Elspeth Eric and Joe Julian start in a rather pedestrian Peter Fernandez script. A recently released convict turns to an old girlfriend for help after leaving prison. He’s trying to avoid the police, but kidnaps her daughter to use as a bargaining chip to avoid capture. The old girlfriend was recently widowed, and remembers the old boyfriend, but once her daughter is taken hostage, she does whatever she can to get her released. The woman is thankfully able to change places with the daughter. Then she starts to talk him down, and lowers the temperature of the crisis: “I'm giving you my life. You'll either have to kill me, or you'll have to use me as a shield, and one of their bullets might kill me.” The standoff diffuses, and she explains to the police “If he'd been a stranger, I wouldn't have had a chance. But he wasn't a stranger… he was an old boyfriend.”
Is this another case where the Suspense music could have communicated more tension in the story? It is very predictable, with little personal tension beyond what is stated. What if he was wrong about their past friendship? What if she was a victim of assault, and she had to surrender some even deeper feeling of hate for him? What if her job was to make room for a sharpshooter to get him? Even in a twenty minute story, there was likely room for that.
The program was recorded Friday, July 28, 1961, almost seven months prior to broadcast. The recording session ran from 10:30am to 2:30pm. The episode was originally scheduled to air Sunday, August 13, 1961. It was pre-empted for a sports special about the Mantle-Maris home run chase of Babe Ruth’s record.
The surviving recording is a WROW aircheck. Once again, the station engineer misses the network cue because the weather report ran a few seconds longer than it should have. This is a much better recording than has been available to classic radio enthusiasts for decades.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620218
THE CAST
Elspeth Eric (Maggie), Joseph Julian (Judson), Lawson Zerbe (Police Lieutenant), Francie Myers (Babette), Peter Fernandez (Officer)
###
