This is a Mel Dinelli story about a brother (played by Robert Cummings) and sister who suspect each other of having killed the young woman’s husband. Each of them had a motive: the husband was abusive and the brother wanted to protect her. When they are both discovered with the body, they are faced with the task of proving their innocence to the police.
Newspapers, and likely CBS publicity, had trouble with the name. Some papers had “The Dead of Night.” But “the Night” is the verified title.
Only one network recording has survived, and it is not known if it is the east or west broadcast at this time.
This is Robert Cummings’ first of two appearances on Suspense. The second would be just over 9 years later. He was a very busy actor with an occasionally bumpy career and personal life. His movie career started in the mid-1930s, and he did quite well as he navigated some run-ins with studio management. He became a very popular actor as television grew in the 1950s, mainly for comedy programs. He was in some classic television series such as Playhouse 90, General Electric Theater, and Twilight Zone. Cummings won an Emmy for his role in Twelve Angry Men on the series Studio One. His movie and television career continued through the 1960s.
Cummings was fascinated with aviation as a youth. He was a military flight instructor in WW2. When the government began licensing flight instructors, he was issued “flight instructor certificate No. 1,” making him the first official flight instructor in the country.
This was Mel Dinelli’s first script for Suspense. There would be many of his original stories on the series and he also adapted published works for the program. Dinelli was a writer for the Gerald Mohr versions of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. In the early 1940s developed a stage play, “The Man,” which he re-worked to become To Find Help, a memorable Suspense episode with Frank Sinatra. Dinelli kept working on the concept and The Man became a very successful stage play, especially in regional theater for more than a decade. It became the haunting 1952 movie Beware, My Lovely. Dinelli was involved in many memorable Suspense dramas such as August Heat, Drive-In, The Ten Years, and others. Recognition of his movie screenplay talents widened with the 1946 hit movie The Spiral Staircase.
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TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP441116
THE CAST
ROBERT CUMMINGS (Jimmy), Lurene Tuttle (Helen), Wally Maher (Red Davis), Walter Tetley (First boy), Conrad Binyon (Second boy), Joe Kearns (Man in Black), Leora Thatcher? (Mrs. Gordon)
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