The titular Ernest takes his gal Margaret to the movies.  And I mean takes her and leaves her — to see “a news-reel, a sports-short, a travelogue, Bugs Bunny, and a double-feature.” ^[1]  They figure that will time out about the same as the double-header he is going to see at Ebbets Field.  Unless both movies are The Ten Commandments, I think she should count on him being late. ^[2]

She makes sure that Ernest is wearing his medical alert bracelet and has his please-for-the-love-of-God-DO-resuscitate letter.  She puts it in the pocket of his Joe Mannix sports-coat and tells him not to take it off at the ball-game.

Skipping ahead to the Fran portion of the program.

As she enters the theater, he crosses the street and is almost clipped by a car.  This triggers his catalepsy — an affliction that makes it appear that he is dead.  It even imitates the early stages of rigor-mortis.  If this had happened after sitting in the sun in his jacket & tie for a double-header at Ebbets, he probably would have smelled dead, too.  Officer Chauncy Lindell takes off the jacket and makes a pillow for Ernest’s head.  His medical bracelet is kicked down a sewer grate.

An opportunistic haberdasher sees the coat just sitting there after the ambulance carts Ernest away.  So he takes it back to his shop and puts a price tag on it.  Writer Fran and her actor husband Henry enter looking for a sports jacket.  Inexplicably, the proprietor tells them to try Abercrombie & Fitch.  Fran says they are too expensive.  She sees Ernest’s jacket on the counter and says, “Hey, is that a Joe Mannix?”  Because of, or despite, some blood stains, they are able to buy the jacket for $5.

While Fran is scrubbing out the stains, she finds the letter.  She reads it aloud:

I carry this wherever I go.  It is to advise responsible parties that I am a cataleptic.  My body must not be molested for a period of 72 hours, neither by autopsy nor embalming.  The maximum period of my attacks rarely exceed 4 hours.  Please call my wife or doctor.  This is of vital importance.  It may mean my life.

Fran asks Henry what a cataleptic is.  He says, “Don’t ask me.  I went to a drama school, not Johns Hopkins.”  Wait, an actor not presenting himself as an expert in medicine, science, and politics?  This guy will never get hired!  They look it up in a dictionary — the old kind that can’t be instantly changed online to suit some 23 year old’s fascist political whims.

Credit where due:  Fran and Henry have a good, logical conversation deducing how the bloody jacket came to be at the shop, the timing of the event, and the condition the owner might be in.

We cut to a couple of yahoos in the morgue listening to a ballgame on the radio.  The announcer says Jackie Robinson has just stolen a base, “That boy can really run.”  Okaaaaay.  There is a refreshing flash of creativity as Ernest is wheeled into the morgue, toe-tag first.  He appears dead except, unseen by the attendants, one hand is opening and closing.

Henry, and especially Fran, prove to be pretty good detectives as they try to piece together what happened.  There is even a nice attempt at the titular suspense as they need to use a payphone and some woman is hogging it.  Fran tries to call Mrs. Bowers, but she is still at the theater on about Commandment #7.

So they go back to the clothing shop.  The owner is reluctant to admit he picked up the jacket off the street after being used to prop up a dead guy’s noggin.  He finally fesses up.  His description of the event convinces Fran and Henry that the jacket’s owner is in danger of being embalmed at the morgue.  They try to call, but the two yahoos don’t answer the phone.

As the two morgue monkeys assemble their needles and scalpels, the organ really starts in.  One of them has a problem with his glasses fogging up when he leans over the corpse’s face.  There is a nice fuzzy POV shot of Ernest through the steamy glasses — unfortunately, it is from the camera’s POV, on the other side of the body from the coroner.

Finally, they answer the phone.  In the 2nd of back-to-back errors, he answers the phone without it ringing — which is the opposite of what I do.  He says, “It is some dame babbling about a guy with no coat that may not be dead.”  His blurry-eyed partner comes to the same conclusion. ^[4]

Finally Ernest opens his eyes.

There was some good stuff here.  The title is awesomely grim for 1949.  The scenario has suspense baked in.  There was some intelligent dialogue as Fran and Henry pursued the mystery.  They manufactured suspense with the phone calls and Ernest’s imminent embalming.  Margaret Phillips was delightful as Fran.  She was smart, sexy, and had an awesome Mid-Atlantic accent that sounded like Katherine Hepburn, but less like a car-starting. ^[3]

On the down side . . . well, you have to just accept that it was made in 1949 for no budget.  I guess Auto-Lite did not cough up the big bucks like Alcoa on One Step Beyond.  They played the telephone card too much here, but again, you are dealing with those limitations, plus a short running time.  The main criticism, as in previous episodes, is the obnoxious organ music.  You could say that’s just how things were done at the time, but it doesn’t make it right.  Just ask Jackie Robinson.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  All for the low, low price of 35 cents.
• [2]  When Googling Ten Commandments, the first suggestion is the movie not the, ya know, actual Ten Commandments.  Just sayin’.
• [3]  I would give attribution for that great analogy, but I can’t remember where I heard it.  Actually Margaret was born in the UK, so I’m sure some of that is in there too.  She was last seen as a naughty, naughty girl in ToT’s The Evil Within.
• [4] There was another goof in the lab earlier.  One of the guys commented on Ernest being brought in with no clothes, then corrects himself to say no jacket.
• Suspiciously similar to Breakdown on AHP.  Catalepsy and a Get Out of Morgue Free Card also play roles in another AHP episode, One Grave Too Many.
• The first writing credit for Seeleg Lester.  That might mean nothing to you, but it means nothing to anyone else either.  He did have a yuge career, though.
• Not that anyone else cares, but it really bugs me that the top photo is not the Joe Mannix jacket.  He wouldn’t have been caught dead in that thing.  I think that was a Herb Tarlek.  It was just too tough to find any other shots of Margaret smiling.