June Havoc plays a vaudeville dancer looking for a good time after her final performance in town and Charles Laughton plays the blind date who traps her in her dressing room. He seems nice enough and a refined gentleman at the beginning, but when he takes out his knife to open a bottle of wine, she gets the ominous feeling that things might be taking a bad turn. She realizes that her life is in very serious danger.
The script is by legendary radio writer E. Jack Neuman with Harrison Negley. Neuman wrote for many series and for television; Negley wrote for The Whistler and other series. It’s a well done script and performance, and consists of dialogue between Havoc and Laughton for virtually the entire production.
Havoc and producer William Spier were married in February 1948, and this is her first appearance of the season. The story may have caught Spier’s eye because Havoc was a child of vaudeville, raised by her mother, as they went from town to town on what seemed like never-ending tours until she was a teenager.
Parley Baer is now the voice of “Hap” in the Auto-Lite commercials. He’ll have the part for a few weeks. It will shift to some other actors such as Ken Christy and Burt Holland and others as the Auto-Lite sponsorship continues.
Havoc’s upcoming movie, promoted at the end of the program, is The Story of Molly X. It did not get good reviews and did poorly at the box office. The cast, however, had some radio actors and might be worth finding for that reason. The cast has Cathy and Elliott Lewis, Wally Maher, and Charles McGraw. It even includes Frank Remley, the guitarist on the Jack Benny and Phil Harris and Alice Faye shows, in what IMDb labels as “Minor Role (uncredited)”! It can be viewed at YouTube https://youtu.be/BNEg_38pyII
The network broadcast is the better of the two recordings. There is an Armed Forces Radio and Television Service recording from the late 1970s or early 1980s that is in low quality sound.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP490929
THE CAST
CHARLES LAUGHTON (Vincent Hawthorne), JUNE HAVOC (Gloria LeFay), Sidney Miller (Stage manager), Paul Frees (Signature Voice)
COMMERCIAL: Parley Baer (Hap), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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