Dana Andrews stars in a Mel Dinelli story as a writer who has an idea to get rid of his wife and make it seem like suicide. What’s interesting about this episode is that personal audio recording technology, in this case a dictation recorder, plays an important role. Andrew’s character is having difficulty writing his latest play where a character is about to commit suicide. He chats with his wife a bit and she seems to have an idea how the story should proceed. He asks her if she could dictate what the suicide message should be. Her woulds should flow naturally as a recording rather than his trying to take it down in handwritten notes or keep up with a typewriter. It seems like an innocent request, but we know it’s not.
Wait… wasn’t there something like this in I Had an Alibi a few episodes ago? Yes. But that was to get the wife to write such a note, not to record one. There must be a big difference in the minds that run Suspense that the listening audience will not catch on with the pattern of doing away with wives.
There is only one surviving recording of this episode and it is in pleasing sound. It is a network one and there is not indication of whether it is east or west.
At approximately the 8:15 mark, the happy couple is in a diner looking at jukebox selections and there is a reference to the song “Gloomy Sunday.” This song had a reputation for driving people to suicide. The legend began in Hungary when the song was released there in the 1933. Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress had lyrics about the despair of war, and then a Hungarian poet wrote different lyrics about how a lover’s death drove someone into depression and had them contemplate suicide. Those new lyrics became the ones that were most used. The popular English version was recorded by Billie Holiday. Her version was banned by the BBC because of the reputation and what Wikipedia describes as “being detrimental to wartime morale.” They did permit instrumental versions on their airwaves. The reference here in the story would have been easily recognized by listeners to Suspense, and they would have chuckled about it since the joke fits in with the story. In a CBS publicity release in 1944, picked up in the 1944-08-29 Waterbury CT Democrat, the opening paragraph is amusing in relation to this topic and this episode, and it may be why the reference is made in the script:
“Some day,” gloated William Spier, “I’m going to work an arrangement of ‘Gloomy Sunday’ into my ‘Suspense’ show!”
This is the first appearance on Suspense for Dana Andrews. His career started in 1940 and it was very long and has too many film, television, and radio credits to detail here, but Wikipedia has a good overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Andrews His big movies were Laura in 1944 and the 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives. From there his career took a turn toward film noir roles. One radio program he starred in I Was a Communist for the FBI is a type of film noir for radio once the political cold war aspects are shunted aside. It’s a well-done series with lots of untrustable characters and double and triple crosses, like many film noir stories had. Andrews had a marvelous and recognizable voice for radio and appeared often.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP450517
THE CAST
DANA ANDREWS (Walter Faber), Cathy Lewis (Eleanor Faber), Wally Maher (Nick / Police Officer), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Joe Weiss), Earl Keen? (Tracy the dog)
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