Two big stars whose stardom was on its way to becoming bigger headline this unique Suspense broadcast. The opening scene almost seems like it could be a set-up for Inner Sanctum (imagine the scene with an organ background rather than the Suspense orchestra). Someone buys a coffin for someone who’s not dead yet (nor are they in any final days of illness), which is Sanctumish, for sure. Then, post-commercial, it bursts into a true Suspense drama with curious interplay of two strange sisters whose needs and desires compete and intertwine. Ida Lupino is joined with Agnes Moorehead in this one. Agnes gets to play the crazy sister who lives in the attic. Ida plays the nefarious one.
East and west network recordings have survived. Both recordings have flaws, and the east recording might be an aircheck and not a studio recording. The west recording, bearing the broadcast date of 1944-02-07, is better and more listenable, but still has some disc noise issues. The Armed Forces Radio Service recording is known to have survived and is #38. No copy of the recording is available at this time.
George Wells wrote the script, his only Suspense one, and it was used again in 1948 and 1958. His career was growing just like Lupino’s and Moorehead’s. For years he toiled on Lux Radio Theatre adapting all those movie scripts for radio. In 1943, he started to work at MGM as a screenwriter in 1943, remaining there until his retirement in 1970. Is this yet another Kay Thompson connection to Spier and Suspense? Kay was musical coach and worked on choreography for the musicals (as well as the occasional performance) at MGM.
This was not Agnes Moorehead’s first appearance on Suspense, for sure, but it was for Ida Lupino. She had a grand Hollywood career, and became one of the Hollywood’s most influential people as she moved from performing to producing. She was one of early television’s most important executives when she formed her own production company. She has a special place in Suspense history, though indirectly. She was the only other actor to perform the lead in Sorry, Wrong Number radio play in the golden age. That was part of a Kate Smith show in February, 1945. No recording has surfaced, and has likely not survived. (The Lux production of the movie SWN with Barbara Stanwyck doesn’t count).
The hymn used in the story is Higher Ground, written in 1892 by Johnson Oatman, Jr. (lyrics) and Charles H. Gabriel (music). It was used in all three presentations of this script, this one in 1944, 1948-12-09, and 1958-03-30. Many thanks to members of the Old Time Radio Researchers group forum for identifying it.
Lupino produced and starred in the movie Beware, My Lovely, based on the play The Man and the Suspense play To Find Help... same Mel Dinelli play in three different forms and three different names. Lupino would next appear in some of the Auto-Lite era Suspense, and then in 1958 was in a production of On a Country Road with husband Howard Duff.
The main undertaker in this episode is played by Ian Wolfe, another long-career movie and television character actor with hundreds of credits. He was very active in radio, and in many Suspense episodes from 1943 to 1946. He has affectionate Star Trek cult recognition from the episode All Our Yesterdays (1969) where he plays the librarian, Mr. Atoz. Fans know that is a perfect name for a librarian, because it is “A to Z.”
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP440203
THE CAST
IDA LUPINO (Lydia Haskell), AGNES MOOREHEAD (Elly Haskell), Ian Wolfe (Undertaker), Hans Conried (Second undertaker), John McIntire (Police Officer), Joe Kearns (Man in Black)
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