career but died at age 59. He was 38 years old for this Suspense appearance. For years, his distinctive voice and speech pattern was a favorite of night club and television impersonators. Getting the well-known Lorre for Suspense was a very big deal.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP421215
THE CAST
PETER LORRE (Professor Erwin Krafft), Alice Frost (Cynthia), Mercedes McCambridge (Lady Randolph), David Gothard (Dr. Craig), Ted Osborne (Signature Voice)
Mercedes McCambridge was a highly regarded radio, stage, and movie actress, and yet another member of the Mercury Theater.
This script was later adapted for the 1948-12-19 broadcast for John Dickson Carr’s radio series Cabin B-13. When Carr returned to the US after the war, CBS hired him to base a radio series on one of his most famous stories. He had difficulty keeping up with the weekly requirement for new scripts, so he resorted to re-working some of his Suspense scripts to keep up with the broadcast schedule.
The title ‘Til Death Do Us Part was used for a totally different Suspense broadcast in 1961-11-05. Having a title that is pronounced the same and subject to a variety of spellings confused many collectors over the decades into thinking it was the same script used 19 years apart. The 1961 script was written by Ben Kagen. “ ‘til” is a contraction of “until.” “Till” is correct but is not the same as “until,” and also has multiple meanings (a place to store cash or to prepare ground for planting). It gets confusing after a while. As the style guides say, “ ‘until’ is always correct” but it seems like a clumsy title and does not reflect casual everyday speech. Below is the image from the 1961 script cover.
"Till" instead of " 'til" in this title is not wrong, or even questionable. "Till" as a preposition and conjunction actually predates "until" in English, and "till death do us part" (or more properly "till death us do part", or earlier "till death us depart") is the correct spelling of the phrase from the marriage liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. [Jan 30, 2023]Carr had lived in England for more than a decade and likely would have been familiar with the Book of Common Prayer usage.
Collectors also believed at various points that the same script was used on Inner Sanctum because one of their broadcasts had the same name. The same title was used three times on The Whistler, with each one being a different story. The title is popular because it is one of the most widely known and recognizable lines in a marriage ceremony. It is funny that a line used in a happy event that joins people together always means someone is about to be murdered when it’s a title for a mystery program.
A related item is how Jack Benny was asked if he ever thought of divorcing his wife, Mary. They had one of the happiest marriages in all of Hollywood. Jack replied “Murder, yes… divorce, no” which drew a laugh with his trademark pause in delivering the line.
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