The first performance of this script on 1943-03-16 is missing;
this is the second and final performance of the script. The script
was used in BBC Appointment with Fear series on 1943-09-11; no
recording has survived.
John Dickson Carr builds this story on an urban legend of “the
vanishing lady” or “the vanishing hotel room” that began with a
newspaper story in 1897. A mother was sick and she sent her daughter
out for an errand, but when she returns there is no such hotel room
and no trace of her mother. The story concludes with the authorities
saying that her mother died of the plague and they needed to hush
things up so there would not be a panicked mass exodus from Paris and
the international exposition that was being held there. The concept
was used in many stories, radio programs, television programs, and
movies; this time the story takes place on a ship, but authors have
used the plot on planes, trains, and land locales.
For Cabin B-13, the story begins with newlyweds taking a
cruise to pre-war Europe for their honeymoon. They bring their gifts
and savings amounting to $10,000 in cash ($170,000 in US$2023!) and
will spend three months traveling about Europe. Today, no one would
bring that much money with them, and they would use credit cards and
electronic funds transfer. Such things were not available at the time
in the format we are so used to them now. The money is to be locked
in the ship’s safe, but the husband disappears and so does the
money.
The bride has been ill. We’re told that she is recovered from
“brain fever,” which is an unsophisticated name for meningitis.
She is getting her strength back, but this is Carr’s story device
to indicate that she is vulnerable and subject to some nefarious
deed, building sympathy for the character, and laying the groundwork
for others to say she is prone to memory loss and misunderstanding of
reality. That nefarious deed is, like the “vanishing lady,” that
no one believes that the husband has been with her on the cruise, and
that the room she thought she had doesn’t exist!
Blogger Christine Miller says that the name of the ship in the
story is SS Maurevania and the name was derived from a real ship,
Cunard's Mauretania or Mauretania II.
Philip Dorn plays the role of the ship’s doctor. He was born in
the Netherlands and started his career there and continued it in
Germany. He came to the US two weeks before WW2 began, and started
his Hollywood career. He was usually a supporting player, often in
roles of European characters from Nazi officers, to members of the
French Resistance, and everything in between. After the war, he
appeared in theater and film in the US and in Europe. A stage
accident in the mid-1950s limited his career. RadioGoldindex lists
Dorn in only two surviving radio appearances, both for Suspense.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP431109
THE CAST
PHILIP DORN (Dr. Karl Heinrich), MARGO (Anne Brewster), Dennis
Hoey (Captain Wainwright), Hans Conried (Marshall), Joe Kearns (Man
in Black), Bill Johnstone (Ricky Brewster)
Three recordings of this episode have survived. The network
recording is the best of the three. There is an AFRS release, and
a late 1970s/early 1980s AFRTS release. Those recordings were
stripped of cast information and often their script titles to make
them seem “less dated” for the audience of that period which
included service personnel and their families and civilians in the
area. Even at that time, AFRTS stations were in areas that had
limited television services, and sometimes none, and radio drama was
good entertainment for those areas.
CBS created a Cabin B-13 series around the characters in
1948, but Carr would have trouble keeping up with the weekly
deadlines. He ended up re-using Suspense scripts toward the
end of its run to catch up with time. The series proved too much of a
burden and was cancelled.
The script was adapted to the movie "Dangerous Crossing"
in 1953 starring Jeanne Crain and Michael Rennie. It can be viewed at
https://youtu.be/gjk6v3dee0c
or https://archive.org/details/dangerous-crossing-1953
The announcement about the two different days for east and west
broadcasts is reiterated from the prior week.
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