Linda Darnell makes her only series appearance in a very dark Richard-George Pedicini story. She is a night club dancer, newly located in Las Vegas, but seems to have a stalker. The one unidentified man who keeps trying to take her life. One night after the last show of the night, she is waiting for her husband to pick her up. A dark, unidentified figure lunges at her, strangles her and leaves her for dead. She revives, however, and heads back to her hotel. She enters their room and finds her husband quietly reading in bed. When she asks where he was, he says his car broke down and that he had phoned a message to the club to tell her to take a cab home. The next day, she wakes to find the gas jet in the room turned on but not lighted, and her husband nowhere to be found. She breaks a window and turns off the gas. When she composes herself, she decides to go to the police with her story. She believes her husband is trying to kill her. They have had a rocky marriage, and he asked for a divorce. She declined. The police are sympathetic, but they really don’t believe that her husband is trying to kill her, and tell her that the gas being on was accidental. Disappointed by their reaction, she starts to check the details of her husband’s explanation of his whereabouts the night before, and they don’t make sense. There is a confrontation at the end… and her revenge for her husband’s actions are deadly, and surprising.
Joe Kearns is cast as a police officer and later as a hotel clerk on the phone. The parts are too close to each other in the story. If you’re not paying close attention it is easy to mistake the character as the officer on the phone.
This story is a twist on the tragic “murder-suicide” stories that occur in real life. This time, it's “suicide - ‘frame for murder’” that makes it very unnerving. She completed what the husband was unable to finish... and it is assumed he will meet a certain fate because of his evil intent. (Oh, spoiler alert... sorry... forgot). That turnabout is the creative aspect of the plot that Pedicini used.
There are two surviving recordings. The network recording is the better of the two. The other recording is from the Armed Forces Radio Service (#401).
Researcher and writer Martin Grams notes that Barbara Stanwyck was originally considered for the lead in this production.
Linda Darnell started in Hollywood at 15 years old and had an RKO contract. She lied about her age, saying she was 17! She found success for a while in the studio system but it was not always smooth sailing. She was often cast with Tyrone Power in successful productions. Her bumpy career and her personal life are summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Darnell
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP520225
THE CAST
LINDA DARNELL (Dixie), Lamont Johnson (Charlie), Joe Kearns (Hank / Man), Jerry Hausner (Sergeant), Charles Calvert (Barney), Eve McVeagh (Girl), James Nusser (Cole), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Tom Holland, (Hap) Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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