{"id":40652,"date":"2024-09-14T00:01:05","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T06:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=40652"},"modified":"2024-09-13T08:02:37","modified_gmt":"2024-09-13T14:02:37","slug":"telefilm-review-the-telltale-clue-the-case-of-the-dying-accusation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/telefilm-review-the-telltale-clue-the-case-of-the-dying-accusation\/","title":{"rendered":"Telefilm Review: The Telltale Clue: The Case of the Dying Accusation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wYhLH5IZWms?si=5_HHzMHBQ_p3_b_P\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>The Telltale Clue\u00a0<\/em>was a summer 1954 TV series starring Anthony Ross (the original actor to play Danny Clover in <em>Broadway&#8217;s My Beat) <\/em>as Captain Richard Hale of &#8220;The Criminological Division&#8221; of the Police Department. Each week he solves a case where a key clue leads to the solution of the crime.<\/p>\n<p>This particular episode of <em>The Telltale Clue<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s a strong piece of evidence, Captain Hale needs more. He finds a whole family&#8217;s worth of suspects, with her husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law all sure she was cheating on her husband.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s radio culture, and would figure in its future as a soap opera mecca for decades to come. In some ways, it&#8217;s an odd series to be on television, as CBS chose to launch this as a police procedural when more realistic programs like <em>Dragnet\u00a0<\/em>were dominating the airwaves.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Twenty-six-year-old Nielsen turns in a solid performance. As with all of Nielsen&#8217;s work prior to <em>Airplane\u00a0<\/em>in 1980, he turns in a solid dramatic performance as a man who knows more than he&#8217;s letting on.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 3.5 out of 5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Telltale Clue\u00a0was a summer 1954 TV series starring Anthony Ross (the original actor to play Danny Clover in Broadway&#8217;s My Beat) as Captain Richard Hale of &#8220;The Criminological Division&#8221; 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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,248],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-golden-age-article","category-telefilm-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-azG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40652"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40668,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40652\/revisions\/40668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}