What I watched: The thirteenth episode of the first season of Suspense, a half-hour anthology series. This episode starred Boris Karloff, Felicia Montealegre, Russell Collins and Douglass Watson, in a script by Halsted Wells adapted from a story by Thomas Burke, and directed by Robert Stevens, the creator of Suspense. This episode was broadcast on Tuesday, June 7, 1949, on CBS, and is available for viewing on YouTube.
What happened: We open outside a busy tavern in 1897 London. A drunken woman named Hettie stumbles out and gets interrogated by a bobby. However, she is offered shelter by… BORIS KARLOFF! Karloff offers the woman a room and a pound a week to work as a maid. He makes her promise to never leave the house and never disturb his laboratory, which can only be entered by him and his hunch-backed assistant Tilson. The woman seems to grasp that something is up, but Karloff hurries her off to bed. In the laboratory, Boris schemes about marrying Hettie in order to help his villainous deeds avoid suspicion.
A few moments of screen-time later, it seems the marriage has already taken place. Unfortunately, Hettie has other interests, namely a strapping young trumpet player named Tom Weatherby. This doesn’t please Boris. It turns out that Tom has given Hettie a yellow scarf in exchange for taking the temperance pledge. Boris snatches it away, and Hettie just GOES OFF, talking about how much more Tom appreciates her. Her revenge: inviting Tom for supper! Karloff puts the scarf in a jar, saying it “will be slowly destroyed, as she will be too.” Spooky!
The night of the dinner party arrives, and Boris and Tilson are nowhere to be found. Tom comes over and begins macking on Hettie, despite being nervous that it’s a trap. Disobeying all fairy tale logic, she decides to go into the laboratory while the master’s away, with Tom for companionship. She finds the scarf in the jar and takes it out, stirring up a cloud of powder.
Boris and his assistant come home, and proceed to act incredibly creepy. He stabs Tom in the hand under the guise of attempting to open a can. This, of course, causes Hettie to wrap her scarf around the damaged hand, infecting Tom with whatever poison the scarf had been wrapped in. He dies pretty much immediately, and Hettie realizes that this was Karloff’s plan all along. So she gives him the same treatment, stabbing him and wrapping her poisonous scarf around his hand. Hettie ends the story like she started it, standing on the corner waiting for a policeman to take her away.
What I thought: Suspense brings us another drama of domestic domination. Like “Post Mortem” and “Flowers from a Stranger” (which wasn’t a Suspense episode, but which fits in with these other episodes in my mind), it derives its horror from the sense of powerlessness women felt in their domestic lives. This was a story that appealed to television’s growing constituency of sedentary middle-class families, all of whom likely would have denied that their own relationships were like this, but might have thought it reminded them of that family down the road. Hence the strange, instantaneous transformation of a homeless woman into a middle-class romantic heroine.
“The Yellow Scarf” is also in some ways a drama about modernity — about suddenly not knowing what the objects around you are. The scarf is marked as a product of its era by its link to the Temperance movement. The sudden and unknown transformation of a domestic object representing purity and restraint into a murder weapon touches on the way in which modern technological advancements alienated people from their understanding of the physical world. This was doubly so for those in 1949 watching a play transmitted through the air on an electronic device sometimes advertised as a “magic mirror.”
The thematic focus on modernity is even more evident in the original story. Thomas Burke made his name as a purveyor of allegedly authentic stories about the horrors of slum life, in particularly the Limehouse and Chinatown areas of London. In his version, Hettie finds herself in the situation thanks to the desperation of poverty: her master is described as “the perfect Limehouse husband” whose financial independence is so extraordinary that he can get away with his cold and domineering nature. In Burke the horror of modernity is represented both through poisonous chemicals and urban poverty.
Burke’s story is also written in conversational style as a kind of local tall tale. This aspect of things is lost in the Suspense rendition, which is a straightforward staging of events. The hunch-backed assistant is also an addition to the TV version, which may explain why he doesn’t do much of anything. Also of note is that Hettie’s revenge on her husband is an addition to Halstead Wells’ script. The original story ends with him laughing as Hettie realizes what he’s manipulated her into doing. One could chalk up this change to Stevenson’s tendency to punish his evildoers in the end (it’s happened in every Suspense story with an identifiable villain), but I think Karloff’s death actually makes the story better. It makes his character less omnipotent and gives us the nice bookend of Hettie waiting for the wagon. “The Yellow Scarf” is comfortably the best-written episode of Suspense thus far, although that’s not particularly high acclaim.
This also marks the first episode of Suspense where reoccurring actors start to dominate the cast – all four of the main cast have all appeared on Suspense before. In the case of Boris Karloff, this is a very good thing. His character doesn’t have a lot of range here, but his combination of paternal calmness and menace really makes the drama work. As we’re already seeing recurring plot elements and motifs, it makes sense to re-use actors who can reliably play your favourite archetypes, whether it be Karloff’s menacing patriarch or Montealegre and Watson’s romantic heroes. Plus, why wouldn’t you keep using Boris Karloff until he stops returning your phone calls?
Coming Up Next: Eisenhower makes some dodgy deals as Crusade in Europe rolls on.
The Eternal Couch Potato 