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Suspicion: NBC's new series of hour-long melodramas, half on film and half live, usually seems deader than either, but it sat up and began to move last week with The Deadly Game, adapted by James Yaffe from a story by Friedrich Duerren-matt. A sales executive (Gary Merrill) stumbled out of a New England blizzard to find shelter in an old-fashioned mansion where four retired men in dinner jackets almost seemed to be waiting for him. They plied him with food and brandy, and he amiably agreed after dinner to join them in the parlor game that enabled them to practice once more their former professions as judge, prosecutor and defense attorney. Merrill would be the defendant. The crime? He could think of none that he had committed. But soon, between Prosecutor Joseph Wiseman's sharp questions and his own loose-lipped, boozy euphoria, Merrill found in growing confusion and fear that he was on trial for murder—and that his fourth host was the former state executioner. The crime: inducing a fatal heart attack in the boss whose job he coveted.
At once urbane and eerie, Deadly Game achieved some of the quality of a Lord Dunsany shocker, benefited from skilled construction as well as from Actor Merrill's supple playing at the head of a sure cast, including Boris Karloff and Harry Townes. Closing scene: Merrill's widow, no angel either, drops in unexpectedly, agrees to stay for dinner and perhaps a parlor game afterward to take her mind off her bereavement.