Author Archives: don

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Pearl Necklace (05/02/61)

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Charlotte and Mark are playing tennis — him in long pants and her in a knee-length skirt.  This struck me not so much because of the formality and oppressive transphobic  cis-gender conformity imposed by Big Tennis in the past, but by how great California weather must be.  Here in sweaty South Florida, such a stunt would be suicide.  It is also nice if you can play on a private court at a huge estate with rolling hills and an old geezer watching.  What?

Oh, that’s Charlotte’s boss, 65 year old Howard Rutherford.  He reminds Charlotte her lunch hour is about over and tells her fiancé Mark to beat it.

Rutherford reminds her he is worth $11 million, and this is back when that was a lot of money. [1]  His ex-wives have been taken care of, and not in the usual AHP way.  They have been paid off so a new Mrs. Rutherford would be his sole heir.  He puts his hand on her leg and says she is a lucky gal.  He estimates that because of his bad heart, he has only a few months to live.  With no heirs, she would get his entire estate rather than, say, leaving it to that depressing Children’s Hospital down the street. [2]

Charlotte protests that she is going to marry Mark.  Rutherford is very practical, saying there will be plenty of time to marry Mark after he croaks in a year or so.  She still declines, but he suggests she run it by Mark.

When Mark hears the arrangement would only be for about a year, it sounds like a good deal to him.  Especially since this is before Viagra was invented.

I love the economy of these 30 minute episodes.  There is a quick cut to soon after the the Rutherfords’ wedding.  Rutherford gives his wife a necklace with a single pearl on it:  “A token of an old man’s love and gratitude for sharing his last days.”  He says he regrets that he won’t be around to give her more.

Another quick cut to the couple having dinner at opposite ends of a long table like the Citizens Kane  Citizen Kanes.  Rutherford impressively rolls a single pearl down the long table to Charlotte.  As she catches it, we see she is wearing a necklace with five pearls on it — one for each anniversary.

Charlotte sneaks out to see Mark.  She wants to get a divorce so she and Mark can be together.  He is committed to waiting for the old man to die “so the money doesn’t go to some seedy charity.”  Mark says all the lonely nights are rough for him too, but his argument is somewhat undercut when a girlfriend walks in.  Charlotte slaps him and storms out.

Another quick-cut to Rutherford giving his wife another pearl — for their fifteenth anniversary!  He again voices his fear that this will be the last one.

Mark comes to the house after seeing in the paper that Rutherford is sick.  Charlotte sees that Mark has a 10 year old son, Billy, from a previous marriage, so I guess the mother is the one who walked in on them.  Charlotte invites the boy back to play tennis tomorrow.  Mark sees this as a sign that he can maybe get back together with Charlotte, but she is having none of that.

After spending time with the boy over the summer, Charlotte says she and Rutherford want to pay for the boy to go to prep school and then to a fancy college so he can learn to embrace communism and hate the country that gave his benefactor the opportunities to succeed so Billy could have every advantage.  If all goes well, he’ll be calling them racists by Christmas Break

Cut to their 25th anniversary.  Rutherford finally dies.

Suddenly, I couldn’t get a decent well-lit shot without the logo. Elon Musk had the right idea — fire half the coders before they destroy the product. I’m also looking at you Microsoft, Adobe, and WordPress!

Mark comes to visit.  Charlotte gloats about inheriting all the money.  Her glee at Mark’s being left with nothing is truly infuriating.  However, Mark is even more concerned about her impending marriage — to Billy!

An all-around great episode.  Just goes to show you (and by you, I mean me) that you can have a great AHP episode without a murder.  It was a surprising choice to have Charlotte grow to love the old man pretty quickly.  It could have been a very different story, but I trust the pros at AHP to make the right choice.

The other thing that is baffling is AHP again flirting with incest . . . and getting away with it!  In the same year that Rob and Laura Petrie were sleeping in separate beds, AHP has a woman whoring herself out for money, her cuckolded fiancée secretly banging another chick, and her marrying her ex-fiancée’s young son — a boy that she had de facto adopted when he was 10 years old.  OK, it’s only incest under the Pornhub definition, but it’s still pretty weird.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  This is a little like Indecent Proposal, but 32 years later the offer was only $1M.  True, that proposal was for just one night, but it was offered by 1993 Robert Redford, and not 2023 Robert Redford.
  • [2]  To be fair, he did add a codicil giving them $2M if they did not ever play the 1-877-KARS4KIDS jingle again while he was alive.
  • Ted Jack Cassidy (Mark) was Ted Baxter’s brother on MTM, starred in the first Columbo (directed by Stephen Spielberg), and was David Cassidy’s father.  He died in a fire at age 49.
  • I was planning to post about the AHP version of Poison that I had somehow missed years ago in its proper rotation.  Turns out, though, that I actually liked the Tales of the Unexpected version better.  Where’s the fun in that?
  • Kudos to Michael Burns for not ending up with the ignominious fate of many kid actors (i.e. dead, drug addict, adult actor).  He went on to be an author, a professor, and horse breeder.
  • Inevitably:

One Step Beyond – Ordeal on Locust Street (09/22/59)

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Host John Newland shows us a house in Boston.  He says the door is kept locked at all times.   The curtains on the window are always drawn.  If they show a Pizza Guy driving up, I’ll get chills.

Anna Parish and her mother are planning for Anna’s beau Danny to visit the house — the first time anyone has been inside since they moved to Boston.  As they work on the Boston Baked Beans and Boston Cream Pie, they are surprised to hear someone shriek outside.  Mrs. Parish assures her daughter that no one can see in the windows.

Outside, Mr. Parish catches Danny still looking toward the window.  “What is it?” Danny cries.  He is shocked and tells Mr. & Mrs. Parish he had heard stories, but now “I saw for myself!  A red velvet chair!”  Well, that is an affront to good taste, but hardly worth screaming like a girl.  He continues, “That’s what was so horrible!  A red velvet chair with a high back!”  OK, lazy-boy, we get it.  Oh wait, he goes on to describe the occupant of the chair which he says would have seemed more at home in the sea than in a house. 

Over Anna’s objections, Mrs. Parish tells him that is her son, i.e. Anna’s brother.  Mrs. Parish assures him the problem is not hereditary or contagious but that they all got two shots and multiple boosters because Twitter experts unanimously told them too.  Danny contemplates missing out on Anna’s Pie and a hoped-for Southie, then flees like he just met Marilyn Munster’s family.

Anna screams that she hates her brother.  Mrs. Parish gives her two really good slaps. [2] Anna runs out of the room.  Her father tells his wife that either they put Jason “some place” or he will leave her.  So that’s the end of Mr. Parish.

Mrs. Parish brings in a defrocked doctor who has had success using a “mind force.”

Dr. Brown hypnotizes Anna as an example.  He does the usual tricks.  He has her raise her hand, act as if she had been burned, ignore the pain of a pin-prick, and check her 401(k) without digging her MAGA hat out of the closet.  He suggests to her that she will forget the pain of Danny running away and, hey, are those beans for anybody?

After reviving Anna, Doc Brown gets the key to Jason’s room.  The scene is from Jason’s POV.  He explains to Jason how he lost his medical license because he doubted the efficacy of masks, but might make an exception in this case.  He also warns that this might take a while.  We see the doctor take his scaley hands.  

Three months later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Parish comes back home.  He has brought someone with him who will take Jason to a hospital.  Ma Parish is distraught; she will hear nothing of Jason being taken from his home.  She even gets a pistol out of the desk.  

As she is about to ventilate Mr. Parish, Anna enters the room, all smiles.  With her is Jason, now a handsome, unblemished young man.  Doc Brown’s crazy hypno-therapy got him out of that room!  Although the two of them living in there eating beans everyday for 3 months was probably also a factor.

John Newland tells us Doc Brown did not live to see hypnosis become accepted in the medical community.  No shit — I probably won’t either.  

Well, I guess OSB realized what I’ve said from the start.  Sticking to their slim slice of the genre pie was not sustainable.  There was just too much “sameness” to the ghost stories regardless of what time period and majority-white country they took place in.[1]  I appreciate their attempt to branch out, but this was a titular Step in the wrong direction.

Hypnosis might have its place in certain stories, or in helping people quit smoking, but this does not seem a likely application.  Just using the mind caused genetic deformities to disappear, caused scales to fall from his body, and left no scarring.  That’s a leap, even on the Christmas episode of a show about the supernatural. [3]

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  I’ve lost count (and interest) how many OSB episodes are set outside the USA, but they did seem to shoot for about 50%.  As I’ve mentioned before, they never got to Africa or Asia.  Well, they did have an episode in India, but I guess you can’t say “the Orient” any more.
  • [2]  Note to self:  Learn to make GIFs.  Also: running low on peanut butter.
  • [3]  Rules broken:  1) I’ve skipped other episodes about kids with “issues”, but Jason seemed to be older; even though I guess he had been a guppy at one time.  2) I usually skip Christmas episodes because they are so predictable and mawkish.  OSB tricked me by making the episode last 3 months.  And it felt that way, too.