Norman and Paula Frayne are in bed — or rather, they are in separate twin beds as all couples were in the 50’s (hence the title Death Sentence).  Paula is noticeably 10 years older than Norman. Apparently Hitch didn’t get the Hollywood memo that when a woman is at least 5 years older, she is to play the man’s mother.

Norman is worried about a contract he lost at his real estate office.  As the contract was won by a realtor named Kennedy, he should just be thankful he’s still alive.  But I’m a little baffled how he works at Frayne Real Estate which his wife’s father owned.  He is pretty wimpy — did he take his wife’s name when they married?  I suppose the correct answer is that he inherited the firm and renamed it after himself, but that seems an unlikely move for his wimpy character.

Touchy-Feely!

The next morning at the office, he is surprised by a visit from an old pal. Norman had committed a robbery with Al Revnel, but only Al had been caught.  He did not rat out Norman who spent 12 years in the can as he was charged with murdering the night watchman. You never hear about day watch-men being killed — that seems like the better career move.  Al figures $50,000 should make things even between them, and keep him from implicating Norman.  As that would be $413,000 today, that would shut me up too.

Well, he did keep Norman out of prison.  And the vermicelli-spined (and not even al dente) Norman would have made first season Beecher look like sixth season Beecher.

Touchy-Feely!

Al is one of those bullies who likes to touch his victim’s face and get very handsy with them.  He tells Norman to call Paula and tell them he is coming to live with them.  He also calls Norman “buddy-boy” about 400 times in 25 minutes. The first month, he milks Norman for $800 of advances.  He also likes to drop in to have lunch with Paula every day while Norman is at work.

Norman actually shows about 25% of a gonad and forces a confron-tation; although with Paula, not Al.  She says their rondevouzes ^[1] are very innocent. Apparently Al is feeling Norman up more than he is Paula.  She says she is going to go on a trip to Detroit with a gal-pal.  As this is 1958, she stands a pretty good chance of coming back.  Norman thinks she might be sneaking off with Al so he buys  some dynamite and wires up his car.

Touchy-Feely!

Paula hears an explosion, and the twist is that it wasn’t Al who was in the explosion — Norman killed himself.  Kind of anti-climactic.  Al goes back to jail for life for violat-ing his parole by leaving the state. Twelve years for murdering an innocent man, but make the state look bad, and it’s LIFE buddy-boy!

Post-Post:

• ^[1] The plural of rondezvous is also rendezvous, but you pronounce the “s”.
• AHP Deathwatch:  James Best made it until this year.  Probably best known as Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard.  He also starred in Jess-Belle.
• I was watching The Walking Dead on a second screen at the same time as AHP — Does the Dos Equis slogan make any sense at all?  Isn’t “Stay Thirsty” telling people to not drink their beer?  Their “Most Interesting Man in the World” is about as interesting as a Rothko painting.
• Hulu sucks.

Touchy-Feely!

Netflix recently lost all except the first AHP season and I was forced to crawl to Hulu.  Amazingly, the episodes did not require membership.  Not truly amazing because they do have commercials, but amazing because Hulu does not make you pay for them on top of getting stuck with commercials.

But having done one thing which did not piss off its customers (yes, enduring ads makes me a “paying customer”), Hulu clearly had to regress back to it’s mean.  I just noticed that certain episodes are missing from its queue.  I assume they are not available to subscribers either because the icons do not appear at all.

Today’s episode would have been, probably the most famous episode of the series, Lamb to the Slaughter by Raold Dahl.  But no.  Instead we flashforward one episode to a an episode starring a very irritating John McGiver, but with an admirably dark ending for 1958.

Bookkeeper Harold Goames (McGiver) is whining to his sister, who he lives with, about the sameness of his life.  Every day, for thirteen years, the same job, the same suits.  They receive an almanac in the mail and George is devastated to realize the sum value of his contribution to humanity is to be 1 of the 172 million citizens of the country (this is back when we had a border).

That night he looks through the almanac and finds some other statistics that pep him up. His voiceover reads that the US labor force is 121 million, and he is happy that he is a slightly more significant man in that figure.  Strangely, when he speaks the figure he says, “One of those 60 million is Harold Goames.”  Why the number is different seems to be an editing error because he then reads out loud out loud, “male labor force only 60 million.”

Determined to improve his standing in the 172 million, he sees that there were 226,000 auto thefts that year. We see him get into a car which is not his and easily steal it.  Did cars not require a key back then?

Realizing that he is still basically a big zero, he sees that there were only 63,000 robberies last year.  A brutha’s life could start having some meaning in this smaller figure — so he robs a drugstore.  This must have gotten him pumped because he forgets about the Chinese Checkers game that he and his live-in sister have played every Sunday night for 13 years.

How about 45 years old guys who live with their sister in what seems to be a marital — but to be fair, non-sexual — relationship.  She doesn’t seem to work, but cooks his meals and washes his laundry like a dutiful 1950’s wife.  That is probably a pretty small sliver of the population.  In that tiny figure, he is royalty!  No,wait, I mean a loser.

Thinking he can be an even bigger cog in the wheel, he sees that there were only 7,000 murders last year — so he kills his sister.  Well, she had become a bit of a nag creepily accusing him of philandering and “having another woman.”  Much to his chagrin, the murder is ruled accidental, foiling his attempt to be one of the few, the elite 7,000.  So he confesses to poisoning her.

He explains his theory to the police detective and seems happy with his new role in society.  He is positively chirpy as he goes upstairs to get his coat so they can be off to jail.  He takes out the almanac one last time and sees a really select breed — there were 16,000 suicides.  He takes out the pistol he used in the great drugstore heist, the camera pans away, and there is the sound of thunder.

I like the very dark climax, but he was already 1 in 7,000 so why would he throw that distinction away to be a mere 1 in 16,000?  It’s almost like he was crazy.

A good episode if you can stand Harold’s incessant whining.  The real mystery is why his sister did not kill Harold first.

For a more thorough, better written recap, and background on the production, head over to bare-bones ezine.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathatch:  No survivors.  His sister gave it a good try, hanging on until this year when she died at 98 . . . cause of death unknown.
• Hulu sucks

Usually an oasis among some of the other shows and movies, this outing has dull performances (but by beautiful people) and a fairly dull story.  It is a sad commentary to say that this episode is barely worthy to share the week with the last few 20-for-$7.50 movies.

Bookie Walter Richmond — one of them suave, handsome, stylish  suit-wearing, coiffed, tennis-playing bookies you always hear about — strolls into the office just in time to get a call.  His weekend plans in La Jolla are ruined by his boss who wants him to check on an old client who has suddenly stopped making bets.  Also by his inability to find “Lahoya” on the map.  He gets some expense money and sets out to find this mysterious Herbert Gild.

In La Jolla, Richmond drops by the fabulous casa de Gild and rings the bell.  The girl answering the door — his wife Laura — kind of rings my bell.  She is an exotic blonde who looks like she was all dolled up in a cat-woman suit waiting for someone to drop by.  She invites Richmond in and tells him her much-older husband has been dead for six months — if only there were some sort of notice in the newspapers about that sort of thing.

Back in the office, Richmond learns that Gild last placed a bet 3 months ago; 3 months after his supposed death.  He finally does think of checking the newspapers, and the obit is there just as Laura said.  Body count:  Herbert’s was mysteriously never found, and Laura’s is simply unbelievable.

Richmond makes another unannounced call on Laura.  He tells her his theory that she was cheating on him with younger men, and he just wanted to get away from her. She admits to the cheating, but plays dumb about the faking of his death.

Richmond tracks Herbert Gild down in Tijuana and poses as an insurance investigator.  Had he posed as an insurance salesman, maybe Gild would have been more evasive.  Gild offers him $10,000 to say he was not found, and Richmond takes it.  When they get back to Laura’s apartment, Gild is there.  After the slightest of struggles, Gild shoots Richmond in the shoulder.

He gets a doctor to work on it.  He says the shoulder will heal, but will always be stiff.  “Not too bad unless you’re a tennis player.”  Oh, and Laura fled with the $10,000 of cash that he stupidly left in his jacket pocket in the waiting room.  Richmond laughs, as you do when you lose a hot babe, are robbed of $10,000, your favorite hobby is ruined, and your hook for picking up chicks is compromised.

“I can’t understand why the customers aren’t beating down my door.”

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  Robert Horton is still hanging on, and Betsy Von Furstenberg just died this year.
• You can always trust a business card with no address or phone number.
• Laura was 27 years younger than Gild.  Which is starting to make more sense to me.

Sweet Jeebus!  I take a few weeks months off and Netflix removes seasons 2 and 3 from streaming.  Hulu did the same thing with Outer Limits last year.  Oh the humanity!  The nooses are tightening, sheeple.  Hulu, as always, sucks.

Mr. O’Finn goes to see his neighbor Miss Hildy-Lou across the court, at her invitation.  She is 75 years old — 30 years older than O’Finn — but can’t stop making googly cataracts at him.  She invites him into the parlor where her similarly old friends are just as enamored of their hunky young neighbor.  There is Miss Bessie (83), Miss Birdie (76), and Miss Samantha (47).

Wait, what?  This is strange — she is only 2 years older than O’Finn but fits right in with the other much older ladies.  I would suspect an error on IMBd or that she lied about her age, but IMDb has her dying at 88 in 1999.  So unless she really lived to be 108, 47 would be about right.  Safe to say Miss Samantha was not aging gracefully.

The Walkers Dead

The ladies know his morning work-out routine and know that he is a homicide detective.  That is why they invited him over.  Not for some squat-thrusts, but because another of their superannuated friends (Miss Elizabeth, uncredited, but probably about 103) is dead on the sofa.

They are disappointed when he tells them to call a doctor to get a death certificate. They were hoping to be questioned by him, but he says his business is murder.  They try their best to get him to stay, but he wants to get back to investigating more alluring women like gun-molls, hookers, and crack-whores ^[1].

Back at the station, he tells his partner he “felt like a bull in a china shop in that place,” speaking the title, but lending it no more logic.  He gets a call from the crime lab — Miss Elizabeth was poisoned with arsenic.

The old girls get giddy when O’Finn comes back to, you know, investigate the death.  They explain that the arsenic is kept in a sugar bowl as rat poison.  Once O’Finn determines that the death was an accident, he begins to leave, breaking the hearts of the giddy bitties that they won’t see him again.  But Miss Hildy-Lou has a plan.

When O’Finn sees the ladies spying on him through his window, he pulls the shades. Completely cut off from him, they must come up with a new plan to reel in this handsome devil.  But how . . . oh yeah, kill Miss Samantha.

No dummy, O’Finn — except for not seeing the first death was murder, and not getting that leaving your bathroom window wide open just invites peepers — he announces that Miss Samantha’s death by tea deserves a full investigation.  The olden girls are giddy to have his attention again . . . well, the ones still alive are.

O’Finn cracks the case and comes to arrest Hildy-Lou.  At the announcement, she goes all giddy again.  He asks if she understands what he is saying, since dementia is a strong possibility.  “Oh, yes,” she swoons.  “And I think it was very clever of you to have found out.”  When he tells her he must take her to the station, she runs to her room and comes out dolled up in a fancy new hat like they’re going out on a date.

For the two murders, she’ll probably get life — which in her case would be about 3 weeks.^[2]

This is all pretty silly stuff, but there is a nice twist at the end.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] OK, there were no crack-whores in 1958, but the word just has a great sound.
• ^[2] Actually the actress lived another 26 years, dying at age 101.
• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.  But, Christ, how could there be?
• Title Analysis:  Hunh?  I guess is O’Finn is the bull, but he isn’t reckless as the cliche suggests, I doubt it was a reference to bullshit, and I can’t imagine what else it would be.
• Hulu sucks.