Cary Grant stars in this classic episode that has an interesting history: it’s by a one-hit-wonder writer who became a prominent journalist. Blogger Christine Miller describes it well: “it embodies all of the things at which the radio program excelled.” Grant gives his usual fine performance. The story was disconcerting to many listeners because hitch-hiking was a common practice at the time, and there were always warnings about being careful about picking up riders. Also, stories about a car breakdown as a precursor to a violent crime or attack, was not all that common as plotlines. Those kinds of stories became more common in later decades. Cars were not as reliable as they are in these years, and required constant attention to maintenance, and there was great concern about having a breakdown in an unfamiliar area, far from a pay phone, or some kind of retail business that might be able to call for help. That means, this story generated more shudders in the 1950 audience than it would today with more modern vehicles, GPS-capable smartphones, and phones in general.
Cary Grant portrays a husband and Cathy Lewis plays his wife, as they drive through a small Long Island town. They hear news on their radio about about a tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged insane woman who has escaped from a hospital and has butcher cleaver. She has killed several persons before her incarceration, and has started again. Police are in the hunt for her before she attacks again. They have set up road blocks to inform the public and request information from drivers who may have seen her. The news is frightening, but frustrated by the traffic, the couple turns off the main highway in hopes of finding a short cut around the traffic. Bad decision. This is the exact area where the crazed woman is believed to be running amuck. Another news bulletin reports that butchered bodies of an elderly couple were just found in their car. Halfway across the supposed short-cut, the car runs out of gas. Then, outside their car window, a flash of lightning illuminates the face of a scared woman running toward them. Panicky now, the husband rolls up his window. The woman pleads desperately for them to let her in, claiming that the insane woman is after her. Is she the threat that they fear? Or is she telling the truth about her plight and needs their help?
The story takes place on Long Island and near the village of Center Moriches. It is pronounced “more-itches,” and pronounced incorrectly by Thor and others who put too much emphasis on the first syllable and not enough on the “itch”. The village is on the south shore of Long Island, and is about 8 miles west of the first of the Hamptons villages. Bazar was likely familiar with the area as the Hamptons and all of the south shore of Long Island were happy getaways for city dwellers, especially for the beaches in summer time. The road with all the traffic he had in mind was probably state route 27, known as Sunrise Highway in the east and Montauk Highway in the west side of Long Island. It ends at the very tip of the South Fork at Montauk Point. Many of the side roads south of 27 are not short cuts at all, and terminate at the shore line. New Yorkers and especially Long Islanders would likely have been yelling at their radios for Grant to stay on Montauk Highway.
Writer Walter Bazar likely wrote the script while he was completing his academic work at Columbia University’s journalism school. Upon graduation, he became a reporter for the New York Journal-American. This was the same newspaper where the notable and sometimes larger-than-life city editor Paul Schoenstein worked. (He was featured in The Big Story). He was the editor who assigned Dorothy Kilgallen to Broadway, originally against her wishes, which then led to her celebrity career. Two months before this episode aired, Bazar married a co-worker in the paper’s advertising department. He would eventually be assigned to Washington, DC where he became a noted reporter covering government, science, and space program news and would occasionally appear on Sunday television news talk shows. This was his only radio script, as best can be determined. He died at age 57 in 1983.
The drama portion of this broadcast was recorded on Tuesday, 1950-11-07. Rehearsal began at 11:00am, and the recording commenced at 2:30pm.
Four recordings of this production have survived, one network and three different Armed Forces Radio recordings:
Network: This recording is the best of the four.
AFRS #344: This is an excellent recording, and worth listening to. All of the advertisements have been edited out, per AFRS guidelines.
AFRTS Mystery Theater: This was a 1970s Armed Forces Radio and Television Service series that put new “wrappers” on the recordings and played the dramas in between. Sometimes, the original recordings were recorded at hire speed up to fit the time slot of 25 minutes.
AFRTS 1980s: This is a low quality recording in the “strange” format with clips of Suspense openings from its 20-year history; show title and cast information were edited out to make the programs seem less “dated” when played on AFRTS stations.
Of the four times it was presented on the series, this first time with Cary Grant is probably the best. The others, however, had good casting and good performances. Two of them had real-life married couples in the lead roles, 1954-01-04 with Frank and Joan Lovejoy, and 1959-05-10 with Howard Duff and Ida Lupino. The other performance was 1954-12-09 with Harry Bartell and Virginia Gregg.
The story was also presented on the Suspense television series on 1951-03-13 and starred John Forsythe and Mildred Natwick. It can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKT098z1tX8 or https://archive.org/details/Suspense--On_a_Country_Road Television production was primitive in 1951, and the couple is riding around in the foggy, rainy night, in a convertible with the top down, with the windshield washers on. The top had to be down to allow the massive TV cameras to have an angled view, and close-ups of the actors. The bumpy and uneven country road was shown by someone (or multiple studio workers) rocking the car… or perhaps some in-studio contraption was used to accomplish the effect. Natwick was a respected actor who appeared in the radio series once, but was on the TV series twice. A few years earlier, she starred in an experimental TV broadcast of Sorry, Wrong Number that was available only in the New York City area. The casting was first announced to be Hume Cronyn in the lead role. Forsythe replaced him; no reason is known at this time.
A short film adaptation was presented at a 2014 film festival in Maine and starred Kip Weeks and Sharon Smyth. The main character was changed to a taxi driver, and the locale changed to Maine. It can be viewed at https://youtu.be/T7Q0LI4HN9g
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP501116
THE CAST
CARY GRANT (David), Cathy Lewis (Dorothy), Jeanette Nolan (Nellie), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Policeman), Larry Thor (News Announcer)
COMMERCIAL: Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Ken Christy (Senator), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
###
