"Out of the past, phantoms of a world gone by speak again their immortal tale: The Vendetta."
This episode, first broadcast on September 12, 1943, doesn't immediately suggest an adaptation of any individual story. I guessed it would be Guy de Maupassant, and he did write a short story titled A Vendetta, but other than Corsica featuring in both, and the fact that a vendetta drives their plots, there seems little in common between them.
Unlike the previous two episodes, this is a purely mundane tale about the destructive power of revenge. The writers chose to start with two framing stories - a Roma (the slur is used) is offering to tell stories for a penny, and when a passerby takes her up on it, she begins a tale with a man and a woman, lovers, and that woman also starts telling a story of the day her mother was burned to death in a fire started by members of the Porte family. Her father was able to save her, and the two of them, the last of the del Piombo family, leave Corsica for Paris, where the bulk of the tale, including that of the star-crossed lovers, takes place. (I do apologize if I got the names wrong - the audio quality was especially poor, and I did have to try and parse Americans attempting to parse Corsican names through a Mid-Atlantic accent)
In the end the framing does make sense, and there is no real point in which its existence becomes an issue (compare The Princess Bride with its frequent interruptions, and imagine someone catching fragments of that on the radio), but it was still a bit risky. The dialog in this one moved between different pairings, rather than sticking predominantly to one driving couple as in their The House and the Brain - to great effect.
The lack of supernatural elements might be disappointing to an audience primed for something more, but I felt that it was nice to show that natural human passion can also lead to horrifying results. From my sampling months ago, I expect this will happen again from time to time.
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