Paul Douglas returns to the series in an excellent script about a wise-cracking San Francisco newspaper columnist who stumbles upon a Communist plot and ends up in the Bay. The dialogue is snarky and fast-moving, and has a cynicism about every quirky character he meets. Sound familiar?
It should. The script was used before.
It’s a script from The Adventures of Sam Spade from 1950-12-15, The 25-1235679 Caper! The series producer and past Suspense producer, William Spier, wrote the script. Using it for Suspense may have been arranged when Spier was in town for the Sorry, Wrong Number taping and publicity session for the new season. The Spade broadcast was from the Steve Dunne era. Douglas’ interpretation for the Suspense production is more like Howard Duff than it is Dunne, but only Duff can be Duff.
It’s an entertaining story, and as they say about old jokes, “it’s not a re-used script if you’ve never heard it before.”
The adaptation has the lead character changed from Spade to a newspaper columnist, Mann Jackson, played by Paul Douglas. He writes a column of “saucy chat and unimpeachable rumors” (a marvelous Spier-ism) which he calls “Mann Overboard.” As he enters his favorite Italian restaurant one evening, he finds the proprietor greatly upset over a murderous attack on a cousin who was slugged without apparent provocation on a San Francisco ferry boat. No one saw the attacker, who struck in a heavy fog at that time, but there are clues indicating mysterious international overtones to the incident. Mann decides to prowl the same ferry boat that night. While feeling his way along an upper deck, he stumbles onto a lifeboat containing a man's body, and the next thing he knows he is trying to stay afloat in the Bay!
The story is announced as “based on fact.” The only fact that drives the plotline is that there are spies in the country who occasionally take ferries.
At about 1:20, “Hap” recovers from a small flub where he says “Auto-Lock” or something close to that.
A recording of the Sam Spade episode has been included on this episode’s Internet Archive page.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP521124
THE CAST
PAUL DOUGLAS (Mann), William Conrad (Connolly), Jeanette Nolan (Mama), Jay Novello (Tony / Uniform), Fred MacKaye (Dr. Ames), Joe Kearns (Melton), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Tom Holland (Hap), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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In the Spade production of this script, Conrad and Novello play the same roles as they do in Suspense.
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