Jim Ameche and Vanessa Brown star in a William N. Robson episode that seems more appropriate for Romance, where it was likely first broadcast on 1952-01-06 (details are not conclusive), than it does on Suspense. She’s driving along a country road and her car breaks down. He sees her and tries to help her out. Then it rains really really hard and they can’t go anywhere. Oh, and there’s news on the radio that there’s a killer on the loose. They have to tough it out in the woods for some mildly funny dialogue. Call it It Happened One Night meets On a Country Road, or something like that. The story’s okay as filler, and Jim Ameche, for all his time acting on radio, handles much of his dialogue as an announcer and not an actor. Vanessa Brown plays the stranded woman as a helpless, sometimes clueless girl. The story finally gets good, but predictable, when they find the killer trying to get her car started to help his getaway from the area. There are also bears in the area, which Ameche’s character dismisses as unimportant and not dangerous. He later finds out they are important and really dangerous. Then he faints. (Spoiler alert; whoops... forgot to mention...).
The program was recorded on Wednesday, March 12, 1958. Rehearsal began at 2:00pm and finished at 5:00pm. Recording then commenced and was completed with in-studio edits at 7:00pm. Further production edits, along with recording of George Walsh narration and announcements for this episode and perhaps others, were complete by 9:00pm.
For years, the only circulating copies of this episode were heavily edited AFRS airchecks. There is now a fine-sounding complete Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#973) that is available.
There is no network recording available. The advertisers on the network broadcast included Shinola shoe polish and Ex-Lax.
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TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP580323
THE CAST
VANESSA BROWN (Polly Weatherby), Jim Ameche (Stan Torrance), Barney Phillips (Red the killer), James Nusser (Sheriff / Radio announcer), George Walsh (Narrator)
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