IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS TITLE WAS USED BEFORE ON SUSPENSE. THIS 1962 PRODUCTION IS A MUCH DIFFERENT STORY. THE 1955-08-02 SCRIPT BY LAWRENCE GOLDMAN IS ABOUT THE SEARCH FOR A CAT INFECTED BY BLACK PLAGUE THAT ESCAPED FROM A RESEARCH LAB.
Christopher Cary stars in a Mercer MacLeod story about a couple traveling the English Moors who are seeking shelter from a storm for the night. Perhaps they should have looked harder.
They find a remote house that might be what they need. They start to think otherwise when they realize what a strange house it is and are concerned about the creepy scientist who lives there. He turns them away at first, but when he finds out that Carey’s character in the story is a doctor and therefore a “scientific man,” he invites them in. He is conducting experiments using a “death ray machine” that makes living things disappear. He demonstrates it to them with a mouse and a dog, which they think is a trick. The scientist becomes very belligerent after his serious work is dismissed. The couple becomes quite dismayed with these surroundings and hope to get into town that night, twenty miles away. The weather has cleared and the strange scientist suggests that they take a nearby train, the only one of the day, that also hauls freight overnight but has one car for passengers. It will get them to where they need to be. They go to the train, and get on board, and soon realize the passengers are all dead! The train crashed and then… they realize they back at the house. It was an apparition, created by the scientist, to prove the validity of his work. There has been no train line for years, but there was a fatal accident with the old train a long time ago. They want to get out, and seem to have the help of the scientist’s strange assistant. But are they really leaving? Or are they now perpetually trapped as the crazed scientist moved from using the ray on animals… to humans? He believes Charles and Nora are not his guests, but his next subjects!
The story is a bit strange but is interesting to the extent that you keep listening to figure out how much stranger it might get. The Zirato-Hendrickson period certainly has its share of mad scientists. At least the episode is better than Doom Machine. But not by much.
The surviving recording is an aircheck from WDNC of Durham, North Carolina. There is some mild reception noise here and there, but is a very good and very listenable recording. It is much better than what was in circulation among collectors for the last decades.
Oh how funny it is that Christopher Cary plays “Charles”, and Mary Jane Higby plays “Nora,” as in “Nick and Nora Charles” of The Thin Man stories. Higby starred in a radio soap opera as a different “Nora,” This is Nora Drake.
At this time, Cary was appearing in the Broadway production of Camelot in the role of “Mordred.” He assumed that role in January 1962. The show opened on Broadway in December 1960 and starred Julie Andrews. By the time Cary joined the cast, Richard Burton (King Arthur) and Roddy McDowall (Mordred) had already left the show. Cary was the third actor to play Mordred. Robert Goulet made his Broadway debut in the production, and played “Lancelot Du Lac.” The show was Cary’s sole Broadway appearance as an actor.
Cary was born Christopher Bay Carysfort and came to the US in the mid-1950s to work in television and stage productions. He was in numerous 1960s and 1970s television series. His only regular role was as “Goniff” in the sole season of the ABC WW2 series, Garrison’s Gorillas. He was always working, it seems, playing some supporting role somewhere.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620701
THE CAST
Christopher Cary (Charles), Mary Jane Higby (Nora), Leon Janney (Jacob the assistant), James Ducas (The Master), Frank Milano (animals)
###
