Lawrence Dobkin stars in a Morton Fine and David Friedkin story about a husband, Joe Porter, whose entire life has disintegrated. The show opens with him in a hospital as doctors are working on him to save his life. The script turns to flashbacks and the events he ponders in his thoughts becomes the narration for the listener. Scenes that led up to this situation are replayed, starting with his wife telling him she wants a divorce. The story continues as he loses his job, his friends, and any self-esteem he might have had.
This show might be considered as very depressing, especially in its conclusion. One of the premises of the story is that Joe Porter’s “will to live” had eroded so much he could not recover, but if he had the desire to rebound, he could have done so. Once that desire was destroyed, the cumulative effects of the cascade of negative experiences, he was gone, right before our ears.
When he loses his job, his boss details the need to restructure the business and control their costs. This scene would have resonated with the listening audience because the US economy was in recession from Spring 1953 to Spring 1954. Many families had dealt with job disruptions in this period. The economy had started to recover. There was concern that the economy and businesses would retain that recovery. That particular recession and their own organizational restructuring was a major reason, among many others, for the Auto-Lite decision to end their sponsorship.
This is the first production under the leadership of Norman Macdonnell. His relationship with the series began during the 1949-1950 season when he served during William Spier’s brief return to the series after Anton M. Leader’s contract was not renewed. The highlight of Macdonnell’s career was Gunsmoke. His return to Suspense was likely as a placeholder to fill the vacuum created by Elliott Lewis’s departure. CBS was uncertain what they would do with Suspense. They were originally prepared to end the season with Terribly Strange Bed, but that assumed Auto-Lite would return. Instead of closing down for the summer, they continued with the backlog of scripts they had. This was likely in hope of gaining a sponsor. That sponsor never materialized. Macdonnell’s return to the series was as an established and respected radio producer and director. The series was in very capable hands as CBS pondered what to do with the series next, and the productions, especially of new scripts, demonstrate that. Macdonnell was likely told it was temporary.
This is the last of the original Fine and Friedkin scripts to debut on the series. It was probably commissioned by Elliott Lewis when there was am expectation of an Auto-Lite sponsorship renewal. Many of Fine & Friedkin’s scripts would be re-presented again in subsequent years. You can always tell whether a script was considered by Suspense staffers to be better than others by whether or not it was repeated. Not all of the best scripts were repeated, of course. Repeats had to be negotiated with the authors. One of the ways CBS was reducing costs for the sustained Suspense was to re-use scripts. The author’s fee was generally one-third to one-half of what was originally paid. Sometimes authors would be paid for the right to produce a repeat broadcast as part of their initial fee. Fine and Friedkin were so well-established that they likely commanded a higher fee than other writers, which was likely a reason that their new Suspense scripts ended once the show sponsorship ended.
There are two surviving recordings. The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS#497) is the better of the two, with much crisper sound. The network recording is very listenable, but not as rich or clean.
Classic radio enthusiast Elizabeth Tankersley noted on the Old Time Radio Researchers Facebook Group page that the AFRS version seems to be missing two scenes. She notes:
...the first line after the break is “It was moving in on me. All the dying that had happened to me during the day, moving in.” In the network version, the first line after the break is “Dr. Landis?” The doctors discuss the will to live, then Joe is eating dinner alone and the maid tells him his wife said not to wait up, and then he says “it was moving in on him--and the emptiness, the stillness left behind when she walked out of the house” refers not to his wife’s leaving the house at some unspecified time but to the maid's leaving right now... I guess the story still works alright without those scenes. I wouldn't have noticed anything missing if this wasn't already one of my favorite radio episodes, and even then I thought maybe I was imagining things until I checked the network version!
Enthusiast, researcher and performer Patte Rosebank also noted:
Whether listeners realized it or not, it really does feel like this episode was an allegory about Auto-Lite killing its sponsorship, and the listeners being the ones who hold the show's life in their hands.
Joe
Porter = the series
Medical team = listeners
The episode needed to end in Joe's death, to spur listeners to take action to save it, by writing to CBS.
The idea that this story is an allegory of the Elliott Lewis tenure of the series may be plausible in other ways, too. When you consider that Lewis was not always getting along with the CBS and Auto-Lite executives, and AutoLite’s ad agency, that he took professional gambles as there were experiments with story formats, and all the while ratings were going down. That was happening mostly with the growth of television viewing and the TV version of Suspense. After all of that toeing the line, Auto-Lite pulled the plug on its sponsorship (and also on on Fine & Friedkin). From the storyline perspective, as Ms. Rosebank implies, you could say they took Suspense and just let it die on the table, which is what it must have seemed like at the time. Whose desire was destroyed? Auto-Lite’s? The ad agency’s? CBS? Was Lewis and the staff the medical team, stymied by the lack of will of the other parties involved?
Suspense was "cancelled" multiple times, but some key attributes saved it until that fatal day of September 30, 1962. It was an anthology series so it did not have to pay a regularly appearing star or a writing staff. The population of listeners had changed significantly, and it had a backlog of great stories from prior years that the new 1950s audience may never had heard before. They could get fresh performances. There was a willing cast of superb actors always just a call away. The series had a marvelous reputation that the affiliates liked, and they could sell local advertising before and after the sustained network broadcasts.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
THE CAST
Lawrence Dobkin (Joe Porter), Parley Baer (Reamer), Charlotte Lawrence (Vera), Jerry Hausner (Herb), Michael Ann Barrett (Phyllis), John Dehner (Dickie / Collins), Virginia Gregg (Girl / Maid), Clayton Post (Steve), Frank Gerstle (Bar), Georgia Ellis (Ellen), Jack Kruschen (Landis), Larry Thor (Narrator)
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