Frank Lovejoy stars as a troubled Korean War veteran in a psychological drama by William N. Robson. It is an unsettling story. Lovejoy’s character, Butch, is starting his life again after being in and out of government hospitals. He goes looking for a friend from the Army days, Pete, and finally is in the neighborhood. Butch goes up to the house, and sees a boy playing cowboy with toy guns in the yard. When he learns the boy’s name is “Butch,” he knows he is in the right place. He goes up to the home and meets Pete’s wife, Louise. After some time together that evening, Pete invites him to live with him and his family. He means to be generous, but Butch’s behavior is unsettling to his wife. Her instincts are correct: it doesn’t go well. He ends up as a menace to Louise, practically stalking her in their own house, making unwanted advances to touch her and especially her hair. Pete asks Butch to leave, which he does, but he seems to have taking the wife’s hairbrush with him. Some time passes, and Butch makes an unexpected and disturbing visit to the house while Pete is at work. He demands that Louise let down her hair and start brushing it, desiring to touch it, with things escalating to his choking her. Luckily, their little son interrupts and Butch collapses, ending the danger. We don’t normally hear Lovejoy playing characters with such despicable behavior, and he succeeds in making Butch creepy with a sense of looming violence.
The ending of the story is set up at about 2:30 in the AFRS recording when the two “Butches” meet.
The program was recorded on Wednesday, April 22, 1959. Rehearsal began at 2:00pm with recording commencing at 4:30pm. With in-studio edits, the session ended at 6:00pm, and additional production edits were made, concluding at 8:00pm.
Originally planned for broadcast on May 10, 1959, but was replaced by On a Country Road with Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. The working title of this script was “Friend of the Family.”
There are two surviving recordings. The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) recording is the superior of the two. The network recording is heavily edited, is missing Robson’s monologue, does retain commercials, but is in very low quality sound with noise and narrow range. Some network recordings in circulation had a patched show opening. For many years, only that network recording was available. Now Lovejoy’s performance, and its subtle nature, can be fully appreciated.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP590517
THE CAST
FRANK LOVEJOY (Butch Bailey), Dick Beals (Butch Carson), Cathy Lewis (Louise Carson), Bill Quinn (Pete Carson), George Walsh (Narrator)
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