June Havoc stars as a struggling actor who happens to find herself standing in the same subway car as a former acting school classmate. She’s just landed a big break as an understudy in a Broadway play. Where Havoc’s character has been scraping by, her ex-classmate’s path was cleared by her family’s contacts and riches. Envy starts to overcome her, and she contemplates stabbing her ex-classmate in a dark alley or empty lot, fleeing, and then working for auditions to take her understudy role. She suggests that the classmate join her for dinner at her apartment. She wondered about how she would execute her plan, and decided that getting off the subway a few stops prior to then real one, and then walking together until she found the right spot to use the scissors she was carrying at the ready. By the end of the story, she re-thinks her plan, and decides that the crime is too demeaning to carry out. She would be better off achieving any future success through hard work and persistence.
This is a demanding role with long monologues that comment on the subway ride and the passing scenery. It is hard to make such reading interesting. Havoc performs it well. The suspense is how and when she will commit the crime… and the surprise ending is that her conscience wins the day. It is an odd story for the Suspense series.
At about 16:00, the classmate asks how “Bill” was. This is likely a brief in-joke about Havoc and Spier’s relationship.
This was Eileen Dugliss Walzer’s only Suspense script. She entered many scripts in the contests run by the Dr. Christian series and had numerous scripts accepted for broadcast. She worked in advertising early in her career. While pursuing family life, she was a freelance writer for magazines and contributed her writing and publicity skills to many civic and non-profit organizations. The script was adapted by Mel Dinelli.
In the cast for crowd noises are CBS sound effects personnel, but freelance scripter Richard George Pedicini takes part in the murmuring of the subway crowds. He wrote many scripts for the Auto-Lite era of the series.
This is a network recording and there are indications that it is a west coast broadcast recording that may been the playing of a transcription of the east coast performance. When inquiring as to the source of the recording, we were advised that this was June Havoc’s personal disc, transferred by Los Angeles area disc experts. The program was believed “missing” until she found it in her belongings. There is no network ID by Kearns, but there is a local announcer that the show was transcribed and then gives the network ID. It could be a delayed broadcast, or it could be that the east broadcast was live, and the west received a transcribed broadcast. It is not known.
There is a poor-sounding AFRTS recording from the late 1970s or early 1980s. It matches the surviving network recording. It seems to be a home tape recording from an AFRS station, likely made by a military service person, a civilian working for the military, or a family member. In the middle of the recording are “commercials” that may be from that AFRS station. These recordings have a smattering of openings from the Suspense series over its years, so they sound somewhat disorienting. AFRTS engineers often edited out credits and sometimes episode titles to make the shows seem “less dated.”
The network recording is the better of the two. There are some slight disc skips in the recording.
Dream Song with Henry Morgan was originally scheduled for this date,
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP471030
THE CAST
JUNE HAVOC (Paula Stevens), Lurene Tuttle (Ruth Carney), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Train passenger with cigar), Dolores Crane, Berne Surrey, Richard George Pedicini, Gus Bayz, Bob Young, Bud Widom, Adele Sliff, Naomi Scher (Atmosphere sounds and Crowd Ad-Libs)
###
