Any similarities to The Invisible Man story or movie are purely coincidental. There’s no invisibility elixir or scientific experiment gone wrong, this invisibility is pure trickery by an experienced and nefarious stage magician. Whoops! Sorry for the late spoiler alert. You’ll thank me later.
A quaint English village is being spooked by an invisible man, otherwise known as “The Man Without a Body." A gramophone is operated by white-gloved-hands with seemingly no body to move them. (For those born less than 80 years ago, a gramophone was a hand-cranked record player). Bells ring in a church tower with no one to pull the rope. We can do all of that today with electronics; we don’t need invisible people to do these things. We have Siri or Alexa.
This is one of those very dated scripts that make us wonder, about 80 years later, how listeners could be entertained by this kind of script. Just a few weeks ago, Suspense delivered an innovative script, Sorry, Wrong Number. The stark contrast of a Fletcher script and this Carr script (and others) is quite wide. One can understand, through that contrast, why potential sponsors suddenly perked up at the idea of bankrolling Suspense. It had the potential to not be “just” another mystery program.
Since the spoiler has already been started, it might as well continue. The American doctor played by John Sutton was no American and no doctor. He was a well-known Berlin magician in line with the Nazi cause to disrupt life in an English town.
This might be one of those times where knowing the spoilers actually helps the enjoyment of the story. It makes it like one of those light mysteries like Murder, She Wrote in the US and Death in Paradise in the UK (those usually have better stories than this episode, however). Don’t expect an exciting or deep mystery from The Man Without a Body. The program can still be enjoyed if expectations are measured and you focus on how Carr tries to make it all work.
You have to wonder if Carr liked the script: it was one of the very few not used on the BBC series Appointment with Fear.
The stars of the program were John Sutton and George Zucco. Sutton was British, born in India, and traveled around the Empire working various jobs until he found his way to Hollywood in the mid-1930s. He became a busy actor, as one comment on IMDb explained it, in roles that seemed to be at the wrong end of a love triangle or the wrong end of a sword in a “Hollywood swashbuckler.” Sutton became a US citizen while serving in the Navy. Zucco grew up in England but started his stage career in Canada. When World War One broke out he returned to England and joined the Army. He was wounded by gunfire which affected use of some fingers. He became active on the London stage and went to Hollywood in the mid-1930s. He was cast as Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A couple of months before this Suspense appearance, he was in Sherlock Holmes in Washington and played a different character, “Stanley,” who turns out to be spy “Heinrich Hinkel.”
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP430622
THE CAST
GEORGE ZUCCO (Reverend Arthur Morley), JOHN SUTTON (Dr. Jim Norwood), Joe Kearns (Man in Black & Narration), Raymond Lawrence (Newspaper editor / Henry Emmett), Vicki Marsden (Janice Morley), unknown (Reporter), unknown (Professor Ansmith, aka Carl Heinrich Von Keiss), unknown (George Wellman)
John Dickson Carr was already back in England serving in the country’s wartime information efforts. The BBC made the request a few months before and the US agreed about six weeks before this broadcast. According to a biographer, Carr was happy to leave CBS and he feared that if Suspense found a sponsor, they would micromanage his scripts. With Carr no longer under contract, Spier could take Suspense in a new direction, which he did.
A portion of the program survives as an aircheck from station WHAS of Louisville, Kentucky. It starts at about the 15 and a half minute mark of the program and ends at almost the 29 minute mark. It is audio quality is good, but obviously incomplete.
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