Agnes Moorehead is a jealous, selfish, nagging woman who sends chain letters to people associated with her husband’s workplace. They’re not getting along, and she does this to get under his skin. She pretends her actions are innocent and he’s making way to much about the consequences. No one expects the story to turn so darkly, not even the regular listeners.
The chain letter that she received was claimed to be “started by a holy man in Tibet to ‘end all evil.’” She forwards it to the two people in the world she hates most: her husband's secretary whom she suspects is stealing her husband’s affections, and to a man whom she was not aware had just experienced a severe personal loss. Her aim was to irritate the people involved and her husband (and also the listeners), but the events she sets into motion go horribly and disproportionately out of control. It’s a good script, and she delivers a performance similar to Sorry, Wrong Number. In that case, her character was an innocent victim; in this case, she is definitely not. In both performances, the mounting fear and panic of her characters is something many actors are not as capable of delivering as she can.
The story is by radio veteran Joel Murcott. His script Six Feet Under was produced just two weeks earlier.
It is somewhat distracting to have one of the characters named “Burt Reynolds.” That’s the name of an actor whose multi-decade television and movie career would rise to high celebrity status starting in the mid-1960s and through the 1990s.
Chain letters were in the news in early 1950, and possibly gave Joel Murcott the spark of the idea for this story. They were being used in a grass roots effort for the political campaign of Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Supporters wanted him re-elected to the Senate to put him in a strong position for presidential candidacy in the 1952 election. He did win re-election, but his third attempt for the presidential nod failed. Dwight Eisenhower became the 1952 Republican nominee. “Lucky” chain letters that promised good fortune or avoidance of personal disaster had been around for decades if not centuries. The letters were socially harmless, for the most part, just sent between friends who got a chuckle about them. The downside was that some of the letters were so persistent that they annoyed postal organizations because of customer complaints. The worst ones were those used as a method of conducting fraudulent schemes. In the early 1990s when the consumer Internet and online services like America Online were new, the equivalent of chain letters were common. They did not last and were quickly replaced by what became known as “spam.”
John McIntire subs for Joe Kearns as the Suspense signature voice. Kearns returns for the next broadcast.
There are two surviving recordings, the network broadcast and the Armed Forces Radio Service release (AFRS#323). The network recording is the better of the two. The AFRS recording was edited by its production staff to us the Paul Frees announcement of the series name “Suspense” followed by the John McIntire opening as heard on the network broadcast. Frees’ last appearance as the signature voice of the series was December 1949. AFRS used whatever clips of prior shows that could to make their editing of network programs easier to get recordings out to their stations as quickly as possible.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP500427
THE CAST
AGNES MOOREHEAD (Leonora Carpenter), John McIntire (George Carpenter / Signature Voice), Jeanette Nolan (Abby / Operator), Jay Novello (Peter Koshevski), Robert Gist (Reynolds), William Conrad (Police Lieutenant)
COMMERCIAL: Ken Christy (Hap), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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