Roddy McDowall makes his sole appearance on Suspense in a rather weak offering. McDowall overdoes his accent in the story, possibly to emphasize the lower class character. The story involves poisoning as a means to steal an inheritance. His character is just out of prison and goes back to his old neighborhood. He’s visiting an uncle for whom he has low regard. His sentiment only gets worse when he suspects the uncle is a gold-digger for money of the rich widow he recently married. When he finds rat poison in the house (on the shelf right next to the heart medication she takes), his suspicion grows. He warns the woman. She seems a bit nonplussed about it, but the feeling changes and she actually ends up poisoning the old man. (Whoops… forgot the spoiler alert again).
The Britain-based website oldtimeradioreview.com is not a fan of this episode. It is not one of the series’ best, for certain. These are excerpts of the review:
Terrible, just terrible. I refer to the atrocious Cockney accent Roddy McDowall adopts for this episode, which is extremely distracting throughout (for British listeners, at least). What makes this particularly jarring is that McDowall was born in London! Perhaps he was deliberately putting on an exaggerated accent for Suspense's American audience, or maybe it is the way the script is written - full of clichéd English slang - that makes it seem so bad... For non-British listeners, the accent issue may not be so important, or even noticeable...
He’s not a fan of the plot, either:
The plot is dire, with zero credibility. To take up just one problem, it is entirely unbelievable that the Edna character - who is presented as both relatively wealthy and quite refined - would marry the lower-class criminal 'uncle Bert', who appears to have few, if any, redeeming features. Another issue is that much of the episode is taken up with a lot of nonsense about poison and tea, which gets very tiresome, very quickly.
He laments that McDowall does not appear in Suspense in any other episodes to make up for this disappointing story. The complete review is at http://www.oldtimeradioreview.com/suspense---o2.html
As usual, the Suspense music can improve a weak script. It did. But the series deserved a better one. How did this one slip through? But we know the rule: even bad Suspense can often be better than other broadcasts. The mildly surprising ending saves it from tanking.
There are three recordings that have survived. The single network recording is has the best sound. It is not known to which coast that was broadcast; it has a two second pause to the network ID (“2s”). The two Armed Forces Radio Service recordings are different. The recording that contemporary to the original broadcast is from the missing network broadcast. The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) released Suspense many times. The late 1970s and early 1980s releases were heavily edited and have openings and closings that are compilations of Suspense opens and closes through its history. Listening to them can be a bit surprising as the editing is not very clean. The Service also stripped the programs of its credits, hoping that they would seem “less dated” as many of the stars had passed away or were long retired by the time the AFRTS were playing them. It is odd that the original AFRS recording is from the missing network broadcast while the AFRTS recording is from the surviving one. Times are approximate:
2s 1:55 “The only home I've had since...”
AFRS 1:08 “The only home I've ever known since...”
AFRTS 1:36 “The only home I've had since...”
This was McDowall’s sole appearance on the series; he’s just over 18 years old at the time of this broadcast. He did not do much radio beyond the movie-based series like Lux, but he did appear often on Family Theater. Fourteen of his appearances on that series are noted in RadioGoldindex. Nostalgia fans know him for his roles in Planet of the Apes and also the 1960s Batman TV series. His career was much richer than that, winning numerous awards for stage, screen, and television, and taking leadership positions in industry organizations. He was a leader in film preservation initiatives. His career overview can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddy_McDowall
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470123
THE CAST
RODDY McDOWALL (Georgie Williams), Jeanette Nolan (Edna Williams / Girl in street), Raymond Lawrence (Uncle Bert), Wally Maher (Police constable), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Crowd)
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