John Dickson Carr’s script stars Elissa Landi who portrays a woman anxious to prove her fiance to be innocent of a robbery at the bank where he works. Somehow, she has to learn where the money is hidden to show his innocence. $88,000 is stolen. That’s more than $1.5 million in US dollars in 2022.
Landi was a stage and movie star in the 1920s and 1930s. She was born in Italy, worked in Europe and the British stage, and then in New York and Hollywood. Her best-known role near the end of her movie career was in the 1936 After the Thin Man. She then mainly concentrated on her passion for writing. Unfortunately, she died of cancer at age 43 in 1948.
George Coulouris, on the other hand, had a very long career and life on stage, radio, movies, and television in his native Britain and Hollywood (even in 1960s episodes of Doctor Who!). He was a member of the Mercury Theater and appeared in Citizen Kane. (It is amazing how Orson Welles’ influence from a business and production perspective is so prominent in the background of Suspense and radio drama in general).
1943-01-05 Philadelphia PA Inquirer
Note
how Suspense is
characterized as a “whodunit” in the advertising;
in later
years we’d know "who did it" as many plotlines shifted to how they
extricated
themselves out of trouble.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP430105
THE CAST
GEORGE COULOURIS (Derek Rolfe), ELISSA LANDI (Dorothy Dale), Ted Osborne (Signature Voice), Joseph Julian, others
Publicity for the episode claimed that the story was “written for” Landi and Coulouris. This was a common theme in radio promotion to make the plays seem more exclusive and more unique. Spier would often be quoted as saying that his strategy was to find good scripts first, then work on the casting.
Many Hollywood actors were not comfortable working in radio, so matching the right script with their abilities was important to result in a convincing and problem-free performance. As Suspense developed, good scripts and music that matched the flow and emotions of the story would often overcome issues with lesser skilled radio performers. This was not one of Carr’s better stories, and some of the experience with Carr’s story variability led to Suspense abandoning the idea of having a staff writer. Instead, they would focus on independent story ideas from freelance writers enhanced by a full time staff editor. The process was led by Spier’s skills in editing and supervising the show’s music. Robert L. Richards would supply the Suspense editorial savvy as well as his own scripts. This gave the show a consistency of approach that other series did not have.
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