Anytime you hear that a “millionaire industrialist” is on the private plane you’re on during wartime, be careful: strange stuff can happen.
Richard Dix plays a Navy lieutenant traveling with his fiancé Monica. They are boarding a plane from New York to Los Angeles with a planned stop for them to de-plane in Philadelphia. Just prior to boarding, millionaire industrialist Silas Naylor and two bodyguards and his secretary Mr. Shepherd arrive to board the same plane. Naylor is on a mission vital to the United States war effort, and normally buys all the seats on the plane for himself and his assistants. He allows the lieutenant and Monica come on board. After a short while in the air, the Lieutenant realizes that they should have landed in Philadelphia but were still airborne… over the Atlantic. The pilots are gone and the plane is on autopilot… headed to Nazi Germany as part of a plot to kidnap Naylor.
Below are pictures of cast members Montagu Love, Gale Page, and Dix. Love died at aged 63 on May 17, just two weeks after doing this show. He suffered from heart issues for many years.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP430504
THE CAST
RICHARD DIX (Fred Onslow), GALE PAGE (Monica Vail), Montagu Love (Silas Naylor), Wally Maher (Cohen / Airport P. A.), Joe Kearns (Man in Black / Limo Driver), Hans Conried (German-speaking Englishman), John Lake? (Michael Shepherd), unknown (Miss Lee, the Air Hostess), unknown (Barney O’Reilly / Englishman #2)
Richard Dix would become the star of The Whistler movie series. This Suspense broadcast was about a year before the release of the first movie. Suspense had “movie envy” with the Whistler movies and though there were attempts to create a movie series based on Suspense scripts, they never happened. Suspense was a big success on television for five years but The Whistler was not. The series only mustered 39 weeks of syndicated episodes.
For most of the American public of the 1930s and 1940s, air travel was a mystery. It was for government personnel, business executives, and the very wealthy. This plotline would not be possible under air travel and piloting rules, business and safety regulations, and the technology of the time. The scripters could rely on only a minuscule percentage of the listening audience with any familiarity with personal air travel, making it unlikely that the plausibility of the plotline would be questioned.
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