Zachary Scott stars in a story that explains one of the hazards of life in an apartment building: annoying neighbors. It gets worse. The woman with the bad singing voice is always practicing, and her tiny dog is always yapping, but she’s a reliable and wealthy tenant so the landlord looks the other way when other tenants complain. She takes a liking to Scott’s character, and since she’s a rich widow, and he’s a single man, people start to talk that he’s looking for her money… especially after she’s murdered!
The story was written by Jean Russ Kern, a freelance scripter who also wrote for First Nighter and other programs. She was involved in news reporting and commentary for The West Indian Radio Newspaper, a radio service that broadcast news to countries and US and British territories in the Caribbean. It is likely they also supplied dramas as part of that service as she was described in the February 1946 Radio News as their dramatic script writer.
Elliott Lewis’ character has no name, just referred to as “soft voice.”
The is only one existing recording of this episode and it is 22 seconds to the network ID.
This story was included in Suspense Magazine #4 and a PDF is available on the same page as the audio files.
This was the only Suspense appearance for Zachary Scott. His first film appearance was in 1944 after a few years in Broadway and regional theater. At the time of this broadcast, he gained much attention for his appearance in Mildred Pierce opposite Joan Crawford. His career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Scott
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP451115
THE CAST
ZACHARY SCOTT (Carlson), Cathy Lewis (Girl next door), Verna Felton (Imogene Poindecker), Elliott Lewis (“Soft Voice”), Wally Maher (Snide tenant / Joe), Jerry Hausner (Elevator operator), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Morley), unknown (Pepe the poodle)
Verna Felton is marvelous as the bad-singing widow. In an interview with Wally Maher, Jr., he said that Wally, Sr. would bring the whole family to Verna’s house a few Sundays a year and they had a great time on every visit. Of course they did: they were all little kids and she had a pool!
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