Henry Fonda plays a man with a police record who decides to skip out of paying his rent, but his landlord won’t let him. The landlord is having a meal of pigs knuckles (remember that… I think the meal was picked so it would be easily remembered by the listeners). An argument about the rent becomes violent and Fonda’s character shoves him and believes he killed him. He realizes he can’t get away and has to hide in the house until he has an opportunity to flee. The facts of his past means that even though the death was accidental, it was more likely he’d be accused of murder.
The story is by Louis Este, who was also a writer for The Whistler. Some previous resources attribute the script to William Spier. No verification of that has been found. The Suspense TV version clearly credits Este as the author. Este has very few radio credits, and the name cannot be found in directories of authors or mystery magazines or other resources. There is no indication that the name was a pseudonym of Spier. But… Suspense history is full of mysteries. The script was used on Murder by Experts on 1950-10-30 and attributed to Este. (Hat tip: Karl Schadow)
The episode nearly veers into the problem that Murder for Myra had where the character has to explain everything that they are doing for the listeners. In this case, however, we learn early in the episode that Fonda’s character likes to talk to himself. Much of his internal chatter is his thinking about how to extricate himself from the situation. Unlike Murder for Myra, but there is background activity of people moving in and out of rooms and conversing, and we eavesdrop on them as he does. The internal dialogue also includes the character talking to himself, and referring to himself by his first name, and that makes us wonder about his general mental competence. There is enough variety in Fonda’s performance that it stays interesting and you even start feeling claustrophobic about being stuck in the attic along with him.
The ending of the story involves that pigs knuckles meal and the fortuitous realization that it wasn’t murder… but you still feel he got away from punishment for the wrongful acts of skipping the rent and an assault.
There are three surviving recordings, both east and west network broadcasts and the Armed Forces Radio Service recording (#125). The AFRS recording is drawn from the east broadcast. Times are approximate. East and west broadcasts are about the same, with the west slightly better to some ears. The AFRS recording is from a damaged disc, but the sound improved at about 5 minutes into the program.
East 3:27 “Better wait awhile, Eddie”
AFRS 2:53 “Better wait awhile, Eddie”
West 3:17 “Better... better wait awhile, Eddie.”
Summer Storm was produced and directed by Suspense creator Charles Vanda. He gets on-air credit at the very opening of the program. The image shows the revision made to Joe Kearns’ copy of the script (great thanks to the SPERDVAC script library).
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Vanda was producer of the CBS series Theater of Romance at the time of this broadcast, and was filling in for Spier as he was recovering from another heart attack. He left for military service during the Summer 1942 season of Suspense and helped create the Armed Forces Radio Service. Lt. Col. Vanda served in 19 different countries in key communications roles. In April 1945, he returned from the service and to CBS as an executive producer. Before he left, he was promised a return to Suspense as its producer when his military service was over. The executives who made that promise, however, were no longer in their positions. It was also clear that William Spier had taken the series in a different direction and created a big success that CBS was likely reluctant to tamper with. Some of that success was by Spier’s abandoning aspects of Vanda’s original vision for the series. The relationship between Vanda and Spier was cordial and professional, for the most part, but Vanda did not get credit for all of the times he was filling in (the next week’s program does not recognize him, but Lucille Ball sticks his name into the script in a creative way). By the time the 1950s came around, Spier was incorrectly getting credit in the press as creator of Suspense. Spier never claimed he did. Vanda sent an angry telegram to Variety at one point to correct the record. There was personal animus between them at times, but Vanda was already in a different and lucrative direction by then. He became a highly successful and wealthy producer and investor in television programming. He was a very generous philanthropist to the arts after his retirement.
Interestingly, there is no producer named in the next episode. Perhaps Vanda caused a bit of trouble by having his name mentioned in this episode.
It must have been confusing for the listeners: there was a movie of the same title, Summer Storm, in the theaters. Starring George Sanders and Linda Darnell, it was an adaptation of Anton Chekov’s The Shooting Party.
The story was re-done on the Suspense television series with the addition of a son to Henry Fonda’s character. That took the edge off the monologue segments that are a major part of the radio production. https://archive.org/details/Suspense--Summer_Storm
This was Henry Fonda’s only Suspense appearance. He was not on radio often, but had on-air appearances in the late 1930s and would also appear in some public service programming. His very long and notable career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fonda
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP451018
THE CAST
HENRY FONDA (Eddie), Verna Felton (Mrs. Waters), Lou Merrill (Mr. Waters / Dan the Policeman), Ken Christy (Mike the Counterman), Wally Maher (O’Farrell), Elliott Lewis (Graham), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice)
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