Robert Mitchum’s character has hit a bad financial time and he wants a new start. His business partner has mismanaged the business quite badly and bankruptcy looms. He boards an elevator in the building and a woman is startled and in her first glance at him mistakes him as her husband! It turns out he’s a dead ringer for him. This is Suspense, so you know she has to be in an unhappy marriage and wants a way out of it. Like the old Jack Benny line when he was asked if he ever thought of divorcing Mary and responded “murder, yes… divorce, no” to great chuckling, Suspense uses that sentiment once again as a plotline. What nefarious deed would do away with him? Since Mitchum’s character looks exactly like him, there’s a new possibility. Since he and the wife have fallen in love (that was quick), he could start a new life by swapping places with her husband. They could have the husband’s body be in an accident and be mistaken for his now bankrupt self! Sounds like a great idea! What could possibly go wrong? A lot, because this is Suspense.
“It just so happens” that Mitchum’s character is a private pilot. He poses as a real estate agent and dupes the husband into taking a flight at night to travel see some property that could be used as a private retreat. He takes a freshly-dyed black parachute with him, and they take off. He kills the husband while in flight. He swaps seats with the freshly-demised husband so it will appear that he was the pilot. He exits the plane, parachuting to safety, unseen in the dark of night. Then we find out what could possibly go wrong in a surprise ending after he assumes the husband’s identity.
This could have easily been a superb Whistler script, but we wouldn’t have had the great Suspense music. That music helps carries and heightens the story, as it often does and diminishes its weaknesses. It is good listening.
The story would not work with today’s forensics, but the authors were pretty sharp pros in the radio game, and they’d come up with something else if they were writing today. The script was by Robert E. Lee and E. Jack Neuman. Lee was a writer for many early radio series such as Columbia Workshop and was later producer of Favorite Story, Railroad Hour and others. He was best known for the 1955 stage play Inherit the Wind which became a 1960 movie. E. Jack Neuman became a radio writing legend, one of the best writers in the medium for numerous series, especially in some of the superior 1950s series.
Both east and west network recordings have survived. The east broadcast includes the tease to stay tuned for The FBI in Peace and War. The east recording is the better of the two.
This episode was originally planned to air a week earlier. It was delayed for a “victory lap” repeat performance of Dead Ernest to mark the series achievement of the Peabody Award.
The title of the episode is a juxtaposition of “death” and “live” that builds curiosity and irony in the story. “Oak” is one of nature’s sturdiest trees, and is in contrast to the morally weak and conniving main characters of the story.
This the first of two appearances on Suspense by Robert Mitchum. He had a very long film career that was notable for film noir classics like Out of the Past. His work broadened greatly through the 1960s and 1970s. Mitchum did not do much radio, with many of the few appearances on movie-related series. His career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mitchum
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470515
THE CAST
ROBERT MITCHUM (David Sutherland), Mary Jane Croft (Diana Melville, nee Blake), Jerry Hausner (Elevator Operator), Bill Johnstone (Hotel clerk), Wally Maher (Detective / Man in elevator), Hans Conried (Philippe the waiter), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Flight controller), Peggy Rea (Operator), unknown (Rex Melville)
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