Suspense Sundays (12)

Suspense Sundays

Suspense was a radio series from 1942 to 1962, claiming to be "radio's outstanding theater of thrills."  I have a fondness for "Old Time Radio" as we call it now, and Suspense is my favorite show.  It sets up weird, dark, scary, or intriguing stories with a plot twist in the end, and all in half an hour.  And many of them had very famous stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood.  I love the old-fashion story-telling and I thought it would be fun to give a short review of an episode every Sunday.  I'll have some fun with it too, since the stories can be silly and over-the-top to modern audiences, but I hope you, dear Reader, will give it a listen sometime if the story seems interesting.

"Death Flies Blind"

Air date: May 4, 1943

Starring Richard Dix and Gail Paige

>>Episodes here<<

Spies on a plane.  Starts off with a rich entrepreneur Mr. Nailor and his posse aboard a plane made private for his benefit - with the exception of Naval officer Lt Commander Fred Onslow and his girlfriend, Monica who have Very Important Business and must take that flight.  Something is amiss and the Colonel figures out that the plane is not headed towards Philadelphia as planned but over the Atlantic Ocean.  The pilots are gone - it looks like they parachuted out, and the air hostess is dead.  No one can fly the plane, whose navigation has been pre-programmed.  It looks like it was meant to crash so that Mr. Nailor who is willing to fund and build underwater freighters which would do away with the "submarine menace" of WWII, would die.  Those crafty Germans!  But Fred figures that there is actually a spy on the plane who will land it at the last moment in Germany.  But although Fred can't fly a plane, he knows how to set the navigations...

This episode is a bit heavy-handed in it's propaganda against the Nazis.  Not that there is anything wrong with that I guess, but the suspense in this episode was over by the time it was revealed that Mr. Nailor had some power to turn the war against the Nazis.  Then with the information that Fred knew aerial navigation, it seemed obvious that he would reset the coordinates so they could all land safely in England.  I thought it was funny that no one would just try to fly the plane anyways though.  It seemed like they were all resigned to crash and die.  I mean, in that case if you try to land the plane what's the worse that could happen??