Re: Suspense Upgrades

by greybelt 4/9/2023, 6:36 am

Today's Suspense is Fugue in C Minor with Ida Lupino and Vincent Price. This Lucille Fletcher story has a curious backstory and also a speculative legend! A widowed musician befriends a woman because of a mutual love of music. His children believe their mother’s body is hidden in their home in a small room behind a massive pipe organ. It’s a creepy story, made creepier by the fact that children were involved, and they’re creepy, too.

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Fletcher had a deep love of music. When she was at Vassar College, she won a scholarship to study in Spain for a particular musical instrument: the organ! She was also a music critic for The New Yorker magazine for a time, and worked in the CBS music department. Music brought Fletcher and composer Bernard Herrmann together in marriage, too.

Both the east and west network recordings have survived. The west recording is better. It's not just sound quality; it's a better performance. There are problems in the east broadcast, perhaps attributable to Spier's absence as he recovers from his heart attack. At the 17 to 19 minute mark of the east broadcast, the child actors seem to be having trouble with their lines. Even the adult actors seem uncertain about things in their own performances. The west broadcast is much, much smoother.

The blogpost has details about the happy legend that Joe Kearns ("The Man in Black") is the organist in the broadcast. We don’t know if it’s true or false, but the fan in us wants it to be true, which means we have to be extra cautious about believing it. When Kearns was a young radio performer in Salt Lake City, he regularly entertained at the grand Wurlitzer organ in the city's downtown theater; it's likely he supplied some in-studio music at WSL for their productions. The possibilities are enticing, the research is inconclusive, and tilts toward the unlikely. But... it could be a great story. Learn about it in the blogpost... Enjoy!!

by bojim1 4/10/2023, 12:24 am

I think Joseph Kearns had his house built around his Wurlitzer Grand. Thanks for all the background info Joe!

by greybelt 4/10/2023, 5:30 am

Today's Suspense is Case History on Edgar Lowndes. A railroad magnate suffers from headaches and his psychiatrist suspects he killed his wife by giving her the “wrong” medicine, and killed an associate in a train “accident.” But wait… there’s more… The Robert Tallman script is well done, but you do wonder if we will find out he also murdered Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley if the program was longer. It does not "feel" like it belongs on Suspense after some of the higher level stories of the most recent weeks.

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The cast stars Thomas Mitchell, the only male actor on Suspense to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony. Mitchell is known for his role as “Uncle Billy” in It’s a Wonderful Life. (The only female actor on the series to do so was Ellen McRae, better known in future years as Ellen Burstyn).

The west coast broadcast of 1944-06-12 has survived, and the program was pre-empted in New York for news about the progress of the D-Day Invasion. Others in the Thursday broadcast are may have had interruptive news bulletins and not full pre-emption.

by greybelt 4/11/2023, 6:31 am

Today's Suspense is A Friend to Alexander, first presented months ago, but now re-performed under Roma. The east/Thursday and west/Monday broadcasts are quite different and worth exploring. Wartime radio was fascinating; producers had to be ready to adapt to any news event that would affect their scheduled time. This particular Suspense production is a prime example of that as well as the challenges of having broadcasts four days apart and trying to keep the same casts and crew together.

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Breaking news in the midst of the ongoing D-Day actions forced a delay to the Thursday Suspense broadcast and quick edits to the script. They likely had little time to fully prepare for the interruption. The Monday west broadcast is the full presentation. Many scripts were written in a modular fashion for timing edits that would be decided in rehearsal. In the breaking wartime news environment, they also knew what parts of a script and timing of pace could be altered to fit their time commitments.

Robert Young was scheduled to appear, but rising star Richard Whorf replaced him. His acting career eventually became a very successful TV directing one. Hans Conried is in the east broadcast, replaced by Elliott Lewis for the west.

We have east and west network broadcasts, and the AFRS version (which was derived from the east one). The blogpost also links to the original presentation of the story with Young.

Top blog traffic rank by episode as of 2023-04-11 morning

by kdmarket 4/11/2023, 4:40 pm

suspense 1943-06-08 Five Canaries in the Room

new recording is missing suspense open

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old recording

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by greybelt 4/11/2023, 6:31 pm

kdmarket:
It sounds like a patched opening to me at 1:25.

There was also a patch in Menace in Wax that was similar to this one. That one used the open from Lord of the Witch Doctors.

I suspect this is a patch and it's a good one. What do others think?

by greybelt 4/12/2023, 5:23 am

Today's Suspense is The Ten Grand, featuring Lucille Ball in a very demanding near-monologue role. Her character realizes her purse is stolen… she finds it… and it’s got $10,000 in it! That’s more than $170,000 in 2023US$… What will she do?

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The script was written by Virginia Radcliffe, best recognized for many years of writing for Cavalcade of America. It was her only Suspense script. Enjoy!

Two things yesterday as I keep working on the blogposts -- first, I'm trying to figure out the accurate title of Dateline Lisbon. There may not be one!

Is the title...
Dateline Lisbon?
Dateline - Lisbon?
Dateline: Lisbon?

I've decided to run with the punctuation-less one. The newspaper listings are all over the place as editors did their own thing. If it's in the script header, that's what I'm running with. It is lower on the page as circled with a semi-colon, and that's just a typo of not hitting the shift bar with enough force. But that's the point -- I think the intended colon is to create a brief pause for the announcer as they read it. But the colon could not graduate to the head of the page. Crazy stuff, important to us 80 years later but not to the people who lived it.

And then this shocker: they tried to write a half-hour Donovan's Brain in the effort to bring it to the air! It was written by Robert Tallman, one of Spier's favorite writers, especially for the Sam Spade series.

When they realized the story was impossible to fit in such a small time period, they went to the two-part format. This makes me wonder if the Tallman effort was written in the Summer of 1943.

And... indications are the final scripts for DB written by Robert Richards were all set to go in October 1943, and were little-changed for the eventual May 1944 presentations. This implies that the Republic Pictures request to delay was made closer to final broadcast planning than anyone thought. This is why Philomel Cottage was grabbed from the files for the week that would have been part one.

And... what else is in the background? Why waste a story that will get lots of publicity on a sustaining program when the negotiations with Roma were reaching their conclusion in October? Better to save it for them. One wonders what was swirling around in that decision-making of the time.

* * *

Hat tip to wich2 for bringing this article to our attention. It's about writer Silvia Richards. She adapted Dunwich Horror and had a few other Suspense scripts. Spier liked DH so much he wanted to do it annually. He had the same plan for SWN. Neither happened as his Suspense tenure ended less than a year later from this article's publication. And then he returned as producer after the Leader year, and then got the movie production bug rather than the radio one, and then got into something called TV.

1947-04-01 Los Angeles CA Daily News

by greybelt 4/13/2023, 6:45 am

Today's Suspense is The Walls Came Tumbling Down starring Keenan Wynn. He's a smart-aleck Broadway gossip-columnist who gets drawn into a plot to find a valuable painting.

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If the production sounds like it's flowing like a Sam Spade broadcast, it's no accident. Spier obviously liked it, and it helped shape his vision of the Spade series. This script was re-written as the Spade audition (no copy has survived, and it was never broadcast) and is fun to listen to. Hans Conried's character portrayal is almost over-the-top, a key part of the lighter nature of the production. Enjoy!

Yesterday I was working on You Were Wonderful with Lena Horne. I was reminded what a gift the Internet is when I referred back to Sam Irvin's bio of Kay Thompson. His extensive endnotes are at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and he has a great section on the broadcast that starts on page 163 of the PDF. Such a massive document would never have been so easily available in the pre-Internet days. The book is highly recommended, btw.

I ran into a situation where we know there are two distinct broadcasts of this episode for east and west, one goes straight to network ID and the other is 5 seconds to ID. We know where the AFRS got their recording. When I went back to all of the recordings I ever had of these performances, I had a pair of low encode MP3s labeled east and west but they were exactly the same, the direct ID repeated for each file. Does anyone have an old Suspense set where the recordings are different or have a reel that has both east and west labeled as such?

by lasombra 4/13/2023, 8:22 am

Try this one: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

by greybelt 4/13/2023, 10:12 am

I'm looking for something in an old collection that was specifically labeled as east or west coast. All we know is that there is one dirID and 5s to ID right now because the EC/WC pair I had were the same exact recording (dirID). There must have been someone with a correctly labeled reel recording somewhere along the line (I hope!).

I just finished the post of what I had to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The fuller blogpost write-up is scheduled for release on May 2. I am behind where I wanted to be... but some of these episodes like this one deserve the extra work even if it slows me down...

by gathol 4/13/2023, 11:22 am

Greybelt

I don't know if I'm helping with this, but I listened to 2 episodes of You Were Wonderful I have. One labeled upgrade 3 - ec or wc running 29:46 and one labeled upgrade 4 running 29:45. I can tell you on both of them around the 29:10 point the man in black says next Thursday so that would make both of them the EC unless I am missing something else.

by greybelt 4/13/2023, 12:13 pm

Gathol:

By this time Suspense was on Thursday nationally. So that's not a marker for us.

When discs were transferred decades ago, some of the dubbers noted if it was from an east or west broadcast. They didn't always do it.

When they would trade their reels, they would keep the note if they had both. One recording would say east and one would say west IN THEIR NOTES on the reel contents sheet. Over time, partly because tape was expensive, one of those recordings would fall out of circulation, and the other would become hard to find.

But there are some that survived, and somehow in the digital age, retained their original designations of east or west. Some collectors just ignored them, and again, just picked one of them.

I have an mp3 set that has TWO files of You Were Wonderful, one labeled east, the other labeled west, but the two files are the same exact recording.

So what I am trying to find is whether or not anyone has any kind of set that has east or west as DIFFERENT recordings (one goes directly to the network ID, another has a 5 minute musical gap) either on reel or digital. OR if they're in the same situation that my old digital set had of the same recording repeated with misleading east and west designations.

by greybelt 4/14/2023, 7:20 am

Today's Suspense is The Search for Henri LeFevre, a Lucille Fletcher story that’s quite different than others. It deals with recovering from a mental illness rather than any spooky or threatening situation. It also involves music, one of her favorite subjects. Paul Muni plays Adolphus Flynn, a composer who completes his biggest work, turns on the radio, and hears it playing. He is so upset about the stealing of his composition that he is compelled to find the announced author of the work, Henri LeFevre. The way Fletcher reveals the facts behind his predicament is the real entertainment here.

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The star is Oscar winner Paul Muni in his only Suspense appearance. He was nominated for four other Oscars, too. Muni was noted for immersing himself in research about the characters and the context of their times. He wanted to know everything he could about a part before he went on screen, or even the microphone. Did he have such conversations with Fletcher about her script? Enjoy!

by wich2 4/14/2023, 11:57 am

greybelt wrote:Today's Suspense is The Search for Henri LeFevre, a Lucille Fletcher story that’s quite different than others ... The star is Oscar winner Paul Muni in his only Suspense appearance.

Muni was a Stage/Film guy who did not do an enormous amount of original Radio; mainly, adaptations of his Films. A wonderful Actor - quietly, because he didn't much play the Star game.

Great weekend,

- Craig

by wich2 4/14/2023, 3:09 pm

bojim1 wrote:I think Joseph Kearns had his house built around his Wurlitzer Grand.

Ya better believe he did, bubba! Wink

(Catching up after Easter travels...)

Best,
- Craig

by greybelt 4/15/2023, 3:48 am

Today's Suspense is The Beast Must Die and stars Herbert Marshall in his first official Suspense appearance. The story is considered a classic mystery. It is authored by Cecil Day-Lewis under his pseudonym Nicholas Blake. It is known for its opening lines: “I am going to kill a man. I don't know his name. I don't know where he lives. I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him.” A father seeks revenge for the hit-and-run death of his son. His search for the identity of the killer is the core of the story... but things take an unexpected turn and get more complicated than he anticipated.

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This is another situation where the Suspense adaptation removes a detective from the original story to fit the series “first person narrative” style. It then tells the story from the father’s perspective, which makes for compelling listening. The story is still popular and was recently done as a series on AMC+ and was also shown on AcornTV.

Marshall was in the CBS Forecast audition performance of Suspense based on the original concept for the series. That was rejected by potential sponsors and languished until it was redesigned in a manner to be much different than originally conceived. Enjoy!

by greybelt 4/16/2023, 2:54 am

Today's Suspense is Of Maestro and Man and stars Peter Lorre and Richard Conte. Lorre plays “Maestro,” a boxing manager with a gambling problem. He's deep into debt with an impatient loan shark. Maestro promises to pay that debt by giving him the contract of a talented and rising young boxer. He soon learns the boxer is leaving the dangerous sport to start life as a family man. If the loan shark finds out, Maestro realizes his trouble will only get worse...

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This is the first of two appearances by Conte. He had a decades-long Hollywood career and was one of the town's most reliable supporting actors.

The Jo Eisinger script would later be used on Sam Spade 1947-02-16 as Inside Story on Kid Slade. The broadcast includes some inside jokes delivered by an airport public address announcer. They involve music director Lud Gluskin, Kay Thompson (William Spier's wife and a key figure in Suspense history), future Sam Spade announcer Dick Joy, and a likely reference to CBS music conductor Leith Stevens. Enjoy!

by greybelt 4/17/2023, 7:26 am

Today's Suspense is The Black Shawl and stars Dame May Whitty and Maureen O'Sullivan. This was the first of four appearances for Whitty, age 79; it was the only for O'Sullivan.

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The plot is about a young Irish girl who takes a job as a companion to an elderly woman (played by Whitty, in case you were wondering...). It all seems so innocent and safe. She starts the job and discovers that the woman's insane son is living there, too… she’s trapped in the house… and the son’s presence threatens the her life.

The Jay A Hickerson Memorial Collection at the Internet Archive is being developed. Jay had numerous photos, documents, and correspondence related to the Hello Again newsletter and the FOTR conventions.

He had a large collection of OTR logs that were sent to him by collectors in appreciation of his mentioning their work in the newsletter. Jay also did a lot of log work, too. We have started scanning these and converting to PDF. The first scans of the documents can be found at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Please also note that Jay's guide to radio programs is available at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

by wich2 4/17/2023, 10:40 am

Today's Suspense is The Black Shawl and stars Dame May Whitty and Maureen O'Sullivan. This was the first of four appearances for Whitty, age 79; it was the only for O'Sullivan.

The Jay A Hickerson Memorial Collection at the Internet Archive is being developed.

The late, much-missed Jay was indeed one of the Titans of our little fandom, alongside such folks as Dave Goldin and Jim Harmon. I was blessed to consider him a friend - though that relationship had a winding path...

After hearing of FOTR by way of Max Schmid's show, I believe I began attending as a fan/trader/collector around 1991? Jay was usually very welcoming at the table. Then, along about 2001, fellow actor and fellow Episcopal Actor's Guilder Arthur Anderson began bringing me out to Newark to perform in his recreations. It was very gratifying when Bill Nadel followed suit, and then several other directors.

But in those first years, working there was a bit of a mixed bag....

The Vets -almost uniformly - were totally welcoming, as fellow Pros. But some of the attendees, and alas, some of the pooh-bahs, were pretty dismissive of such "younger" (most, 50ish!) players as myself, Kevin Scullin, and Leslie Feagan. This hurt. A lot. Because we not only gave our all as actors - we were all fans ourselves, every bit as much as any others!

Most folks softened over time, though. (It likely helped, when Arthur intro-ed on of his productions by stating, "I hear some of you are wondering why there aren't more Old Time Radio veterans in our casts - well, it's because THEY'RE DEAD!") Then when Bill Nadel drafted me to replace him as a producer, and I brought in working director Jay Stern, we did some very well-received shows, and had - and gave - considerable joy.

Jay H., and wife Karen (who my spouse Bernadette sometimes worked check-in with) then remained friends after FOTR sadly passed into history itself.

Thanks again for everything, Jay. Maybe see ya later!
- Craig

by greybelt 4/18/2023, 8:27 am

Today's Suspense is Banquo's Chair. It's the second of three performances on the series. Bill Spier thought this was a script deserving of the attention of the bigger Roma audience and its better prime time slot.

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Collector opinions of the first performance from 1943 episode are tainted by the pre-show announcement of the May 1943 Sorry, Wrong Number flub, and the drama that followed was practically ignored! Here's your chance to right that wrong. Set reason and pragmatism aside and enjoy the fun of its entertaining and implausible plot. Enjoy!

by greybelt 4/19/2023, 6:05 am

Today's Suspense is The Man Who Knew How with series favorite Charles Laughton. His character is curious about how to commit an undetectable murder. It just so happens he's on a train with someone who knows exactly how to do it. And then reports start appearing in the newspapers about some murders...

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Suspense is often full of "it just so happens" and we go along for the entertaining ride all the time. Enjoy!

Just saw news that Jack French had passed away. I had some correspondence with him about two weeks ago. He was a retired FBI agent and he pursued radio history with the same diligence. Some of his articles are at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and you can find more at the Metro Washington OTR Club website mwotrc.com as he was an active club member and contributor to their Radio Recall newsletter.
Two of his books, Private Eye-Lashes (about radio's lady detectives) and Radio Rides the Range (with the late Dave Siegel, a directory and analysis of radio's western adventures) have been very popular for many years and are highly recommended to all.
Jack was a key contributor to all efforts in our hobby, for many decades. He will be greatly missed.

by greybelt 4/19/2023, 8:14 am

Re Search for Henri Lefevre... There was correspondence between Spier and Muni about changing the name of his character in the story.

As to the name Adolphus Flynn I have been cudgeling. The name must be one which is unusual enough to be remembered by the radio audience in its relatively few mentions, since the name Henri Le Fevre receives so much more spotlighting. I am convinced that we should preserve the Adolphus. Among such that occurred to me for the surname were such as: Grimm, Tortue, Scarbo (a French night—elf and ghost immortalized in The Gaspard de la Nutt,) and even...Fantomas. These all convey, in addition to their intricate unusualness, a certain macabre and moonlit quality. However, perhaps the simplest alteration of all be to convert to Flynn to Flenn, which, if uttered precisely, has a strange and metallic sound. If we make this simple but effective alteration it won't be necessary for me to consult the author, who is in New York. Otherwise, I should like to do her the courtesy of asking her opinion.

He seems to have some objection to the name "Adolphus" being used in the script. I don't know why, but it could have been because of its similarity to the name of der Fuhrer. It is very likely that Muni's family still had relatives in Germany or elsewhere in danger. Or it could be something else. As to Spier changing the last name from "Flynn" to "Flenn," it seems that change was made, and is more obvious at the end of the play when he says it and not when the nurse says it near the beginning of the performance.

by greybelt 4/20/2023, 2:10 am

Today's Suspense is The Diary of Sophronia Winters. It's a repeated performance and worth a listen to experience the richer and lusher Roma production budgets. Mercury Theater vets Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins are back in the leads. I love the tease that CBS provided to the newspapers: “weird tale of oddly assorted couple on a honeymoon which soon takes on macabre overtones.” Huh? Sounds like lots of programs of the era! No, it's just a crazed husband who wants to kill his new wife. That's all.

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This is supposedly the episode where sfx artist Berne Surrey accidentally stuck his hand with an ice pick, kept going on with the show, and got stitches later. Surrey went to med school in his “free time” and became an MD in the 1950s.

Just received word that Project Audion will be recreating an early missing Suspense! The release date is May 12...

The episode is from the Summer 1942 season. It's actually an adapted Harold Medford script from Calling All Cars. The original program has not been found and may not have survived.

The group recently produced a missing Escape, also a train-based story, Run of the Yellow Mail. Last year, they produced a missing Suspense, the 1956 episode of The Eavesdropper.

by greybelt 4/21/2023, 2:55 am

Today's Suspense is Actor's Blood, based on a short story by Ben Hecht. The prominent writer and commentator gets to narrate his very own story with Fredric March as the star. March and Helen Hayes are the only actors to win two Oscars and two Tonys. The Hecht plotline is of a strange dinner party staged to trap the murderer of a prominent actor’s daughter.

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It's like the plot of Banquo’s Chair and an Agatha Christie novel decided to have a fling in Tinseltown. Enjoy!

The Man Who Knew How blogpost was shut down for a little while as being against Google's "community standards." It seems that the plotline description triggered a review. It's back up.

The blogposts for the 2x/week Roma period are coming to a close. It must have been so very strange to have those four days between performances. So much could have happened to disrupt everything. It's amazing how consistent they all were. It also means the easy discernment of east and west broadcasts is coming to a close, too. Aside from the time when they made announcements that FBI in Peace and War was next, we're left with only the documentation of the collectors who noted which discs they recorded and the note preservation of those downstream collectors who got copies. So many made the assumption that the recording contents were the same and just kept one recording.

There was a post on the OTRR FB page about the destruction of AFRTS discs. The story takes place in Crete, Greece, and is from the 1990s. Discs from this period tend not to be OTR-related.
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This was all understandable because of the legal agreements that were made about the program contents and their disposition. They're just following orders... and the law.

Destruction in this manner was not such an innovative idea. Collector Ron Barnett was a civilian working on a military base in Frankfurt, Germany in the same building as AFRTS in the 1970s. He got quite the lecture from staff at that time when he asked about their records. He was told they regularly brought them to the shooting range. Sammy Jones noted in the comments of the FB post that he had an acquaintance who served in Europe in the 1950s and ship personnel would fling a disc in the air and have target practice that way, with the pieces landing in the sea.

We are very lucky that so many AFRS discs have survived in collectors hands over the decades. There are still more to be found, thankfully. Not everyone was following orders, it seems.

by greybelt 4/22/2023, 6:56 am

Today's Suspense is The Black Path of Fear, another Cornell Woolrich story and stars Brian Donlevy.

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Set in Central America, the wife of a gangster is stabbed and killed just as a photographer snaps her picture. Her companion, the gangster’s ex-chauffeur, fled with her to escape his harsh treatment and start a new life together. The chauffer is accused of the stabbing. He has to clear himself with the police and avoid being killed by the gangster's men. Yes, right now a glassful of Roma Wine would be very pleasant, but Brian Donlevy's character is a little busy right now, so you'll have to drink alone. Enjoy!

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