What I watched: A second- season episode of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “The Suicide Club” starred Ralph Bell, Ralph Cannon, Donald Buka and Richard Fraser. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and written by Mary Orr and Reginald Durham based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We are introduced to Florizel, the prince of Bohemia and a well-liked aristocrat living in London (Bell). But he’s bored, so he and his valet Gerard (Clanton) disguise themselves as various characters in search of adventure. This quest takes them to an underground pub, where a well-dressed man wants to buy a bunch of oysters and serve them to the customers. Feel the thrills!
This evidently impresses the prince, who invites the oyster-buyer to the table. He introduces himself as Mr. X (Buka), which means he’s about to debut in a Japanese wrestling promotion. He says that he’s throwing away the last of his fortune. Florizel pretends that he’s in the same situation, and they resolve to end their sad lots.
Mr. X then hits them up for $40, saying that it’s the entry fee for the Suicide Club, a private society for people who want to off themselves. (It seems like they would have a lot of membership turnover.) The organ music goes REALLY nuts. They meet with the club president (Fraser) a man with an eyepatch, who wants all the details on their reasons for suicide. Florizel comes up with a story about them cheating at cards and being exiled from polite society.
The eyepatch man asks them to swear an oath of absolute obedience..Florizel takes the oath, and apparently takes it quite seriously, with the other two following. After an act break, the trio are introduced to the club’s “oldest member”, Mr. Morphus. (He must not be very good at it.) Morphus explains the rules: every night they must come here to play a game of cards. Whoever draws the ace of spades must be killed, and the man who draws the ace of clubs will be the one to do the killing.
A whole bunch of other aristocrats in suits come in, and the game begins. (We also learn why the president has lasted so long, as he deals to himself last.) After a whole bunch of cards have been flipped, we reach the last round. Finally, Morphus draws the death card and Mr. X is assigned to do the killing. He protests, saying that he only intended to kill himself.
The next day, Gerard is reading in the paper about Morphus dying from falling off a tall building. Florizel promises to bring down the suicide club, but still doesn’t want to break his oath. So he goes back to the club, but this time with a plan. Mr. X is still broken up about becoming a murderer. This time there are only six guys at the table, because the weather is bad. (I guess they don’t take the oath that seriously.)
In the final deal, Florizel receives the death card. He’s told to walk down a particular alley late at night. The president gives his assigned killer a knife, in case the prince resists. Things seemingly go according to plan, with the hero being struck down, but he wakes up the next morning. Apparently the killer is an old friend of Gerard’s. And Gerard stole the president’s ledger off-screen and handed it over to the police. (Maybe Gerard is the real hero.) Apparently this does not break their vow and bring dishonour upon them. Florizel celebrates by pouring a glass of water over the oath he signed.
What I thought: Once again, Suspense draws on material from the nineteenth-century pioneers of genre fiction, whose work had the sheen of prestige (if only because of age) and happened to be in the public domain. Robert Louis Stevens in particular seems like a perfect fit for the series: just intellectual enough to be respectable, but with plenty of genre thrills, and without the gloominess of Poe or the pedanticness of Doyle. The series had already adapted his most famous story, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in an unpreserved episode the previous fall.
This particular story, “The Suicide Club”, is one of Stevens’ earliest works and not one of his better-remembered ones, but it has still been frequently adapted. The original text was actually a book-length collection of three short stories, so the version we have here is something of an abridgment. Florizel and Gerard (Geraldine in the original text, which I suppose was thought too feminine for the show) are perhaps an early prototype of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, an aristocratic investigator and his humble but competent companion. (Both heroes are, of course, descendants of Poe’s Auguste Dupin.)
However, at least from this adaptation it seems apparent why Florizel and Gerard never quite caught on in the way other investigators did. As a wealthy prince who is simply looking for a way to resolve his boredom, Florizel is not a particularly sympathetic character. He also doesn’t show any particular cunning in unraveling the mystery of the suicide club, instead simply stumbling into the organization. I suspect that there was more mystery in the original, but here it’s a rush to the climax.
The story deals with the topic of suicide, a concept which seems far too potentially controversial to appear on the generally hunky-dory world of 1950s television. Perhaps the literary pedigree of the material gave Suspense a pass. But the episode also seems carefully divorced from any experience of suicide that a viewer might have actually had: here the concept of killing oneself seems to be almost a thought experiment, a thriller conceit that wouldn’t happen in real life.
In reality, even the sunny postwar reality, those who committed suicide were driven by depression and despair, not aristocratic boredom. And they didn’t have to join a club to do so: the instruments of self-destruction were everpresent and seemingly growing: high ledges, rope, guns, bridges, drugs, automobiles… Stevens can only bring suicide onto the small screen by making it melodramatic and Victorian: something closer to home and potentially recognizable would have gone far beyond his program’s goal of offering a half hour’s entertainment.
In general, the psychology of the characters is distant from psychological realism or even plausible human behaviour. Their thinking is distant and alien, perhaps the product of an age before or perhaps simply the product of poor writing. The keeping of the oath of secrecy is seen as all-important, dooming a man to a life of dishonour and an afterlife in hell if it is violated. The crime of the suicide club is posited not as killing people, but as forcing people to become killers. The whole thing is very odd.
Genre fiction often offers a simple and individualistic means of confronting a social problem, and “The Suicide Club” is no different. The material and psychological circumstances which could lead a seemingly prosperous man to suicide are here reduced to a single villain, the club’s president who can be arrested and handed over to the authorities. But this resolution is unsatisfying, perhaps knowingly so. We don’t even see the arrest happen, rather being told it happened second-hand.
Rather, the climax of the episode is Florizel’s own brush with death. In the alley, a scene that Stevens shoots with claustrophobic precision, he confronts his own apathy towards life and desire for death, and ultimately succumbs to it. But ultimately he is rescued: the man who would strike him down is revealed to be not a miscreant but a policeman. In this way, the emerging powers of the state and social conformity emerge as the superego which will keep our depressive desires in check.
Coming up next: A sunnier portrayal of the emerging state power in yet another episode of The Lone Ranger.
The Eternal Couch Potato 