Three partners in a publishing business no longer get along. Van Heflin plays the partner whose personal star is falling but desires to lead the business once more. One partner is murdered but the scene is rigged to look like suicide. The other partner is framed for the crime. Heflin’s character is then the only partner remaining in the business. A woman, the promotional manager of the firm, had a relationship with the accused man, but has started a relationship with Heflin’s character. She wants to be a partner in the business. Does she mean what she says about the relationship or does she have selfish intent? A little inter-office blackmail? A lot can happen in 24 minutes of drama!
It’s a twisting road for Heflin’s character as he attempts to both manipulate the situation and escape from the mess of it. It turns out in an unplanned way and he ends up on death row. She has selfish intent. He has selfish intent. They deserve each other and whatever bad things happen to them.
The story is by Kenneth L. Pettus and adapted by Robert L. Richards. This is the only Suspense play by Pettus. He who was writing scripts for other programs (one of his Nick Carter programs survived) and wrote for many of the popular Chicago-based shows. Much of his writing did not receive on-air credit. He was also a news editor for NBC in Chicago. Early in his career, Pettus worked in publishing businesses as a writer and editor. You wonder if the relationships in this story’s plotline were partly inspired by those experiences and some of the people he met.
As the years moved on Pettus, became a successful television writer and series consultant. He was an active writer for television and also a story editor and advisor in the 1950s through the 1970s. He worked on series such as Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, Magnum, P.I., The Big Valley, Wild, Wild West, and others. The real-life Pettus story of the 1940s and 1950s might be more interesting than some of his own television storylines.
When he left college he became a reporter and journalist, with regular positions and freelance work. He joined the Army in 1944, and was later assigned to the Tokyo office of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Eventually, he ran into a struggle regarding journalistic independence about post-war demobilization reporting and other stories. He resisted the telling of sanitized facts and details and that difficulties with military officers. MacArthur’s staff removed him and he was accused of “disloyalty.” The story of his firing received national coverage and the special attention of the journalistic community. Events led to his discharge in April 1946, not even a year before this broadcast of his script. Members of the Pettus family had been tied to the Communist Party union activity, and that likely came up in the investigation by the military staff. Pettus’ brother, Terry, was a leader of the Newspaper Guild in Washington State and led a successful strike against the Hearst newspaper the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the mid-1930s. Kenneth Pettus was tracked by the FBI for over a decade, mainly for these family connections. At some points he was an informant for the FBI. His story is yet another glimpse of how the Hollywood Blacklist and other investigations were in the background of Suspense and some of its staff and writers, such as Robert L. Richards. It is not known if Pettus knew Richards outside of having this script considered for the series. As I have stated to many over the years, “Suspense is an onion that you can keep peeling away layers of backstories, yet it always stays the same size as one backstory leads to another. Some days it seems the onion is bigger than it was the day before.”
For details about Pettus’ career, there is a superb academic article based on Freedom of Information Act requests of FBI documents that were not available before its publication. It is fascinating and highly recommended. It is From Stars and Stripes Editor to FBI Informant: The Conflicting Loyalties of Kenneth Pettus, from the January 2014 edition of Journalism History by Dr. Cindy Elmore of East Carolina University. It is available for free download at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284900858_From_Stars_and_Stripes_Editor_to_FBI_Informant_The_Conflicting_Loyalties_of_Kenneth_Pettus and is highly recommended. What makes it all the more interesting is that Dr. Elmore was once a reporter at The Stars and Stripes, many years later.
Pettus occasionally used the pseudonym “Steven Thornely” when writing for television.
The title comes from the very old nursery rhyme and song, that has the lines “They all ran after the farmer’s wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.” The partners are the mice who can’t see what’s really going on. She’s the farmer’s wife. Freud can have a field day with the rest of the imagery.
Background on the “Three Blind Mice” poem that inspired the title can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice There are many theories about the symbolism of the three mice in relation to historical events dating back to the 1600s. The poem did not become popular for children until much later. A version published in a children’s book can be viewed at The Complete Version of Ye Three Blind Mice https://archive.org/details/completeversiono00ivim/mode/2up
The most educated readers of this blog know that the song is revered for its critical role in entertainment history beyond its being the title of a Suspense episode. https://youtu.be/s5a45f1uy80
There are two network recordings of this episode, and it is not known to which coast they were broadcast. One recording has no pause before the network ID (“dirID”) and the other has a three second pause (“3s”). The “dirID” recording is the better of the two. There is a difference in dialogue at about the 14:00 mark in the first lines after the mid-show commercial.
3s “Does, uh, the defendant wish to make a statement before sentence is passed?”
dirID “The defendant will rise and face the court.”
This information may be helpful in identifying the source of an Armed Forces Radio Service recording of the episode should one be found.
This production was originally planned for broadcast on 1947-01-16. The reason for the delay is not known. Suspense guests had first priority for their movie studio schedules, which were always subject to unforeseen issues.
This is the first appearance of Van Heflin on Suspense. He was remarkably skilled at the craft of radio. You can sense his ability in this very episode in the manner in scenes that have monologue descriptions of his activities. He has great nuance, purposeful changes in volume, timing, and the nature of his voice. It’s in stark contrast to the believability and difficulty that other actors have in delivering such passages. The awkwardness of Lloyd Nolan’s performance in Murder for Myra https://suspenseproject.blogspot.com/2023/06/1945-08-09-murder-for-myra.html is an example. Heflin’s third Suspense appearance, in the Cornell Woolrich story Three O’Clock on 1949-03-10, is one of the greatest dramatic performances of radio’s golden age.
Heflin’s career began on Broadway in the late 1920s and he moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s but still retained a Broadway presence. At the time of this broadcast, he had successful movie appearances with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and in the musical Till the Clouds Roll By. An overview of his long and very successful career is at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Heflin Heflin was on radio often, and also starred in the first Philip Marlowe radio series on ABC. That series was closer to the original Chandler stories than the later CBS series that starred Gerald Mohr. It was the only series that Heflin had, with most of his appearances on anthology programs or movie-related series.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470130
THE CAST
VAN HEFLIN (Arthur Lockwood), Cathy Lewis (Helen Conover), Bill Johnstone (Captain Gibbons), Wally Maher (Judge / Elevator Operator), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Waiter / Harry the detective), Peggy Rea (Receptionist)
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