What I watched: The fifth episode of the second season of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “The Cask of Amontilado” starred Bela Lugosi and Romney Brent. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and adapted by Halsted Wells from the Edgar Allen Poe story. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, October 11, 1949, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happens: We open with bells signifying the end of World War II. But the military police still have to due their duty — in this case, taking a deposition from Bela Lugosi, who’s just seen a murder. We quickly learn that we’re in Italy, as Lugosi explains he used to be the duke of the castle they’re in until he was forced out by the fascist. And wouldn’t you know it — there are catacombs underneath the castle! It’s these catacombs that, Lugosi explains in a very roundabout way, are the scene of the crime.
Bela explains that the fascist general Fortunato forcibly married his sister. Finally, we get into the flashback that makes up most of the episode, but we don’t start with something Lugosi himself witnessed. His wife has breakfast in the morning with the general as their spouses are at work. General Fortunato, of course, promptly begins trying to seduce the duchess, promising a trip to Rome in the winter. Lugosi’s wife shuts him down, but the general still decides to start plotting murder.
A year later, the sister is dead, and the wife is in Rome. Lugosi is having dinner with the General, knowing he’s about to be killed, but resigned to his fate. He says that he’s planning a divorce, and this seems to please the crass general. It’s now that Lugosi finally mentions the titular cask of Amontillado, apparently a vintage of wine that’s impossible to get during wartime. The cask is at the bottom of the catacombs, and the general insists on both of them going down to get it.
When we come back, our duo are walking down the spiral stairs into the catacombs at great length. They stop halfway down to enjoy some less-vintage wine. The besotted general tells Lugosi that his mistake was not joining the Fascist Party at the beginning of its rise. Both men reach suspiciously for their pockets, but no violence takes place just now.
Fortunato keeps coming close to confessing his plot to murder the duke’s sister and marry his wife, and Lugosi comes close to accusing him of it, with both just barely keeping up the pretense. Lugosi suddenly comes to the realization that he can kill the general just as easily as the man can kill him, and bolts down the stairs. The drunken general follows.
Lugosi leads his foe into the dark bottom of the catacombs and finds a conveniently placed set of construction equipment. Apparently his family had gotten halfway through bricking up an old vault years ago. The general paces around the pail of wet cement, allowing the duke to grab his gun. Lugosi forces the general at gunpoint into the vault and into shackles. He then leaves the man there and finishes building the wall, sealing him in and leaving him to die. This, then, is his confession of the crime to the police. Now that the war is over, he’s ready for justice to be done.
What I thought: This is Suspense‘s finest half-hour yet, a gothic tale that manages to avoid the shortcuts and silliness that so often drag this series down. The series has dabbled in literary adaptations before, as in “A Night at an Inn” and “The Yellow Scarf”, both of which also featured a B-movie icon in Boris Karloff. Perhaps these were meant to be the showcase episodes, ones that used venerated authors like Poe and Dunsany to burnish the prestige of a low-status series in a low-status medium, and where the producers would splurge a little on a well-known character actor. In any case, it pays off here in a way it hasn’t really before.
Lugosi was, at this time, near the bottom of his declining career and health. After his starring role in the 1931 version of Dracula, industry politics and a changing market forced him into small roles, often serving as second fiddle to Karloff. Lugosi suffered from sciatica, a condition he treated with a procession of opiates. It’s clear what Lugosi offered to a television producer like Robert Stevens: the prestige of a well-remembered actor who wasn’t that expensive. For Lugosi, it was another paycheque, more or less as dignified as the D-grade films he was doing.
Perhaps television could have been a fruitful home for Lugosi. His performance in this episode isn’t particularly great, but it’s also not bad, and he has a natural kind of charisma and dignity that was in rare supply amidst small-screen actors. Lugosi was Hungarian, but his subdued accent still passes as Italian to North American ears, and certainly comes off better than Brent’s scenery-chewing. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Perhaps a flubbed performance earlier in the year on Texaco Star Theater scared Lugosi off the nascent medium. His career would continue to slide, eventually leading him to Z-grade Ed Wood movies, until his death in 1956. He was just one of many stars who had helped build Hollywood but never saw the fruits of their labours.
A large part of this episode’s success stems from the decision to transplant the events of Poe’s short story to a more contemporary setting, unlike the previously-mentioned adaptations. Suspense‘s invocations of the Victorian period were never all that credible, and I doubt they would have done better with Poe’s 19th-century Italy. Besides which, Poe’s story is really the grisly punishment and nothing else, with the protagonist’s motives and character left blank. I think Stevens liked these stories — all three of the adaptations we’ve seen so far were of works that had plenty of blank space to fill in. B
By setting the story in postwar Italy, Suspense suggests that World War II is a gothic story in its own right. In this way, it ultimately comes closer to grappling with the war’s cost than twenty-plus episodes of Crusade in Europe. Fascism is the most obvious Gothic horror presented by “A Cask of Amontillado.” Like the class system underlying the horrors of Poe and Hawthorne, fascism is power awarded without thought of virtue, and as a result good people are forced to subordinate themselves to monsters. The general, a man with a telling Hitler mustache, forces the duke to sacrifice his family members one by one, and yet Lugosi’s character is still forced to act friendly towards the man. The old order of power depicted in Poe’s original is now forced to submit itself to something even more remorseless. It is precisely the general’s lust to consume more and more of the old world — the titular cask of aged wine — that leads to his downfall.
However, this episode of Suspense also suggests that there is something monstrous in the count’s revenge. There is no utility to the way the count kills his foe — he could easily shoot him, and save himself just the same, but he chooses to let the man starve to death, hanging by his wrists. We can read into this the many cruel, needless actions that are part of even a just war. One thinks of the dropping of the atom bomb, the firebombing of Dresden, Japanese internment, or the rapes and pillaging that occurred as Allied forces poured into Germany. The count turns himself in at the end of the story because he knows that, no matter what his circumstances are, he has still committed evil. But there was to be no similar reckoning for most of the other corpses sealed deep beneath the surface of postwar peace.
But who won?: This week, Suspense beats the brakes off The Life of Riley.
Coming up next: We get another glimpse of LA regional TV, with a space-faring episode of City at Night.
The Eternal Couch Potato 