Baynard Kendrick is the author of the original story featuring his best-known character, a blind detective named Duncan Maclain. The Suspense production stars Brian Donlevy and was adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert Tallman. Many of the listeners would have been familiar with the character and the series of novels, as well as two movies with Edward Arnold as Maclain, and therefore looked forward to this radio production.
Out of Control was the sixth novel in the Maclain series. In it, he helps a woman at a posh resort. She is being blackmailed, but she’s not really a helpless innocent in the scheme; a murder follows. Maclain has two German Shepherds. He travels with one for company and for assistance, and the other is his trained police dog which (at about 9:20) he says he reserves for his “dangerous assignments.” That line is an amusing foreshadowing of the adventure radio series for which Brian Donlevy became best known, Dangerous Assignment. The police dog’s name is “Dreist,” which means “bold” in German. He sends for the dog and asks that he be sent by air from a kennel in New Jersey… which would have been very expensive at the time.
Kendrick’s creation of the character was from his continuing personal experiences with World War I veterans who were blinded in their service. Three of the Maclain novels made it to the screen, two of them with Edward Arnold. More details about the character can be found at https://thrillingdetective.com/2018/12/21/duncan-maclain/ Kendrick was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America and was the organization’s first president. Details about Kendrick’s career can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baynard_Kendrick
Two of the three Maclain films are available for viewing at The Internet Archive. The first was Eyes in the Night (1942) https://archive.org/details/EyesInTheNight720p1942 and The Hidden Eye (1945) https://archive.org/details/hidden-eye-1945
There is a mystery regarding the surviving network recordings. There are two network recordings, one that goes directly to network ID (“dirID”) and another that has a five second pause to the network ID (“5s).” The two recordings are otherwise exactly the same. The recording identifies as “5s” has the best sound. How can there be two exact recordings with different times to network ID?
One of the indicators that the network recordings are the same is a slight reading stumble by Donlevy. After 7:22, Donlevy has a slight problem saying “spark plugs” and it is in both the 5s and dirID recordings. There is no such stumble in the Armed Forces Radio Service recording (#148). At 6:40 in the AFRS recording, he pronounces the phrase perfectly. Therefore, the AFRS recording is from a missing network recording. The only way to get to the bottom of this network audio mystery is to retrieve the original network transcriptions and play them. That is highly unlikely to occur as those discs are not available at this time.
The mid-show commercial concludes with using the bells of the Suspense theme for spelling R-O-M-A. It probably sounded like a good idea at the ad agency but it sounds very awkward in its implementation. They kept it up for a couple of weeks more, and then returned to a more typical conclusion of the break.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP460328
THE CAST
BRIAN DONLEVY (Captain Duncan Maclain), Bill Johnstone (Dennis Filmore), Cathy Lewis (Marcia Fillmore), Elliott Lewis (Waiter), Wally Maher (Walter Crane), Earl Keen? (Snooky & Dreist, the dogs), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Sheriff Blackmer)
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Author and researcher Martin Grams reported that this episode was an audition for a possible Duncan Maclain radio series. That led to some further research.
Some Kendrick documents at the University of South Florida indicate that the novel was being shopped as a radio series and also an A-movie. There were two letters there.
The first is a letter from Leslie Charteris (!!) to Kendrick's agent proposing a radio series with the Duncan Maclain character. Charteris notes what they had done with The Saint and how he could do the same. He outlines the costs of an audition recording and a financial arrangement.
The second item is a letter from another agent whining about not being able to get Out of Control to be considered as an A-movie. The two Edward Arnold B-movies seem to get in the way of them considering it being any greater than that. The pitch for a higher-level production was rejected multiple times, including by Hitchcock. This was disappointing because Out of Control was considered to be the best of the Maclain novels to date.
It's easy to understand how the Suspense situation was considered an audition for a radio series even if it was not explicitly so (unlike Lone Wolf - Murder Goes for a Swim which was explicitly identified as an audition on Suspense in the trade papers). Kendrick, his agent, and Spier would have used it as such. And we know that some Suspense plays did end up as screenplays (To Find Help and The High Wall did so).
While there is no citation anywhere as the Suspense appearance being an official audition. It didn't have to be labeled as such for it to get the de facto consideration once Kendrick's agent got involved. And even better: there was no up-front money to produce an audition. Because of the stature of the series, they were able to get a big star, a fine supporting cast, and great orchestral production support and get paid for it. No audition could have pulled together all of those resources.
One of the questions that remains open is how close Spier was to closing the deal on Sam Spade. All of the Kendrick letters were from 1945, so the offering of Out of Control for a big movie and a radio series was in the works for a while. The Spade audition was recorded on May 1 with an adapted script from the Suspense episode The Walls Came Tumbling Down. That recording seems to be lost. So there may have been a time that Spier was weighing the potential of new projects and that a Duncan Maclain series may have been one of them. Then some traction and momentum started happening with the Spade series and Maclain fell by the wayside.
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