Agnes Moorehead stars in an Irving Reis adaptation of the 1866 Charles Dickens story. The only other actor in the drama is Joe Kearns. They have a good chemistry in the performance of what is often referred to as a “ghost story.”
The story was originally presented on Columbia Workshop on 1937-01-23 with Reis writing and directing. Lewis changed the lead role from a man to a woman, allowing the broadcast to garner the high level of attention that a Moorehead appearance could reliably bring to the broadcast.
Moorehead portrays a magazine writer who revisits her home town after many years. She seems to walk into the most fascinating and horrifying story of her career. The strange story begins with her attempt to interview a railroad signalman who lives alone in a shack huddled by the tracks. Her appearance startles him as he is certain he has seen her face before. He has a recurring vision which has come to him as a warning of disaster before several train wrecks. She’s really skeptical about it and tries to explain it away as a combination of coincidence and optical illusion. His vision is so disturbing to him and he insists they are real. She ends inadvertently playing the tragic role in which his visions of her and disaster included.
Irving Reis was the creator of Columbia Workshop. He became a prominent film director for Paramount and RKO in the 1940s. Reis was beloved and respected by the pioneers of radio production as its techniques were often being created and developed for their first broadcast use by programs like Columbia Workshop. Moorehead worked with Reis in his years at that series. It was known that Reis was very ill at the time of this broadcast. In a letter that William N. Robson wrote to Edward R. Murrow in April 1953, he noted that Reis had cancer surgery at the Mayo Clinic in December 1952. Lewis may have selected the script because he knew that Reis’ health was in serious decline. Reis passed away in July 1953, at age 47. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Reis
Rehearsal for the drama portion of the program was on Sunday, March 22, 1953 starting at 3:30pm. The recording began at 8:00pm.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP530323
THE CAST
AGNES MOOREHEAD (Amy Sears), Joseph Kearns (The Signalman), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Ken Christy (Oscar), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer)
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