Rita Hayworth stars in her only Suspense appearance. She plays a conniving murderess whose life becomes intertwined with a corrupt money-grubbing lawyer.
It all starts when Hayworth’s character is found not guilty of her husband’s murder. The assistant district attorney did his best to convict her of the bathtub electrocution, but fails to do so. He tried to get her to admit she did it by agreeing to throw the trial if she gave him half of the $100,000 inheritance (almost $1.5 million in US$2023!). At this point in the story, the listener is likely on the side of Hayworth’s character as a victim of accident and a corrupt prosecutor. That sympathy won’t last for long. After being found not guilty, she admits to the attorney that she killed him.
The young murderess widow moves to another town and remarries an older man. Time passes, and “it just so happens” that his half-brother shows up one day… and he’s the lawyer who failed to convict her… and knows the truth. If you smell the aroma of blackmail in the air, you’re right. The story gets more twisted than that. Some Suspense reviewers don’t like this story, but it’s a worthwhile listen even with all of the unlikely coincidences. Hayworth’s character and the lawyer are dreadfully awful people. You wonder how one will get the other in the end. It’s not Suspense at its best, but it is entertaining as you find out.
Hans Conried is back from the service and is superb as the corrupt attorney. This is a straight dramatic role. Conried is often in roles where there is some planned opportunity to go “over the top” with some line or characterization. That’s not in this script, and he shows how good an actor he can be in a serious presentation.
The script was by Robert L. Richards and John DeWitt. DeWitt was the scriptwriter for the soap opera David Harum before entering the service. Some of the plot twists in this episode are “soap-opera-like” but take place in about 24 minutes. It is easy to imagine how a network soap opera could have dragged them out for weeks and weeks and weeks of daily episodes!
The husband’s death by electrocution would not work in modern homes because of the modern use of GFCI (ground-fault circuit interrupter) outlets in bathrooms. This same plot gimmick was part of Post Mortem.
There are two surviving recordings, a network one that goes directly to network ID (“dirID”) with no indication of broadcast coast, and a low quality Armed Forces Radio Service recording (#175) that is drawn from the missing network broadcast. A marker is as follows, times approximate.
dirID 2:14 “Yes, Robert?” “Laura, where's my electric razor?”
AFRS 1:28 “Yes, Robert?” “Ah, where's my electric razor?”
The network recording is the preferred one for listening.
This is Rita Hayworth’s only appearance on Suspense. She mentions that she is in a project involving Orson Welles, her husband at that time, and a close personal friend of William Spier. Welles and Hayward had a few months earlier in March 1946. Six months after this broadcast, Welles would make his final appearance on Suspense as a cameo with then-girlfriend Ava Gardner on 1947-05-01. Hayworth and Welles had their divorce filing in October 1947 and it was decreed a month later. The project she mentioned at the end of the broadcast while all of this personal upheavals were in process was Lady from Shanghai. Earlier in 1946, the iconic film Gilda was released. It has been popular among film historians and fans of that era for decades. Hayworth’s career was long and her life complex, but there’s a helpful overview at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Hayworth
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP461003
THE CAST
RITA HAYWORTH (Laura Williams, nee Starling-Morton), Hans Conried (Elmer Garner), Bill Johnstone (Charles Morton), Wally Maher (Robert Williams), Lou Merrill (Radio voice / Jury Foreman), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Judge)
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