What I watched: A second- season episode of Suspense, an anthology drama series created by Robert Stevens. “My Old Man’s Badge” starred Barry Nelson, Steve Hill, Ann Thomas (making her second Suspense appearance in as many weeks) and Julian Noa. It was directed by Stevens and written by Robert Tallman, based off a story from Ferguson Findley . This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, March 21, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube. (Please ignore the other YouTube video with the same title, which seems to be of someone walking their dog.)
What happened: We immediately see that Suspense is back on its Irish bullshit, with a cop singing blarney on his way in to a neighbourhood tavern. The bar has a “gay 90s” theme, complete with silly hats and tap-dancing waitresses. The cop tells the waitress Billie (Thomas) about his son, who’s also a cop but unlike him is an educated man. Anyway, he takes a trinket from her, promptly gets shot in the back and dies.
This, of course, leads it to our protagonist the son Johnny (Nelson) swearing to investigate and avenge the murder. The Stupid Chief (Noa), also with an Irish accent, won’t put him on the case due to his inexperience, so he decides to take a vacation and pursue the matter privately. The Chief assigns another cop to tail Johnny and keep him out of trouble. This other dude tries to talk Johnny out of it, but he won’t be deterred.
Johnny goes to the 90s bar and talks to Billie. She plays “Molly Malone” on the piano, of course. She says that the killer had a tattoo of an anchor on the back of his hand. Great, so that narrows it down to the millions of people who were in the Navy in the 40s. We cut to three cartoonishly shady-looking guys in the back room, lead by Dolph Romano (Hill.). One of them comes out to talk to Johnny, and he notices that the guy has a bandage on the back of his hand. Our hero decides to barrel into the mobsters’ private room.
After an AutoLite cartoon about a matador, our guy Johnny has a gun to his back and is being frisked. Romano sees through his pretense of wanting to do business pretty quickly, realizes that he’s the dead cop’s son, and knocks him out. The Stupid Chief and the cop he assigned to trail Johnny come in looking for him. The gangsters try to sneak past him by putting on the festive hats and pretending that Johnny is their passed-out friend.
Romano and company decide to kill Johnny by shooting him during the peak of a big brass number. But Johnny is more conscious than they think, and gets up to stall for time by singing “Molly Malone” as you do. He escapes out the front door with some kind of evidence. The tattoo-hand guy shoots at him, but Johnny gets the first shot off. For killing a guy while off-duty, the Stupid Chief awards Johnny with his father’s badge.
What I thought: This is one of the rare times we have episodes of Suspense that aired on back-to-back weeks, and they’re actually pretty similar episodes. Both avoid any suggestion of the supernatural or even the gothic, instead telling fairly straightforward crime dramas. Both also present the criminals in a largely caricatured, anachronistic way — the fact that our gang works out of a 1890s-themed bar seems very apropos.
Both “My Old Man’s Badge” and “The Parcel” also use local colour to liven up a pretty dull plot. Here, there’s an almost unspoken setting of New York’s Irish diaspora. Both the murder victim and the Stupid Chief speak with recognizably Irish accents, while the son speaks as a Hollywood leading man. Irish songs fill the bar, but in doing so become associated with the past. There’s the real sense of a foreign ethnic identity fading away and being replaced by a generic American-ness. Of course, this was 1950, so assimilation was seen as a good thing.
I don’t know if Stevens was Irish, but if nothing else he seems to have an affection for Irish-ness, using stereotyped characters as comic relief from the earliest episodes of Suspense. Here, we get a slightly more respectful treatment, as our murder victim demonstrates the charm and friendliness stereotypically associated with Irishmen and not, say, the drunkenness. The gangsters, on the other hand, are not exactly positive portrayals of Italian-Americans..
One could, if they wanted, read the whole episode as a narrative about diasporic identity. After all, it’s through embracing his heritage and singing “Molly Malone” that our protagonist saves his life. One could read the ending, where Johnny regains his father’s badge, as a sign that he’s found a way to integrate his ethnic identity with his American national identity.
Unfortunately, the episode is too muddled for this thematic material to really resonate. The mystery isn’t really developed at all — our hero finds the killers in the first place he looks, and doesn’t delve deep into their motive. The climactic sequence, where the protagonist is set to be executed on a musical note and has to karaoke for his life, should be fun but in practice is just kind of confusing. This episode seems to have been based off a full novel by Ferguson Findley, a very Irish-sounding American crime author, which came out the same year. Condensing things to a half-hour episode might explain the disjointed feel.
The result is an episode that I liked a lot less than “The Parcel”, despite all their similarities. Making the protagonist a cop instead of a confused kid removes all of the moral ambiguity that made that story fun. Plus, there’s no Jackie Robinson. Maybe the key for Suspense is to integrate baseball footage into every story.
Coming up next: One more Lone Ranger before some of our more irregular programs return.
The Eternal Couch Potato 