Australian TV Plays: GMH - Suspect (3 June 1962)

One of the Peter Cotes productions. It was directed by Ian Jones.

Premise

The son of Mrs Smith (née Maggie Wishart) is about to marry a doctor's daughter. A press baron, Sir Hugo, arrives who thirty years ago covered a trial where Maggie cut up her mother and father with an axe. Maggie claims she's innocent... but is she telling the truth?

Cast

Joan Miller as Mrs Smith
Kenneth Burgess as Rev. Alfred Combermere
Moira Carleton as Goodie McIntire
Michael Duffield as Dr. Rendle
Patsy King as Janet
Clement McCallin as Sir Hugo
Frederick Parslow as Robert
Bettina Welch as Lady Const

Original play

It was based on a play by Edward Percy and Reginald Denham which was based on the Sandyford murder case.

Other adaptations

The play had been adapted for US TV in 1948 and 1952 and for British TV in 1939, 1946 and 1958.

Production

The show starred Cotes' wife, Joan Miller, who had performed in the play on British TV for the BBC in 1958.

It was one of four productions Cotes made in Australia, the others being Long Distance, Candida, and Shadow of the Vine. He said he would have made more but for the credit freeze, which was blamed for a failure to find sponsors.While Long Distance was shown while Cotes was in Australia, they other three were not broadcast until months later.

In May 1962 GMH announced it as part of six Australian dramas to be shown.

Jones told Susan Lever "By that time the television horizons were not terribly promising and I realised to do the things that really fascinated me like drama for example, I had directed one drama in my seven years at Channel 7. I just resigned. There was a little bit of publicity about my resignation. Some job offers came through and the most attractive one was Crawford’s, not the most lucrative but, far and away, the one with the greatest potential."

Reception

The Bulletin (Frank Roberts) said

Acting for radio was a full-time job, and being completely at ease in their work, the actors could more readily lift their talent in an hour play. This is not so in television. Production costs are too great. There are no everlasting serials to provide steady income and rapidly accumulated experience in the medium. The players in Australian-produced tele- vision drama are therefore ill at ease, or inept, or wooden. The results make horrible viewing, unless we regard them less than seriously. It is the only possible way to look at such a production as “The Suspect”, 90 minutes of lunacy released as a General Motors Hour of Drama, directed by lan Jones, adapted and produced by Peter Cotes, and starring his wife Joan Miller who “repeats the part she played on BBC television a few years back”.

Their plot was madly dramatic. Thirty years after chopping up her momma and poppa, in Scotland not Massachusetts, Mrs Smith nee Maggie Wishart is about to lose her only son in marriage to a doctor’s daughter. Enter a Press magnate who had covered her trial as a young reporter. It all comes back to him. He tells the doctor, who babbles about the physiology of the thing—genetics, I guess. They confront Maggie. She tells them she is innocent, and describes how it really happened. They believe her. All exit except Maggie, who then applies an axe to a chopping block, laughing hideously. This proper haggis was described as a thriller. It may have been, in the era of Rain, E. Phillips Oppenheim and The Bat. Certainly, most of the cast borrowed their dramatics from a time when over- acting for the silents set the universal style.

Clement McCallin as the Press magnate qualified for the Silver Ham in 1962, but he was merely the most prepos-terous of a ridiculous bunch in a fusty, trivial play. Condemnation must extend to those who accepted it as suitable for television, billed it as a thriller, designed a set that dominated most of the action, and made this worse by camera work that fre- quently gave the setting nine-tenths of the picture.

In production, “The Suspect” was treated as a play viewed by cameras, and the players acted accordingly, but with wondrous variations in period styles, delivery and dialects. “The Suspect” was billed in Melbourne as “first of a series of full-length dramas, made at HSV7 by noted British producer Peter Cotes which will be seen in coming months”. If it is any criterion, we are in for a bad time.

It should be obvious by now that tele- vision demands an entirely new drama, with simplicity its keynote. Anything more is nearly always too much. And this dictum includes small casts, sets that suggest and never obtrude, ideas as direct as homing pigeons while as light on the wing, writing and acting that achieve realism before trying to ascend to poetry, and photography which finds its story in small detail rather than in 23-inch Cinemascope. Snobbery must be the current veil over this obvious truth, which is visible in the best of the imported series. This snob- bery wants us to look back to “theatre” for our values. If Mr Cotes cannot show us good filmed drama, he will be no help at all. Australia has been a traditional grave-yard of overseas and particularly British talent for too many decades to be much impressed by reputation.

The Age said it "commanded attention."

Listener In thought it was a "run of the mill" play but liked the production.

Frank Thring thought the direction was better than the play.