Suspense TV: The Spider – S 4 E 18, 1952
Synopsis and review by Bill Russo
Her worst fear was a loathing of spiders, but when she found herself lost in a swamp near the top corner of Florida's sparsely populated West Coast, she encountered a new thing she feared even more!
Olive Deering stars as the lady who wanders into the secluded dwelling of a seemingly harmless blind man, who she later discovers, has a chilling hobby.
Between the 1940s and 60s Olive Deering worked in radio (on dramatic shows and in soap operas) television, and in film (notably in 1949's Samson and Delilah).
When I watched this episode I was struck by how much this beautiful lady resembled Carolyn Jones, who achieved fame in the TV show The Addams family. Both of the ladies had angular, distinctive, chiseled-features, as well as dark hair, usually worn long.
Despite a few issues with sound (early TV shows often had such problems. In the early 1950s television was pretty new and the producers, technicians and even the actors, still had a lot to learn. Still, this is another pretty good episode of Suspense, the TV version.
It was performed live as many early TV shows were. The actors had to memorize their lines and perform the show in sequence as if it were a theater performance.
Suspense TV was the little brother to the Suspense Radio Program that ran from 1942 to 1962. Suspense TV produced 250 episodes in its span of five season from 1949 to 1954. Only one third of the episodes have survived into the 2000s. They were captured by an early process called Kinescope - aiming a motion picture camera at a TV monitor showing the program as it was being performed live.
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