Lucille Fletcher’s The Furnished Floor is not what we’ve come to expect from one of her scripts. It’s considered a weak one, but it is still better than average radio age listening. Some of it seems eerily amusing rather than serious, more Haunting Hour than Suspense-ish. Just the week before, the legendary Sorry, Wrong Number was re-presented, so in some ways Furnished Floor is a letdown. Read the notes below and it may seem like a better program than the classic radio fan common wisdom. Its strength may be in its open ended closing events that lead to entertaining speculation.
A landlady is pleased when a former border wants to return after losing his wife just a year ago. He asks to rent the very same single-floor apartment they shared. He’s pleased to learn that the apartment is still exactly the same and has not been cleaned or painted. Why is he returning? Is it with a new wife or does it still have something to do with his deceased wife, and if so, did she die or is he entertaining a ghost? He could still have her body with him, could he? The landlady is suspicious as he starts to re-assemble the apartment the way it was before he left. He relocates various furnishings he had disposed of, and even finds their pet bird! It falls to pieces when the landlady decides to rent to someone else because she thinks the whole thing is strange since she never sees the new wife even though he insists she’s upstairs and ill. It’s pretty clear that the man’s grief has turned into psychological trauma as he really believes his deceased wife has returned and he does not want others to know. At the end of the program, the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is played on the piano… who is playing? The man? The ghost of his wife? He tells her to sing, but we hear him as he sings it. It’s safe to assume it’s him playing the song, though in his tortured mind he likely believes her hands are on the piano keys.
The traditional song, an African-American spiritual, has multiple meanings. In this case, it represents his grief and desire to be reunited with his wife. What’s next for him? Will they find him one day in the future having taken his own life? The story seems to be headed that way in the long run; the landlady said as much at the beginning of the episode when she says he was so forlorn she expected to hear that he drowned himself after the wife died. (The song was also popular in an allegorical manner for the Underground Railroad movement which helped slaves escape to free states in the north.)
Is the landlady okay? Has she passed out? Has she had a fatal heart attack upon gazing at this scene and realizing she’s with a madman or because she’s seen a ghost? Yet again a Fletcher story includes the sound of a body fall during the concluding scene. In SWN, we know what the body fall meant. In this story, we’re not so sure. Perhaps the epilogue that we don’t hear is that she wakes up and calls the police. Perhaps medical personnel to take him away after what is clearly a psychological breakdown. The lack of finality and the open end possibilities of the story actually make this story more interesting than its core premise seems to be.
The story was also presented on the Lights Out television series seven years later as The Upstairs Floor. https://youtu.be/LxcYCb9Knmk or https://archive.org/details/LightsOut-TheUpstairsFloor
There are two surviving recordings of the episode. The network recording is the better of the two. It is not known whether it is east or west. The recording goes direct to network ID and is identified as such, “(dirID).” The Armed Forces Radio Service recording (#120) is derived from the missing network recording. Times are approximate:
dirID 3:21 “You were always so very kind”
AFRS 2:23 “You were always so kind”
The two stars in this episode, Mildred Natwick and Don DeFore, make their only Suspense appearances. Natwick’s relationship to the series, however, is quite interesting.
Mildred Natwick was primarily a stage actor who also found great success in film and television. She rarely had leading roles and was rarely on radio. This was her only Suspense radio appearance, but she had other roles that are important parts of Suspense history. In January 1946 she starred in the experimental television broadcast of Sorry, Wrong Number on the New York City station WCBT owned by CBS. Pictures can be viewed at the Getty Images website https://www.gettyimages.com/search/more-like-this/526035622?assettype=image&family=editorial&phrase=sorry%20wrong%20number%20natwick She also appeared on the Suspense television series, twice. She had roles in the TV adaptation of On a Country Road https://youtu.be/lKT098z1tX8 and the original episode Murderers Meeting https://youtu.be/Aw84td-79ac Her long career is summarized at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Natwick
Don DeFore’s career started on the stage on Broadway, but he became very popular in Hollywood in supporting roles of all types, and had a very successful television career in the 1950s and 1960s. Most boomers would know him for his roles in the television series Ozzie and Harriet and Hazel. His long and successful career can be viewed at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0214529/ He was rarely on radio, but performed on Lux Radio Theatre, Family Theater and a few others. Of all the strange radio gigs he could have, he was in multiple episodes of the somewhat erratic quality syndicated psychological mystery series Obsession.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP450913
THE CAST
MILDRED NATWICK (Mrs. Hawkins), DON DeFORE (Mr. Jennings), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice), Harry Lang? (Canary whistling)
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