User Reviews

I will cut "Help Wanted" a lot of slack. Sure, it's a bit stagy and the organ music is invasive and terrible...but this show was made in 1949 and then TV was only in its infancy. Nice graphics, music and professional sound simply weren't available yet and polished TV shows were a couple years (or more) away...so I don't hold these shortcomings against the show that much. And, if you look beyond this, you'll find an interesting plot that at first seems like a remake of "The Red-Headed League" bu Conan Doyle...but it soon become very different and very deadly!

Otto Kruger was a fine actor and he stars as Mr. Crabtree--a rather pitiful man. His daughter is mentally ill and he's spent everything he's had to keep her in a private sanitarium. But he's also old and can't find work...and this cannot go on forever. To make it worse, his landlady is about to evict him since he hasn't been paying his rent. But soon a benefactor seems to have appeared in the form of a woman who offers him a very strange job. He's to talk to no one about it but report to a small office and stay there all day writing useless reports no one will actually end up reading. I thought they were trying to get him out of the house for reasons similar to the Sherlock Holmes story I mentioned above...but the reason soon ends up being far deadlier.

I won't spoil the show...so I'll end here. This and several more old episodes of "Suspense" are available to either view online or to download from archive.org...a website that is frequently linked to IMDb pages.

"Help Wanted" struck me as a story that was so old it seemed new, the freshness coming about because it hadn't been told again in recent history. I won't spoil it here, but briefly summarize why it works.

Otto Kruger is delightful as an old fellow given two weeks' notice by his landlady, as he's had trouble paying his rent for over a year. He's unemployed, answering many Help Wanted classified ads in the newspaper but without success in landing a job. All his money, including borrowing against his life insurance policy goes to paying for his payments to keep his daughter in a private sanatorium, and under no circumstances would he let her be interned instead in a state-run insane asylum.

He's thrown a lifeline when a woman shows up at his door, offering him a mysterious offfice job paying $100 a week. That sum is more than he could have hoped for, so despite the very sketchy and suspicious details of the employment he accepts.

Things go smoothly, as he works alone in an office with his name on the door for six months, writing reports on the finances of various companies, and mailing them to his unknown employer's post office box. Six months later the employer shows up and reveals all the details of the mysterious job.

It's an ingenious crime story, with an amazing plot twist near the end that clears up a clue planted earlier in the show, wonderfully handled. The denouement leading to a surprise ending is just as clever, the rare case of a shaggy-dog story actually tied up neatly, unpredictably and satisfying.