Robert Taylor returns to the series and plays an enterprising newspaperman who wants to buy a newspaper and run it on his own. He doesn’t have the money for it, so he asks his brother, a wealthy attorney, for the $5,000 he needs. For perspective, that’s 50% more than the average annual household income of the time, and about $65,000 in US$2024. The brother is not pleased, and gets nasty and insulting. Fisticuffs ensue and Taylor’s character knocks him down, but he hits his head on the corner of the fireplace. Worried, he feels for his brother’s pulse and there is none. Then he notices that the telephone is off the hook. A young woman is on the other end of the call and overheard the struggle. She also knows that it was Taylor’s character in the fight, but she does not know that the attorney is dead. Panicking, he believes that the only way to save himself is to find that woman and kill her before she learns from newspapers that the attorney dead and has the chance to tell her story to police.
The plotline becomes interesting, because it’s not someone trying to evade a killing by an unknown assailant, but an assailant looking for the right person to kill. It is unnerving how quickly he decided to pursue this line of action.
The story is by Harold Swanton who was a key writer and figure in the success of The Whistler series.
Robert Taylor was originally scheduled to star in Slow Burn for this date. The script was either not ready or Spier and Macdonnell felt that Slow Burn was a better fit for Dick Powell, holding it for his appearance in a few weeks.
Slow Burn was delayed and they used today's episode Four Hours to Kill. That change may have been made because Slow Burn was a better fit for Dick Powell, in their mind, or the script was not ready. Whatever the reason, you can always tell what scripts Spier likes by whether or not he repeats them or uses them when the planned schedule is in trouble.
Four Hours to Kill was used on The Whistler on Sunday, 1949-03-13 with a title change to Search for Maxine. It starred Joe Kearns and Doris Singleton. Spier obviously felt there was no problem with using the script on Philip Morris Playhouse just two months after The Whistler production on Friday, 1949-05-13 with Howard Duff. The Whistler was exclusively on the CBS Pacific Network with its geographically limited audience on Sundays at 8:30pm Pacific. PMP was nationally broadcast on Fridays at 10pm Eastern and 7pm Pacific. There were vastly different audience patterns for Sundays and Fridays, no matter what the time zone. Suspense had higher ratings than PMP. This meant that even though the script was broadcast three different times on CBS in ten months that there remained a large portion of the listening audience who were hearing it for the first time on Suspense.
The repetition of this script is certainly unusual. It was produced yet again, just five months later, on the 1950-06-19 Murder by Experts series of the Mutual network. The program is missing and there are no details available about its casting.
Curiously, The Whistler production storyline had a cousin who refused to lend the money, but it is a brother in this Suspense version. The PMP production has him as a brother, but he's 28 years old and not 34. The PMP script has the 34 scratched out and 28 written in on the Spier copy of the script. Wonder why the change!
The Swanton script was also used on television’s Four Star Playhouse with David Niven with the title Touch and Go. A syndicated version is at https://archive.org/details/FourStarPlayhouseTouchAndGo A copy with the open and close of the original broadcast is at https://youtu.be/3NLZkK0bOwE
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP50012
THE CAST
ROBERT TAYLOR (Ted Pomeroy), Joe Kearns (Walter / Cop / Signature Voice), Virginia Gregg (Maxine / Operator 1), Charlotte Lawrence (Anna Lee / Susan), Barney Phillips (Tough guy on phone), Vivi Janiss (Operator 2), Larry Dobkin (Guy in phone booth / Eddie), Sidney Miller (Bellboy)
COMMERCIAL: Peter Leeds (Hamhock), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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