Dorothy McGuire makes her only Suspense appearance in a David Ellis script where a woman to suspects she may have committed a murder, but she’s not sure. As she reads the newspaper account of a murder in town, she starts to wonder where she was at the time of the murder, and if the glove found at the scene was hers. When she calls the home of the boyfriend with whom she just ended a relationship, she learns he’s dead! She starts doing her own detective work to find if she’s innocent, and if she is, who committed the crime. She still convinces herself, however, that she’s guilty and goes to the police to confess to the crime. It’s there that she learns the very surprising truth, just as listeners do, as much of the background and motivations of others are held back until the very end.
CBS publicity promoted the episode with two interesting quotes. The first was of William Spier stating “the kind of odd, off-center psychological thriller which I regard as the ideal Suspense vehicle.” The other was of McGuire saying that the script was “a wonderful change of pace for me and one of the most unusual characterizations I've ever had a chance to do either in pictures or radio.” (These details appeared in many papers, but were taken from the 1949-09-15 Ottawa ON Citizen).
David Ellis wrote for series such as Night Beat and the early years of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. He adapted or wrote other Suspense productions. He was also an actor, appearing on many series, such as Escape, Cavalcade of America, and Suspense. He even subbed for Joe Kearns as the signature voice of Suspense in 1945-06-07 Two Sharp Knives!
Dorothy McGuire had a long career in theater, including Broadway, movies, and television. She also had extensive radio experience in New York on soap operas and other programs before movies took her to Hollywood. An overview of her life and work can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McGuire
LISTEN
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mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP490915
THE CAST
DOROTHY McGUIRE (Jessie Larkin), Joan Banks (Edna), Bill Tracy (Henry Hackers), Verna Felton (Henry’s Mother), Ted Von Eltz (Pa), Bill Johnstone (Lieutenant Fleming), Betty Lou Gerson (Fran Gilbert), Peggy Webber (Barbara Keely), Paul Frees (Signature Voice)
COMMERCIAL: Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator), Charles Victor
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Suspense was planned six to eight weeks in advance under William Spier, and flexibility was a key ingredient of all the years he was producer. He navigated movie set schedules and also matched scripts to personalities and abilities. This broadcast date is probably a good illustration of it. Dorothy McGuire stars in The Red Headed Woman… whoops!… Red Headed Woman with Dorothy McGuire was originally scheduled for this date, but for some reason, they switched to Last Confession. Red Headed Woman may have been scheduled originally for 1949-10-20, but got moved to this September date. For that, they substituted Goodnight, Mrs. Russell with Bette Davis. The suspicion is that McGuire was scheduled for the October date, Davis became available for that date, then McGuire was moved to September, but the script wasn’t ready. And then, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz became available, and who better to play a “red headed woman” than Ms. Ball! The script was held for them until that November performance. It is possible that the reason for some of the problems that a handful of Anton M. Leader’s productions had was because his planning horizon was not as long as Spier’s. He avoided a lot of problems and always had a backup script from the files in mind to save the day.
WKZO of Kalamazoo, Michigan prepared announcements of the upcoming shows on the station. These were usually done with information supplied by the network in hard copy format. The stations would write their promos from there. Michigan State University has a copy of the promos in their Vincent Voice Library that announce McGuire in The Red Headed Woman as an upcoming episode. The announcement can be streamed at https://catalog.lib.msu.edu/Record/folio.in00005707098
(Many thanks to classic radio researcher and collector Anthony Pemberton of Cobalt Club who brought this audio to our attention).
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