What I watched: The fifteenth episode of the second season of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “The Bomber Command” starred George Reeves, Susan Douglas, Joseph Holland, Ed Bryce, and Robert Gallagher. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and written by Halsted Wells. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 10, 1949, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open in the very recent past on New Year’s Day, 1950. An old group of military buddies, consisting of DP (Reeves), George (Bryce) and Andy (Gallagher) are singing “Auld Lang Syne” as photos of their service are displayed. The next morning, everyone is passed out except Sita (Douglas), the wife of DP, who apparently they met in Switzerland during the war. She takes their daughter Susan out for a walk. In a filmed segment, we see that they are being watched by a mysterious couple.
Two of the hung-over men decide that their old pilot DP (snicker) has changed and doesn’t respect them. This is confirmed in another scene where DP complains that his army buddies have turned out boring. Sita chats with George, and notes that “we’ve been so busy being gay that I haven’t had a chance to talk to you.” This is a problem I have all the time.
At a train station, a down-and-out man attempts to steal a guy’s brown paper bag. The man seems a little upset, but not very. Susan is also there, walking her dog, and the derelict lures her into an unused portion of the subway. He gives her a doll and sends her away. That could have gone worse. But the man in a suit, with a threateningly Germanic name of Hans (Holland) convinces her to go up to his office. Stranger danger!
Meanwhile, the girl’s mother is still flirting with George. She gets a call from Suzie’s kidnapper, who wants them to pay a ransom. Somehow the other army guy traces the call to a phone booth in Grand Central. After the break, the three bombers are interrogating an old man in the lobby. They end up in the same hallway we saw our villains in earlier. The piano score gets really high-pitched, so you know it’s spooky.
The trio stumble across the drunk, who seems very blase about the whole situation. The amateur investigators blow it off. Meanwhile, Susan is forced to write another ransom letter. That night, the bombers go to deliver the ransom. Hans sends his female accomplice to scope out the drop site. Everybody spends a long time synchronizing their watches and talking about the time, which never really leads to anything..
D. P. has a plan to “get” the kidnapper instead of just handing over the money. They spot the female accomplice and hold her at gunpoint as she dials her boss and tells him it’s clear. The kidnapper wants to make the exchange on the same catwalk they were on earlier (look, they had limited sets.) DP wants Sita to intercept him there.
They’re about to successfully make the swap, when the accomplice runs in to warn Hans. But before anything can happen George drops down from the ceiling like he’s fucking Spiderman and tackles the villain. I’m not sure what happens to him, but the family swears to be closer to each other, and that’s the end.
What I thought: The opening credits identify this episode as “based off an idea by Robert Stevens”, which leads me to believe that this episode might have a more personal genesis than most of the gothic-tale adaptations on Suspense. Stevens was born in 1920, which both makes him a very young showrunner (his first credits appeared only in 1948) and likely means he served in World War II in some capacity. Biographical information is a little scarce, so I don’t know for sure, but certainly Stevens would be familiar with the emotional connections men of his generation made during war.
As horrible and violent as WW2 was, for many soldiers — particularly those in the relatively well-equipped and comfortable American army — it was a time of intense homosocial bonding and friendship. People from different social classes and regional cultures were tossed together on a grand adventure. Militaries have always fostered these kinds of bonds, as a measure to encourage loyalty and obedience if nothing else.
The opening montage, with old war photos displaying camraderie as “Auld Lang Syne” (a traditional song of friendship) plays, does a great job at conjuring this kind of connection in just a few minutes. In the following minutes, we are introduced to the problem eating away at this tight connection: outside of the war zone, the old buddies find they have little in common, and end up drifting away. No doubt this was also a common experience for WW2 vets who attempted to maintain their wartime connections into civilian life.
(In a sense, this is an almost-universal experience. Judd Apatow and his collaborators dominated comedy for a decade mostly by capitalizing on the melancholy of abandoning adolescent homosocial friendships for adult heterosexual relations. There’s a kind of tragedy that stems from the foreclosing of friendship as an important bond as one reaches maturity in Western culture, a tragedy which we find ourselves unable to articulate except in art.)
About halfway through, however, “The Bomber Command” changes gears and becomes more of a typical Suspense episode dealing with the kidnapping of a little girl. The purpose is clearly to suggest that having a new, life-or-death purpose brings the old friends together again and renews their bonds, although the script doesn’t really emphasize this because of a typically rushed second act.
I wouldn’t say that the more genre-oriented second half has worse writing than the more naturalistic first, but it nevertheless feels like a bit of a letdown. When Sita is talking with George, the interaction obviously has much more affection than her conversations with her own husband, and we feel that something might soon happen which would destroy this social group for good. It makes the viewer feel uncomfortable because we, too, are being seduced by George (who seems so much more virile than Reeves, the man who would soon be playing Superman), and our desire to see a charismatic romance clashes with our worries about morality and the ultimate consequences of adultery.
By contrast, once the kidnapping plot is set in motion, we know exactly how we should feel about everything. This is prior to the sensationalization of “stranger danger”, and it’s shocking to see the amount of freedom her parents allow Susan to wander around New Orleans, but Hans is still a stock villain. In the end, the supposed point about the friends re-comitting to each other (and to beating up Germans) is sidelined for the reunion of the nuclear family. But I guess that’s the way with genre TV: any moments that seem personal or real are fleeting, to be cherished but not expected.
Coming up next: The always-impersonalLone Ranger.
The Eternal Couch Potato 