The Telltale Clue was a summer 1954 TV series starring Anthony Ross (the original actor to play Danny Clover in Broadway’s My Beat) as Captain Richard Hale of “The Criminological Division” of the Police Department. Each week he solves a case where a key clue leads to the solution of the crime.
This particular episode of The Telltale Clue aired July 29, 1954. It is noteworthy for having been written by Gore Vidal under a pseudonym, and also for featuring a young Leslie Nielsen.
The story opens with a woman with a bullet wound being thrown from a moving car. With her dying words, she says she was shot by her husband. While that’s a strong piece of evidence, Captain Hale needs more. He finds a whole family’s worth of suspects, with her husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law all sure she was cheating on her husband.
As a mystery, the story is reasonably well-done. The mystery is a puzzle and manages to throw out a real red herring. However, as an overall production, it operates very close to the sort of melodrama that defined New York’s radio culture, and would figure in its future as a soap opera mecca for decades to come. In some ways, it’s an odd series to be on television, as CBS chose to launch this as a police procedural when more realistic programs like Dragnet were dominating the airwaves.
Most of the performances play to the heightened, almost soap-operatic style, and certainly Ross fits that mold. Captain Hale is still a sympathetic character in the end, but has to cut a probable solution in under thirty minutes. Ross does a good job, but the same can’t be said for many of his fellow actors, as there are a few bad performances that are either a bit too stiff or a bit too over-the-top for the story.
Twenty-six-year-old Nielsen turns in a solid performance. As with all of Nielsen’s work prior to Airplane in 1980, he turns in a solid dramatic performance as a man who knows more than he’s letting on.
All in all, this is a decent TV episode if you enjoy early live television and if you like your mysteries a little bit soapy.
