My God, the talking!  This is a talkie one.  This  one has more chit-chat than a season 4 Twilight Zone.

Grace Connor has come by to pick up her clothes.  She had been married to Judge Connors for 10 years.  He says he met Grace when he was 54.   If we use the actors’ birth dates, she is 41 years younger than him.  Hmmmm.

While she is packing, The Judge invites her new fella Wallace into the house.  He opens a bottle of sherry, and proposes a toast to Grace.   The Judge drones on about his old schoolmates Socrates and Aristotle.  No wonder Grace is bailing on him.

After a few drinks, The Judge convinces Wallace that he has been poisoned and locks him in a room.  He makes a point of saying the sherry is an Amontillado.  I suppose getting him drunk and confining him in the room is a nod to the Poe short story.  But this time, Fortunato is pissed!

Yikes!!!

As Wallace panics, The Judge uses his pleas to show Grace that she is leaving him for a coward — a 40 years younger, muscular, better dressed, handsomer, more interesting coward with a full head of hair.

Panicky Wallace then shoots his way out, hitting The Judge.  He tells Grace The Judge poisoned him, but she points a couple of circumstantial reasons why that is unlikely.  He accepts this flimsy evidence a little too easily when a stomach pumping would have been prudent.  He realizes that Grace now sees him as a coward.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  Congrats to Robert Horton, still hanging in there at 90 years old.
• AHP Proximity Alert:  This is Robert Horton’s 3rd appearance this season.
• Sterling Silliphant wrote 11 AHPs as well as the screenplay for The Poseidon Adventure.

Richard Hertz, er I mean Paine begins the episode with a semi-voiceover. That is, he is narrating, but appears as a translucent ghost over scenes of the big city rat-race that he is bemoaning.

Having just been passed over for yet another sales job, he goes home to wife Beth.  She insists that he go to see his former boss who owes him $450 in back-wages.  He decides a better course of action is to hit a bartender up for a loan.  Sadly, this rock-solid source of capital lost it on the ponies.  So he goes to see his ex-boss.

When he gets there, he sees that Mr. Burroughs has company and doesn’t wish to embarrass him by asking for his wages.  He’s not above peeking in his window, however, where he sees Burroughs pull out a wad of cash and hand it to his unseen guest.

After the guest leaves, and the lights are turned out, Paine lifts up a window and crawls inside to get his $450.  As he is counting out the exact amount, because he has told us he will only take that amount, Burroughs enters with a gun.  There is a struggle as Burroughs is calling the police and he is shot.

Paine heads back to Beth.  Because this couple has the communication skills of Oceanic 815 passengers, there is more death. As always in AHP-world, justice is eventually served.

This was the final episode of season one and it is suitably nasty as far as the censors would allow at the time.  Justice is served, but after 2 even more senseless than usual deaths. Good stuff.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  We’ve got a couple of live ones!  Skip Homeier and Joanne Woodward are still with us.  Possibly a couple of others, or their obscurity just means their deaths were overlooked by IMDb.
• AHP Proximity Alert: Harry Taylor was in 6 episodes this season, including one just 2 weeks earlier.  Give somebody else a chance!
• The apartment hunter was just in Decoy 2 weeks ago.
• Joanne Woodward = Mrs. Paul Newman for 50 years.
• Skip Homeier is famous for 2 iconic roles – both of them in Star Trek:  Melakon the Nazi and Dr. Sevrin the space hippie with the designer ears.

The episode gets off to a good start with Reta Shaw as Mrs. Stone.  Anyone who has watched too much 1970s TV will recognize her from usually playing a bulldog of a cleaning woman.

Mrs. Grant has been waiting for the locksmith to install a chain on her door.  Her idiot lout of a husband berates her for being afraid of a strangler — the titular Creeper — that has been terrorizing the neighborhood.

Shaw and the new janitor are discussing the Creeper and Shaw opines that the women were probably asking for it: “Decent women don’t get themselves murdered.”

Mrs. Grant’s husband is a surly jerk and they appear to live in the Kramdens’ old apartment. He has just been passed over for a raise, and is currently working nights like the husbands of the murdered women. When she asks if he can switch to the day shift, he berates her.  There is never any insinuation that he is the strangler, although it seems they are about equal in their respect for women.

Mr. Grant stops off for a beer before work, maybe explaining why he didn’t get that raise, and talks to his friend Ed who had once dated Mrs. Grant.  Ed does come off as a possible suspect.  When Ed points out that the victims had both been blondes home alone, it finally occurs to Mr. Grant that maybe his wife is legitimately scared.

Ed drops by the Grant home, appearing suddenly, to Mrs. Grant’s shock.  He says he came to keep her company but won’t say how he got in.  Mrs. Grant does not believe his story that her husband asked him to keep her company.  For good reason — Mr. Grant does not strike me as a guy who would send a former boyfriend to keep an eye on his property, er, woman.

Plus Ed is pretty creepy, and does try to force himself on Mrs. Grant until some neighbors complain about the noise.  She uses that opportunity to ask him to leave.  Seeing the man, Shaw wastes no time accusing Mrs. Grant of being a tart who will get what she deserves in the end, just like those other two victims.

Finally the locksmith arrives as Mr. Grant calls to apologize.  Unfortunately, he does not apologize for sending Ed to keep her company.  She tells him the locksmith has arrived and he tells her the police are saying the Creeper has been pretending to be a locksmith.

Hands come into frame to choke her.

So, for the ladies, another love song of J Alfred Hitchcock.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  All dead.
• Christ!  Reta Shaw was only 43 in this?

To be fair, I’m sure he considers rape a close second