31 Days of Suspense: "On a Country Road"

Today I'm returning to an episode of Suspense featuring Cary Grant as the star. Grant appeared a few times on Suspense - only only in the previously-featured "The Black Curtain," but also in "The Black Path of Fear" and today's entry, the November 16, 1950 program "On a Country Road," which you can download from archive.org here.

Grant is remembered as being the most suave of all classic Hollywood actors and an interesting range of his performances are still renowned today - everything from His Girl Friday to Charade. Grant never busted out his comedic talents for Suspense, but these dramatic roles do bring back memories his appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion & Notorious. Here, Grant played the latest of Suspense's unlucky motorists as he drives himself and his wife down a deserted road, then runs out of gas. However, this isn't the start of a make-out session - not with a crazed mental patient on the loose!

Like many popular episodes, "On a Country Road" would be repeated, ultimately rebroadcasted on December 4, 1954 & May 10, 1959.

Tomorrow: "King? I had to laugh. Beldon was the king, I was just the joker."

31 Days of Suspense: "The Black Curtain"

Suspense's stories were an interesting mixture of original scripts and adaptations; some of the adapted material came from time-tested classic material, but many of the adapted works originated with contemporary authors. One of the most prolific contemporary authors featured on Suspense - especially in in the program's early years - was Cornell Woolrich, whose stories can be heard in 28 broadcasts!

Woolrich's story "the Black Curtain" first appeared on December 2, 1943 and was popular enough to repeat twice: November 2, 1944 & January 3, 1948. The first two versions featured Cary Grant and you may download the original version from archive.org here.

"The Black Curtain" concerns a man who awakens from a concussion to find years have passed since his last memory; evidently in the intervening years he lived another life under another name - and for some reason, his other self is wanted by the police!

Woolrich's stories frequently delved into unreliable narrators - men who are (conveniently) unable to recall whether they are a murderer (as you can hear in Suspense episodes such as "the Singing Walls" and "Nightmare"). Although elements of paranoia run rampant in Woolrich's tales (such as another broadcast with Cary Grant, "the Black Path of Fear"), his memory-challenged protagonists definitely drew the shortest possible straw - they can't trust anyone, not even themselves.

Woolrich comes to the verge of cheating his audiences, which - as I've said before - is a problem I have with some radio shows, including a few episodes of Suspense. And yet, Woolrich keeps up such a frantic pace and places the listener so firmly in his protagonist's shoes that the ride is entertaining. It also helps that the lack of memory is a feature of his stories - not a surprise revelation in the climax, but a plot point resolutely entrenched from the outset.

Tomorrow: "You see Joe, I happen to be one of those lawyers who knows his law."