What I watched: The seventh episode of the first season of Suspense, an anthology drama program produced and directed by Robert Stevens. This episode is based off an original script, and stars Margaret Phillips, Tod Andrews, Barry Macollum (returning from last week’s episode), Joshua Shelley, Fred Stewart, Will Hare and Patricia Jenkins. It aired on CBS on Tuesday, May 3, 1949. The episode is available to view on YouTube.
The theatre is showing a very early release of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash.
What happened: We open on an exterior shot of a man entering a movie theatre. The man, the titular Ernest Bower (Hare), is dropping off his wife (Jenkins) at a double feature while he goes to a double header at Ebbets Field. Through expository dialogue, we learn that he has some kind of condition. He walks out into the street and is immediately hit by a car, and his trusty jacket (with a card explaining his affliction) is taken away by a conniving bystander (Macollum). A nearby cop pronounces the man dead. SUSPENSE!
The man’s coat is taken to a nearby shop. An actor named Henry (Andrews) and his wife Fran (Phillips) come in, looking for a sportscoat. The proprietor, with a heavy Irish accent, recommends Abercrombie and Fitch, but of course the theatre actor doesn’t have the money for it. After some haggling, they buy poor Ernest’s coat. When they get home, they find the note telling us that Ernest is a cataleptic (a real condition), meaning that he has fits where he appears dead, and warns that he should not be presumed dead. SUSPENSE!
Henry tries suspiciously hard to assure his wife that it’s no big deal, but Fran sees blood on the coat and puts two and two together. We go to the morgue, where a mortician named Tony (Shelley) is about to start on the embalming — but only once he hears the end of the ballgame. But he has to embalm the living man before the end of the day. SUSPENSE!
There’s an act break slash Autolite commercial, involving another cute animation starring a doctor with a dead battery. When the second act begins, Fran and Henry still haven’t done anything, but finally resolve to track down the shopkeeper. When they do, they get the whole story out of him. They try to contact Mrs. Bower, but of course she’s still at the movies. If only some kind of portable phone had been invented. Meanwhile, Tony begins to drain Ernest’s blood, and is about to make an incision in the neck. SUSPENSE!
There’s some more fumbling around as Tony puts on his glasses, prepares to make the incision again, doesn’t answer the phone, sees his glasses fog up, and so on and so forth. It’s all a little silly. Finally, the mortician’s assistant (Stewart) picks up the phone and gets the message, and the embalming is stopped just in time. Tony freaks out, but everything works out all right in the end. And we get a stop-motion parade of Auto-Lite products. SUSPENSE!
What I thought: The first thing that struck me about “Dead Ernest” was its ambitious use of film exterior segments. This is a substantial shift from even the previous week’s episode of Suspense, which was essentially a filmed play. The direction isn’t exactly Hitchcock, but it shows that Suspense has more ambition than simply putting something on television with minimal effort or expense, which put it a cut above many of its contemporaries. The use of the baseball double-header on the radio (featuring Jackie Robinson!) helps to establish the timeline of the drama and build the ticking-clock element of suspense. Phillips also makes a likeable and inquistive heroine. While the conceit of the episode is a little silly, and the story again somehow dragged out despite the half-hour length, overall it’s a pretty effective little tale, and the best drama we’ve seen thus far. I also have to again tip my cap to AutoLite, for putting together some actually imaginative promotional segments.
The script plays off the basic human fear of being buried alive, and the liminal state between life and death which the modern funeral exists in. Tony is told that “When you get through with these stiffs, they look more alive than dead.” Dead bodies fall into Freud’s idea of the “uncanny”, which is to say that they are both human and nonhuman, and thus disrupt our sense of self. Privately, we fear that the dead body might be us — indeed, will one day be us — and that we will suffer the indignities of being drained, stuffed, and discarded. The episode doesn’t dwell on that horror too much, instead focusing on a lot of futzing around about phone calls and retracing the opening scene. But in the instance of a fear so innate, a little goes a long way. In that final, drawn-out sequence, we’re not afraid because this character we don’t really know might die, but that something unspeakable will happen to a human body like ours.
This episode also offers a bit of a glimpse into late-40s American culture — or at least New York culture. We have movies, the Dodgers, radio, and of course ethnic stereotypes. It’s hard to get very worked up about discrimination against the Irish these days, but it’s also not hard to wince when Andrews starts talking about “Irish time.” The plot essentially hinges on the grave-robbing greed of an Irish shopkeeper, which is a little uncomfortable even to a modern audience.
Still, one important question remains: where does this fall in the Ernest chronology? Are Ernest Goes to Camp and the rest prequels to “Dead Ernest”? When did Ernest pick up this affliction? Perhaps these questions will be answered in future episodes of… SUSPENSE!
Coming up next: One of early TV’s most prestigious productions, Dwight Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, falls under our microscope.
The Eternal Couch Potato 