Sunday, August 07, 2011

Radio review – Suspense – “The Thing in the Window” (1949) ***1/2 (warning: spoilers)

An entry from Lucille Fletcher, perhaps the best writer to work on Suspense; like her most famous pieces it’s primarily a work in paranoia, as unemployed actor Joseph Cotten becomes convinced there's a corpse in the room across the street. According to the banter at the end this was Cotten's seventh episode of the series, making him the star who’d appeared in it most. He’s very good – although as always with Cotten you get the feeling the producers would have preferred to go with someone else (the other actor I felt that way about was Frederic March). The sense of unease and paranoia builds well and I genuinely found myself wondering how it would end - it turns out he was only playing an elaborate trick on the owners of the flat to avenge himself on an actor who turned him down. This character is probably introduced too late in the piece but I guess anything else would have tipped the hat too much. And it gets points for having Cotten murder someone violently and get away with it.

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