What I watched: The eighth episode of the second season of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “The Murderer” starred Jeffrey Lynn, John McQuade, Eileen Heckart and Marilyne Erskine. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and written by Joseph Hayes from a story by Joel Townsley Rogers. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, October 25, 1949, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open on a dead woman, who has just been run off the road, and a man (Lynn) looking at her. It’s basically how True Detective started, except the woman has clothes on. The man’s inner dialogue, provided to us by voice-over narration, has him wondering whether to call the authorities. Conveniently, a police detective is wandering down this back road, and stumbles across the man and the body. We learn that he is John Bassett (McQuade), and the dead woman is his wife Mollie. He acts super suspicious before beginning a flashback.
Twelve hours in the past, John and Mollie (Heckart) were happy, wearing matching plaid clothes and all. But John is keeping secrets from his wife, perhaps about their neighbour Lilybelle (Erskine) who clearly has the hots for him. Nope, it’s just that he’s hiding lilacs all over the place, to surprise Mollie with her favourite flower. In the process, he finds a saucy new pair of nylons (?) in her drawers, and gets mad at her again. Mollie storms out, purportedly to go to the library for the third time this week, and John menacingly pounds his fists. SUSPENSE! (Sorry, I wanted to do one more for the 100th entry.)
George falls asleep, and the next thing he hears is Lilybelle’s screaming, waking him up at 3 AM. Apparently she’s being harassed by a long-faced man, who found her walking in the middle of the street. (She is SUPER fond of physical contact.) Lilybelle quickly gets back on topic by alleging that Mollie has been stepping out. John says he doesn’t know what he’ll do when he finds her, which serves as our act break.
Back in the present, John angrily insists that he doesn’t care that his wife is dead. Geez, read the situation, guy. The previous night, he had gone to the “all-night lunch wagon” across from the library. The proprietor gives him some information that leads him to believe Mollie ran off with another man. Another man comes into the canteen, and says he’s seen Mollie on the bridge a lot waiting for someone, including at 8 PM tonight. That night, she saw him get picked up by a “big guy.” The proprietor suggests that he would murder his wife in a similar situation. Dude!
After looking around the town, John stops back at the diner later, and learns that Mollie was here looking for him. (The law of conservation of sets definitely applies here.) Back at home, Lilybelle is sitting on the bed sitting a cigarette, in true femme fatale fashion. Mollie storms in and starts packing up, swearing that she’s leaving her unfaithful husband. The two women have an argument, and Mollie shoves her to the ground. With this, John’s story (which curiously involved a scene he wasn’t present during) comes to an end.
The conveniently-placed homicide cop, a man by the name of Roy Clade says that he thinks “the boyfriend” did it. John suddenly comes to suspect the long-faced truck driver, then Lilybelle, and finally himself. When the cop, under his haranguing, goes to arrest him, John grabs his gun and accuses Clade of orchestrating the murder himself. His evidence is that the man spelled his unusual last name right, so he must’ve been more familiar with the family than he let on. Well, that’s good enough for me!
What I thought: Hey, what do you know, The Eternal Couch Potato is having a special week on possessive masculinity! Here we see the logical extension of Riley’s petty jealousy from our previous installment: homicidal domestic violence. It’s a rather uncomfortable base to build your standard-issue Suspense yarn on.
Suspense, like Life of Riley, understands in the abstract that its protagonist’s jealous rage is wrong. The early incident of John’s gift for his wife, in which she mistakes his benign intentions for infidelity, is a rather neat way of foreshadowing his later mistaken suspicions. And Lynn certainly plays John like a man on the edge of madness, possessed by an anger he can’t control.
And yet, again we see a series that finds itself narratively seeking to absolve our protagonist of blame. The abrupt reveal that it was the cop who served as the titular murderer is a marker of the strain this contradiction places on the show’s plot. The story really only makes sense if John is the killer, but both 1940s patriarchy and the generic nature of Suspense demands that blame not fall at his feet. Instead, it is the man who would judge him who must be to blame. Clay provides an object for John, and the writer who identifies with him, to project all of his sins onto.
(Also, you’re going to call your story about a murderer “The Murderer?” Try harder, Suspense.)
And what’s even better than blaming your patriarchal violence on another man? Blaming it on another woman! The character of Lilybelle here serves as a textbook femme fatale, openly displaying her desire for the male protagonist in contravention of social norms. Projection is at work here too: the protagonist, along with the presumed male viewer, can attribute their lust towards the forbidden woman to the forbidden woman herself. Lilybelle models the kind of possessive desire that John himself experiences — and, by making it feminine, makes it monstrous. Even though she is ultimately a red herring, it’s hard to leave the episode not feeling that Lilybelle is somehow also guilty.
This was the heyday of film noir, a style of crime film that would only be properly recognized as a genre by French critics a decade later. There’s more than a hint of noir in “The Murderer”, from the tight-sweatered femme fatale to the run-down locales. These stylistic choices also likely stem from the same cause as the noir B-movie style: with a small budget, it’s easier to suggest than display. I wouldn’t call “The Murderer” a particularly great example of noir, but then again I was never a huge fan of the genre. What’s interesting is that even here, decades before television became “cinematic”, we can see a parallel between what was happening on the big screen and the small screen.
But who won?: Script-wise, I’m not sure Suspense was actually better than Riley this year, but the performances of Lynn and Erskine elevate it above the forgettable sitcom. And to be honest, my dial would probably still be turned to Suspense in hopes I saw Bela Lugosi again.
Coming Up Next: With 100 episodes in the books, I’ve slotted in a few weeks’ break before we resume regular service. Come back on September 19 as I trudge through another Lone Ranger adventure.
But first! When the Emmys go live on the 17th, I’ll have my overview of the past year, crowning the best of the best through what I’m calling the Golden Potato Awards! There are also a few episodes I missed in my survey, so I’ll be filling in those gaps over the next two weeks.
The Eternal Couch Potato 