What I watched: A second- season episode of Suspense, an anthology drama series created by Robert Stevens. “The Suicide Club” starred Don Briggs, Edith Atwater, Ben Cooper and Peter Griffith. It was directed by John Peyser, and written by Marie Baumer. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open on Jerry (Cooper) and Joe (Griffith), two preppy teens, listening to the titular man who talks in his sleep, who is Jerry’s stepfather Henry (Briggs). It’s just a lot of gibberish. They get interrupted by Jerry’s mom, and he has a fit. Jerry decides to play a prank by pretending that he heard Henry say something terrible in his sleep. This makes Henry freak out in turn and start threatening the teen.
Even when Jerry says it was a gag, Henry doesn’t believe it. He then spoils the kid by giving him a whole $10 to go to the movies, and stares threateningly at the camera. Later in the kitchen, Jerry is asking his mother Louise (Atwater) how much she knows about her new husband, a question which she deflects. She doesn’t want to hear any of her son’s suspicions. Shortly afterwards, Jerry falls down the stairs, tripping over a loose floorboard.
Later that night, Henry visits Jerry in his bedroom. I think we know how this ends. After the suspenseful break, Louise comes in to save slash interrogate his son. Jerry accuses Henry of trying to kill him by sabotaging the cellar step. Louise thinks that he’s just been reading too many crime comics. Jerry calls Joe over in the middle of the night, but even he doesn’t believe the threat.
The next time Henry starts talking in his sleep, Jerry listens in on him, and invites his mother to do the same. They make out the name “Marwell”, the name of the town where a state prison is located. She leaves to check out the town, and Jerry starts worrying about being alone with Henry. He calls Joe and learns that his stepfather has just been to the store to get rat poison.
Henry is back, with a tray full of coffee. Jerry refuses to drink, and Henry starts throttling him Homer Simpson-style. Louise comes home at that moment, and Jerry proclaims that he was almost poisoned. She says what she’s found out:that Henry spent time in prison for robbery. But he says that he’s reformed now. Louise believes him, and drinks from the suspect cup of coffee. Jerry is forced to admit that his imagination has been acting up, and Henry promises not to keep secrets any more. A happy ending, I guess.
What I thought: Dreams and nocturnal activity have long been thought to reveal inner truths about a person. To Freud, this was the return of the repressed — ideas or feelings that the conscious mind couldn’t bring itself to confront. The rather barebones plot of “The Man Who Talked in His Sleep” puts its faith in this idea that our deepest secrets will reveal themselves when we are sleeping.
And yet Freud also believed that the repressed returns in culture, in jokes and plays that reveal more than they ought. He would find the drama of this episode to be clasically, almost predictably, Oedipal. The son suspects the stepfather because he wants to keep his mother for himself as an object of affection and, in Freud at least, sexual desire. At one point in the show Louise makes this almost explicit by commenting that Jerry and Henry are “jealous” of each other — both envy the closer connection they see each other having with her.
And yet I wonder if there’s a different argument to be made here, one that involves the mother only peripherally. The physical confrontations between Jerry and Henry take place in bedrooms at night, away from prying eyes. Jerry spends most of the episode trying to convince his mother that her new husband could do something terrible, and is never believed. There’s at least an uncanny resonance with the sexual abuse that sometimes take place in step-parental relationships — a secret that Jerry and indeed the text itself cannot express directly, instead concocting stories about rat poison and loose steps. And let’s not even get started on the concept of something unwanted that comes out while you sleep.
Of course, none of these interpretations were likely on the mind of author Baumer or director Peyser. (The latter is, I believe, the first non-Robert Stevens director we’ve seen on Suspense. He does an okay job, even if things are a little too Archie.) They were concerned with making a fairly formulaic domestic drama to fill in a weekly slot. Indeed, this episode seems like a mild re-jigging of past episodes like “Suspicion” and “Summer Storm” where a domestic threat turns out to be more imagined than real. (Or, for that matter, “The Comic Strip Murder”, where Briggs also plays a falsely-suspected husband.)
And yet, the repressed returns anyway. The happy ending is particularly hard to swallow here. Even if Henry’s crime was nonviolent, we’ve seen him physically threaten his step-son. What happens the next time Jerry does something to incur his wrath? Even if we remove all sexual readings, there’s something fundamental which is being repressed here: that the familial home is not as comfortable and squeaky-clean as the decade’s popular culture would make out.
A word from our sponsors: The Autolite animated commercial included with this episode was particularly striking. It features a cops-and-robbers chase scene in which the cop has to get his car going with the help of an AutoLite battery. I particularly love Rex Marshall’s genuine sense of shock as the crooks speed away. The short ends happily, with the the cop gunning down his prey with what looks to be a tommy gun. Suffice to say there’s a lot of repressed stuff returning here, especially in an episode about avoiding the presumption of guilt.
Coming up next: A man whose suspicions are never wrong, The Lone Ranger.
The Eternal Couch Potato 