Richard Conte makes his second and final appearance on Suspense. He plays a detective with a gambling problem. That’s funny: last time he was on Suspense that story involved the consequences of gambling as he played a boxer whose manager had such an itch.
Conte’s character has his office across the hall from a woman detective in her own practice. There’s a bit of Moonlighting (sorry for the TV reference) interplay between them throughout. He calls his bookie and finds out that he’s dead. The bookie’s collection man comes to his office and wants to find the shooter of his boss, another gangster in town. It just so happens that man is across the hall in the her office! Uh-oh. The script is a lot of fun with funny gangster and gambler dialogue, and the talking is at a more rapid pace than most episodes. So pay attention!
The program has similarities in timing and style as The Walls Came Tumbling Down and the recent Three Faces at Midnight. If you enjoyed those, you will enjoy this.
Inside joke? One of the gangsters has a last name of “Ferrago.” The word “farago” is something that is disorganized and messy. The gangsters in the story certainly do seem to be involved in disorganized crime.
Conte may be remembered by movie and Jimmy Stewart fans as the person Stewart newspaper character frees from prison in Call Northside 777. Years later, his role in The Godfather as mob boss Don Barzini won many accolades. He had a long and successful career as noted in an earlier post.
The story is by Emile Tepperman, whose radio career is better known for Inner Sanctum. There’s more to his story. He was a prolific writer for the pulps in the 1930s for titles such as The Spider, Operator #5, Secret Agent “X”, and others. He also wrote under some pulp publisher “house names,” including short stories as “Kenneth Robeson.”
What’s a little more interesting is that the story was adapted by 29-year-old Richard Breen. This is the first of two adaptations by him. He received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the 1948 film A Foreign Affair and won a screenplay Oscar for the 1953 Titanic. He must have developed a relationship with Jack Webb because they worked together often. He wrote the screenplay for the 1955 film Pete Kelly’s Blues and on film versions of the Dragnet television series in the 1960s. For more information on Breen’s career, go to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_L._Breen
The working titles of this episode were “Win, Place, and Death” and “Win, Place, or Murder.” The punctuation of the title is in question, but there is no copy of the script to settle the issue. The KNX Collection list of scripts has “Win, Place & Murder” with an ampersand. We do not have access to that script at this time. There is no copy of the script in the Spier-Havoc papers. Newspapers used “Win, Place and Murder.” The other question is of its punctuation. Over the years, sentiments about commas have changed over the decades. There is good reason to suggest that the correct title should have a comma after “place” rather than what they seemed to select.
Both east and west recordings have survived. The east recording includes the tease to stay tuned for The FBI in Peace and War. The west recording is the better of the two.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470424
THE CAST
RICHARD CONTE (Chris Draper), Cathy Lewis (Laura Lee), Wally Maher (Mike Farrago), Hans Conried (Pilsen), Sidney Miller (Lieutenant Herbie Knapp), Dick Ryan (Policeman), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice), unknown (Receptionist), unknown (Pilsen’s secretary)
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