This episode has a premise that might be found on The Twilight Zone: a man accidentally makes a phone call to his deceased wife. She answers. Uh-oh.
Then plotline’s backstory of how the husband abandoned his wife and the guilt that ensued. Could this have happened in the smartphone age of “butt-calls” and contact lists and voice activation? Carr would have found a way to build those concepts into the story.
Twilight Zone would have left you wondering with an ending that allowed for supernatural (or at least spooky coincidence) or possible but unlikely had happened. But this is John Dickson Carr, so this follows the pattern of a locked room mystery: there has to be a logical explanation, whether it’s plausible or not.
When radio drama falters in its final implementation, don’t overanalyze, just go along for the ride and enjoy it.
Suspense and CBS were all in on the star strategy with this episode. They were not the highest profile Hollywood actors at the time, but they were familiar. Lee Bowman, Susan Hayward, and Walter Hampden. Bowman’s career was in an upward trajectory as a leading man. He made lots of radio appearances in the 1940s. He eventually had a lucrative side career in real estate and public relations. He took over supervision of ABC’s 1960s radio series Theater Five, a series that deserves to be held in higher regard than it usually is, after the death of its producer Ed Byron. Hayward’s career was starting to get some momentum as well, eventually leading to five Oscar nominations starting in the late 1940s. Hampden was known as a great stage actor on Broadway in the 1920s and had done film work in the late 1930s onward. Both Hampden and Hayward were in Cecil B. deMille’s 1942 movie Reap the Wild Wind, considered one of the producer’s best successes.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP430330
THE CAST
LEE BOWMAN (Wilmot), SUSAN HAYWARD (Molly Carroll), WALTER HAMPDEN (Templeton), Ted Osborne (Man in Black), others
It is odd at this time that the CBS publicity machine for Suspense did not seem to be working very hard. It is difficult to find news stories about the series or detailed information about the episodes. We know that the show would find its audience, but the radio critics and radio page editors did not seem to be getting much information from CBS.
This script was produced again on the series Cabin B13 on 1948-12-19 to help Carr deal with his difficulty keeping up with that series’ deadlines.
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