Glenn Ford plays a car salesman named “Speed” Evans. It’s hard to decide if the nickname is because he likes selling fast cars or likes chasing women. He meets the alluring wife of a wealthy older man, and flirts with her while on a test drive with her husband in the car! They begin an affair, and he soon confronts the older man and says she will be leaving with him. The man’s bodyguard makes it physically clear that any relationship with his wife will result in a larger altercation that will not end well. Speed and the wife manage to elude the bodyguard and head to her hometown of Phoebe, Arizona (the town name is fictional). Does he kidnap her or is it with her cooperation? It seems that she can’t decide.
The woman has been tortured by the death of her father, and blames her husband for the mining explosion that caused it. Speed goes around town and tries to investigate to learn the truth about the incident. The information he gets conflicts with her story. It turns out that the very same event injured her husband, permanently damaging his leg, so he could not have triggered the explosion. She finally admits she was the one who pushed the plunger at the mine. She hated her father, and she took the opportunity of that day to set off the explosion that would kill him. The story continues… and does not end well. Speed survives and ends up on the showroom floor again. You just know that he’ll get into another sticky situation sooner rather than later.
Irving Moore wrote this episode and Make Mad the Guilty which was broadcast five months later. He later became a very successful television director. His biggest successes were Dallas and Dynasty. The script was adapted by Moore and Robert L. Richards. Moore was 28 at the time of this broadcast.
What’s the name of this episode? The show open says “The End of the Road.” All other mentions within the program and in newspaper publicity have it as “End of the Road.” That’s also what is on the script.
This title was used twice for on Suspense for different stories. This is the car salesman storyline. The other use was on the episode of 1960-01-31 about a model who was married to a violent ex-convict. That script itself was originally used on the series Indictment.
There are two network recordings of this episode; it is not known to which coast they were broadcast. One recording has a two second pause to network ID (“2s”), and the other is directly to the ID (“dirID”). Both recordings are in pleasing sound, and there is no preference for one over the other.
This is the first appearance of Glenn Ford on Suspense. He was originally scheduled for 1945-12-06 I Won’t Take a Minute but unexpectedly had to remain on the movie set, necessitating Lee Bowman to step into his role on very short notice. After this episode, Ford would not appear on Suspense again until 1957, almost 10 years to the day of this episode. He was not on radio often, usually appearing on movie-related programs, but starred in the short-lived NBC series The Adventures of Christopher London in 1950. It was created by author Erle Stanley Gardner, best known for his character Perry Mason. His movie and television career was long, starting in the late 1930s with film and going on for decades. An overview of his career can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Ford
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470206
THE CAST
GLENN FORD (Speed Evans), Cathy Lewis (Sylvia Ganlon), Wally Maher (McLean / Old man), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Dan Ganlon), Hans Conried (Zeke / Plonski), Ken Christy (Doctor), Peggy Rea? (Operator), unknown (Operator 23)
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