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New Review of Film and Television Studies (2013) - Theatre of thrills: the culture of suspense

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Abstract

This paper examines the suspense-oriented media forms that proliferated in the USA through the 1940s and 1950s. Coinciding with, and inspired by, the success of the distinguished CBS radio series Suspense and the output of Alfred Hitchcock, this broader culture of suspense included films, radio and television series, live entertainments, electro-mechanical amusements, and books, magazines, and comic books. Exploring how such media forms deploy and negotiate suspense as an attraction, as a production value, and as trigger for sensation, the paper interrogates traditional critical assumptions regarding its role as a technique of narrative. The paper argues, instead, that suspense is a vital and more widespread feature of popular commercial culture's affective modalities. With its capacity to stir and to stimulate, suspense has frequently been treated by cultural guardians with suspicion, and demonized as inauthentic, degraded, or even dangerous. While the CBS programme and Hitchcock's films deliberately set out to upgrade the cultural status of suspense, the paper argues that other contemporaneous forms that relied upon it – certain radio thrillers, comic books, and pinball machines, for example – provoked intense moral censure.

Article

Theatre of thrills: the culture of suspense

Suspense is predominantly thought of as a narrative technique, exemplified in its purest form by the thriller. While critics such as Roland Barthes (1975), Noël Carroll (1996), and Martin Rubin (1999) have examined in detail how suspense operates in film and literary fiction, their work ignores the degree to which it serves as an integral and multi-faceted component of popular cultural production that is by no means limited to narrative. As an attraction, a production value, and a trigger for sensation, suspense is a strategy for building, releasing, and regulating affective engagement within and across a wide range of media forms. This paper examines the currency of suspense within US popular culture across a 20-year period, during which the concept attained unparalleled public visibility. In June 1942, the CBS network introduced the dramatic anthology series Suspense, which would enjoy a remarkable two-decade run on US radio. Despite shifts in format and fluctuations in budget, the programme managed throughout that period to remain one of the top-rated and most critically acclaimed drama shows. So ingrained had it become within the experience of network broadcasting that the date of its final episode – 30 September 1962 – is often taken to mark the end of US radio's 'golden age'.1

Coinciding with the success of this series, and a live television spin-off that aired for six seasons from 1949 to 1954, was the heyday of director Alfred Hitchcock, whose films and television programmes established him as the public face of the suspense thriller. Rather than examining Hitchcock's work and the radio series in themselves, this paper aims instead to track the broader network of intermedial relations within which these productions operated through the 1940s and 1950s. The object of my study is the broader culture of suspense that surrounded, informed, and was inflected by the work of Hitchcock and the CBS programme. In this respect my paper differs from other contributions to this issue, as it focuses not on one specific cycle of sensation but on a looser yet interlinked 'family' of cycles produced across a range of media during the run of the CBS programme. The latter inherited, developed, circulated – and also circumscribed – a concept that had vital importance to popular culture. The programme played a key role in shaping popular conceptualizations of what suspense was, and ought to be. However, while its creators sought to position the show in relation to existing media that used and promoted suspense, they also had to manage its more troublesome connotations. Even though the programme had to translate the unseemly sensations of pulp culture into an acceptable form, its best episodes – and there are quite a few of them – nonetheless carry a convincingly disturbing charge. In their build-up of tension and intrigue, their oppressive atmosphere, and their depiction of morbid psychological compulsions, the Suspense dramas resemble the contemporaneous cinematic trend later identified as film noir. Achieving a deft balancing act between unsettling subject matter and high-quality presentation, the programme's creative personnel made skilful use of radio's incantatory power as a 'theatre of the mind', thereby demonstrating the medium's potential as a vehicle for channelling the uncanny.2

Radio's outstanding theatre of thrills

Besides giving the concept of suspense unparalleled visibility and popularity during the two decades it was on the air, the radio series also helped establish the suspense-driven anthology programme as a prominent broadcast genre. When CBS launched Suspense in the early 1940s it clearly sought to capitalize on pre-existing trends within radio and other media. However, the network also went to great lengths to ensure that the programme was not perceived to be tainted by the sensational excesses of pulp culture. In particular, CBS aimed to differentiate Suspense from the horror series that had flourished on the airwaves since the 1930s (see Hand 2005). The creepy narratives and gruesome effects of The Witch's Tale (1931–38), Lights Out (1935–47), Dark Fantasy (1941–42), Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941–52), The Weird Circle (1943–47), and the like, allied them with the disreputable 'weird menace' or 'shudder pulps' of the mid–late 1930s (Jones [1975] 2007). By contrast, Suspense sought to renegotiate the attractions of horror in a similar manner to the films Val Lewton was producing around that time at RKO. As in Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and so on, psychological atmosphere held sway over shock effects, and a more literate sensibility supplanted – or, at least, recast – pulp sensationalism. In its 1943 Halloween issue the entertainment trade journal Billboard (1943a, 6) welcomed Suspense as an alternative to what it called the 'tear-your-throat-out, split-your-noggin-with-a-cleaver school' of radio horror. Suspense aimed instead, the journal suggested, to 'provide the listener with enough exercise in noggin-gymnastics to keep him tuned in to the last second. It is the response to this type of mental horror that is indicative of a less bloody trend in chiller fare.'

Billboard's prediction that the psychological drama of Suspense would replace the more grisly style of radio horror may have proved short-sighted, but others similarly welcomed the programme's innovations. In 1946 Ken Crossen ([1946] 1976, 307), founder and executive vice-president of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc., identified Suspense and The Molle Mystery Theater (1943–51) as the only programmes to rise above the general mediocrity of radio crime drama. That same year Suspense also won a prestigious Peabody broadcasting award, with the committee observing that:

there are too many whodunits for the good of radio; [...] in this overworked and melodramatic field there is one program which, for its casting, its music, and its suspense is head and shoulders above the competition. A special citation therefore to Suspense. (Gould 1947a, X11)

CBS viewed Suspense as a prestigious ve...

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Notes

  1. ↑ The same day also saw the demise of another long-running CBS radio series, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (1948–62). For valuable considerations of Suspense, see McCracken 2002, Verma 2010, and radio enthusiast Martin Grams Jr.'s (1998) wildly undisciplined yet useful Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills. Recommended for golden age US radio are Hilmes 1990, 1997, Douglas 1999, Dunning 1998, and Sterling and Kittross 1978.
  2. ↑ For detailed consideration of radio's expressive properties, see Shingler and Wieringa 1998. Jeffrey Sconce (2000, 81–2) explores how in the pre-network era, before radio was standardized, centralized, commercialized, and domesticated, many commentators were fascinated by the medium's otherworldly undercurrents – especially 'radio's uncanny liberation of the body in time and space … [and its] fundamentally unsettling paradoxes of presence within absence, isolation within community, and intimacy within separation'. Programmes such as Suspense return the uncanny potential to radio, exploiting in particular its capacity to offer 'a form of electronically disembodied consciousness' (93).
  3. ↑ Although 'Alfred Hitchcock' appears in the Forecast programme as a host-narrator, he is actually impersonated by actor Joseph Kearns. Most biographers and radio enthusiasts take Hitchcock's much trumpeted direction of the programme at face value – see, for example, McGilligan 2003, 275–6 – but Variety's (1942) review of 'The Burning Court', the first episode of the Suspense series proper, claims that Hitchcock's name was attached to the Forecast programme 'for publicity purposes'. When rehearsals were called for 'The Lodger' in Hollywood, Hitchcock was actually in New York – leaving the show to be directed instead by experienced CBS producer Charles Vanda.
  4. ↑ A radio veteran, Herrmann composed and directed the music for such prestigious series as The Columbia Workshop (1936–47) and Orson Welles' The Mercury Theater on the Air (1938–46). He was signed to Suspense shortly after collaborating with Welles on his first two Hollywood films, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and winning an Academy Award for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Besides scoring the early episodes of Suspense, Herrmann also wrote its moody signature theme, which, as Steven C. Smith (2002, 95) notes, 'remains one of radio's best remembered, with its eerie harp ostinato, purring flute harmonics, and graveyard bell tolling the arrival of "the Man in Black"'. He would later establish a productive relationship with Alfred Hitchcock on such films as The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1964). Carr was a seasoned radio dramatist who had written several well-received mysteries, historical dramas, and propaganda plays for the BBC (Greene 1995, 234–44). When Suspense returned for its second season in October 1942, CBS signed him as the show's in-house writer, replacing Harold Medford. Over the next eight months, the series broadcast 22 radio dramas written by Carr, including seven that revised earlier BBC scripts (250).
  5. ↑ Hollywood took over increasingly as the hub of national radio production from the mid-1930s, motivated especially by the desire of sponsors to secure star talent (see Jewell 1984; Hilmes 1990; Meyers 2011).
  6. ↑ See, for example, the articles carrying Hitchcock's byline reprinted in Gottlieb 1995, especially 99–154. The extent and nature of Hitchcock's authorship of these articles may at times be questionable, but they were sanctioned by him and are consistent with his self-presentation in other fields. For useful analysis of suspense in Hitchcock films, see Smith 2000, 16–48 and Chapter 2 of Allen 2007, 38–71.
  7. ↑ Not that physical expression is entirely absent, however, for suspense aims to bring audiences to the edge of their seats, with bodies wracked in anxiety (Hitchcock 1948, 113).
  8. ↑ Hitchcock and the Suspense series both use subjective narrational techniques to encourage the audience's bonding with characters: while Hitchcock favours point-of-view editing techniques, Suspense makes extensive use of first-person verbal narration.
  9. ↑ Hitchcock insisted, for example, that his intricately wrought style of suspense was inherently superior to the mechanical puzzles of the whodunit (Hitchcock 1948, 114), the gross spectacle of the monster movie (Hitchcock 1936, 111–12), and the sudden shocks of terror (Hitchcock 1949, 118).
  10. ↑ Worthington Gibson's 1938 article 'Radio Horror: For Children Only' in The American Mercury suggested that the stories themselves were not as troublesome as radio's ability to stir the imagination through vivid sound effects. Children's Hour, he charged, was alive with such gruesome sounds as 'the wail of a police siren, the rattle of a machine gun, the explosion of a hand grenade, the shriek of a dying woman, the bark of a gangster's pistol, or the groan of a soul in purgatory' (quoted in Dennis 1998, 37).
  11. ↑ In his New York Times Magazine article, 'Crime Pays – On the Radio', John K. Hutchens (1944, 16) suggested that the 30 network stations in New York City alone carried 30 crime shows a week.
  12. ↑ Billboard's archive from 1942 onwards has been digitized and is available via Google Books. Virtually the entire run of the CBS radio programme coincides with the period in which this archive offers broad-based coverage of the entertainment business. Since I conducted this investigation, the archive's search facility has been upgraded – and now delivers 1960 hits for 'suspense' from 1942 to 1962.
  13. ↑ A special Pinball Squad consisting of eight patrolmen and a police captain was established in New York in 1940. Supervised by Michael J. Murphy, confidential investigator for Commissioner Valentine, the Squad operating in plain clothes accumulated evidence against pinball gamblers. It was disbanded a year later, when the investigation had been completed (New York Times 1941e).
  14. ↑ In 'Nickel Monte Carlo', a rare pro-pinball article published at the height of the campaign against the games, Sidney M. Shalett (1941, 12, [26]) argues that playing these highly sophisticated machines does indeed involve an element of skill, an assertion supported by many of the players he interviewed.
  15. ↑ LaGuardia and his fellow anti-pinball campaigners (police, magistrates, judges, school principals, parent groups) levied several charges against the games and their operators. Besides accusing them of encouraging gambling in children, LaGuardia argued that mobsters were attracted to these 'larceny machines' (New York Times 1942l) because of the lucrative revenues they delivered. Their profitability could also be enhanced by illicit practices such as the rigging of machines to minimize payouts and protection rackets, organized in collusion with corrupt labour unions, which locked operators into disadvantageous servicing agreements (see New York Times 1941a, 17; 1941b, 1941c). To further their cause, LaGuardia and his allies pointed out the high proportion of those involved in the ownership or leasing of pinball machines had criminal records, some with proven mob connections (New York Times 1941b, 1941f, 1942h). Condemning the main distributors and wholesalers as 'slimy crews of tinhorns, well-dressed and living in luxury on penny thievery' (New York Times 1942l, 29), LaGuardia used the campaign against pinball as part of the bigger war on racketeering that characterized his administration. In 1960, the US Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labour or Management Field (i.e. the McClellan Committee) confirmed the extensive infiltration of racketeers into all phases of the coin machine industry (pinball, jukeboxes, vending machines, etc.) over the previous two decades, especially via certain labour unions. The Committee identified the industry as a common vehicle for money laundering and condemned the prevalent use of force, terror, and corruption (Poe 1960; Billboard 1960c).
  16. ↑ It was not only operators and distributors of such machines that faced the wrath of the legal system: one Jersey City man was even fined for playing pinball (New York Times 1942e).
  17. ↑ See Tim Snelson's paper in this issue for consideration of a further 'moral panic' in New York during the Second World War, in which LaGuardia once more played a key role.
  18. ↑ The controversy over pinball never fully abated, however. An article entitled 'The Pinball Business Isn't Child's Play' in the October 1957 issue of Better Homes and Gardens demonized the game in the same terms as the moral panic of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Describing pinball as a 'vicious racket [that] bleeds millions of dollars each year from youngsters', it implored parents to 'Act now to keep your child from being victimized!' (Weinstein 1957, 6).
  19. ↑ The Bally Manufacturing Company had also introduced a machine entitled Suspense in 1938 (Rossignoli 2011, 236). Photographs of Williams' Suspense machine can be seen in the entry in the Internet Pinball Machine Database (IPDB 2012). Williams revived the Suspense name for a different game in 1969 (Rossignoli 2011, 236).
  20. ↑ Peter Stanfield's paper in this issue explores in detail the sensationalist currency of hot rod culture through the 1950s.
  21. ↑ Achieving great success operating slot machines, jukeboxes, and pinball machines, the King Brothers branched out into slot-machine films in 1940, and then, after the collapse of a production arrangement with Cecil B. DeMille, into full-length movies. Their first feature, the low-budget ($23,000) crime thriller Paper Bullets (1941), was distributed by PRC, and was the first of that company's releases to be picked up by the major league Loew's circuit (Brady 1941, X4; see also Martin 1944; Lewin 1948).
  22. ↑ Sorry, Wrong Number also provided rich material for radio comedians: George Burns and Gracie Allen spoofed it on Maxwell House Coffee Time (13 March 1947), and the Jack Benny Program also based a skit on it (17 October 1948) as well as spoofing Suspense on the programme of 6 January 1952.
  23. ↑ For information about the following publications, see the relevant entries on the magazines database of Galactic Central 2012.
  24. ↑ Based on radio scripts, the stories in Charteris' Suspense Magazine were accompanied by pictures of the performers from the original broadcasts. Information is taken from Grams 1998, which unfortunately dispenses with page numbers!
  25. ↑ Only a few of its stories, a mix of new and republished work, appear to have had a direct connection to the radio or television broadcasts. These included Ray Bradbury's 'The Screaming Woman' (first broadcast 25 November 1948) and John Dickson Carr's 'Honeymoon Terror' (first broadcast, as 'Cabin B-13', on 16 March 1943).
  26. ↑ For a list of the contents of Suspense Stories, see the entry on Galactic Central 2012.
  27. ↑ These include an extremely large number of short story anthologies bearing the Hitchcock brand, mostly published by Dell, including: Suspense Stories Collected by Alfred Hitchcock (1945), Alfred Hitchcock's A Baker's Dozen of Suspense Stories (1949), Alfred Hitchcock's 14 Suspense Stories to Play Russian Roulette By (1949), Alfred Hitchcock Presents: My Favorites in Suspense (1959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents: More of My Favorites in Suspense (1959). For further details, see Alfred's Place 2012.
  28. ↑ EC also used the term 'SuspenStory' as a branded generic descriptor – for example, it crops up frequently on the title pages of many early stories in The Vault of Horror comic (see EC Archives 2007, 9, 19, 27, 35, 43, 53, 61, 69,77).
  29. ↑ The convoluted progress of one comic provides a fascinating insight into the changing terrain of 1950s comic book publishing. Charlton published the Lawbreakers comic book in 1951 and 1952 but rebranded it in 1953 as Lawbreakers Suspense Stories, to slant it more towards the lucrative horror market. The comic was then issued as Strange Suspense Stories, a title that Charlton had purchased from one of its rivals, Fawcett. After seven issues under this name in 1954–55, Charlton responded to the new Comics Code by renaming it once again, as the more matter-of-fact This is Suspense. After four issues in 1955, Charlton reverted back to the more dynamic Strange Suspense Stories. The comic flourished with this title for a decade (Watt-Evans [1997] 2007, 16). For examples of the covers of these comics, see Comic Vine 2012a, 2012c.
  30. ↑ 'Suspense' has persisted in comic book titles, though its connotations are far removed from those at play in the 1940s and 1950s. For example, Charlton revived Strange Suspense Stories from 1967–69 but as a comic that offered science fiction and supernatural stories. More typically – as in Seabord's comic Weird Suspense (1975), the Canadian All Suspense (1998), and Marvel's Tales of Suspense (1995–the present), the term is used to designate superhero fiction. For further information about such titles, including cover reproductions, see the entries in GCD 2012.

Notes & References

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  109. New York Times. 1942l. 'Off to School They Go.' October 8: 29
  110. New York Times. 1942m. 'Pinball Machines Get College Role.' October 10: 17
  111. New York Times. 1942n. 'Mayor's Ire Turns on Pinball Machines.' October 17: 17
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