NRR Project: 'Suspense' - 'Sorry, Wrong Number' (May 25, 1943)

 

NRR Project: ‘Suspense’ – “Sorry, Wrong Number”

Written by Lucille Fletcher

Columbia Broadcasting System

Broadcast May 25, 1943

30 min.

There are already three excellent essays on this topic out there:

Christopher H. Sterling’s at the National Recording Registry; 

John Dunning’s thorough and masterly focus on this particular show, citing it as one of the best in old-time radio history (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, pgs. 648-649)

And Martin Grams, Jr.’s “Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills,” which I only know from its reference by Sterling.

The premise is simple. A nervous, ill woman is bedridden. She tries to call her husband at his office. Suddenly, she cuts in on the conversation of two men planning a murder – that very night She can’t make herself heard. She dials the operator, the police: they treat her with polite indifference.

This was one of Agnes Moorehead’s greatest roles. (She repeated this story seven more times). It involves a woman panicking, of her trying to make someone, anyone, listen to her and stop this foul crime! Then she hears footsteps. They’re coming for HER. (Screenwriter and playwright Lucille Fletcher’s script, much like the rest of her respectable radio output, is unmatched in its relentless ratcheting up of menace.)

The woman, Mrs. Elbert Stevenson (we never do get her name) is expertly played by Moorehead, who simply comes unglued when she discovers the murderer has her marked as his victim. Moorehead went into controlled hysterics in the role, and often ended the episode exhausted.

She could go full-out in a dynamic and convincing performance – she was a boss of the air. She had played Margo Lane, the companion of Lamont Cranston, aka The Shadow (Sept. 26, 1937 – March 20, 1938). She was resigned, later, in film and TV, to play mean old ladies, exotic villainesses, stout-hearted plain folk, sarcastic best friends – she won four Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress (The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Parkington, Johnny Belinda, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte). She was part of Orson Welles’ original Mercury Theater (she played, in one heartbreaking scene, Charles Foster Kane’s mother in Citizen Kane); she goes mad in Welles’ original Ambersons; she is redeemed with a hastily rigged one-shot happy ending alongside Joseph Cotten.

So she brought a lot of firepower to whatever she did. She could get to the truths underlying the hypocrisies of daily life. She was excellent being direct, being fully present, in roles in good films and bad, and radio whenever she wanted.

But they didn’t pick her for the film. The movie version, directed by the under-regarded and versatile director Anatole Litvak, came out in 1948. They got Barbara Stanwyck to play the lead. She earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for it. And yet you wonder what we might have seen if Moorehead had embodied her voice in this, just for one film. 

At any rate, Sorry, Wrong Number was the most popular episode of a show that had many, many excellent episodes. Producer William Spier made sure the show had strong scripts, adept sound effects, and compelling music, once a week, in the service of the realistic thriller (no ghosts or the supernatural). And Spier’s successors, such as Anton M. Leader, Elliott Lewis, and Norman Macdonnell continued the tradition with imaginative and surprising tales that intrigue the curious listener.

The show stayed at its 30-minute length for its run (1940-1962), save for four-and-a-half months in 1948 at an hour long each, hosted by Bob Montgomery.

Top-notch “serious” performers would appear on the show, and they all took their roles quite seriously, even those primarily known as comic actors. The tension was high, and was usually sustained until the often-sardonic, bitter twist ending.

For an amazing 20 years, the show maintained its pedigree as one of the most listened-to fictional shows on the air. (As compared to the similar, also excellent but short-lived Escape [1947-1954]). Suspense was the dramatic radio’s ne plus ultra.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: The King Cole Trio performs “Straighten Up and Fly Right”.