The camera pans across expensive old crystal, fine old silver, and a real antique putting on lipstick.  Young, handsome Howard Prince wheels in a cart with some fine food perfectly mushy for a toothless-American who also travels on wheels; also a 1966 Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

As he shares the wine with his superannuated wife, Howard smoothly pulls a contract out of his snazzy dinner jacket for the old woman to sign which enables him to buy a company.  She asks him to do something for her which, thank God, turns out to merely be reciting To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) who would go on to write The Incredible Hulk (although records are sketchy from that time).

Strangely the poem is about a suitor wishing he had eternity to worship some hot babe, body part by body part.  Who doesn’t like boobs, but “two hundred years to adore each breast.”?  Russ Myer wasn’t that obsessed.  Ironically, it is not Howard who “time’s chariot” is chasing down, but his elderly wife.  And the poison he put in the wine is really cracking the whip on those horses.

The old woman dies before he can get through the poem, even though he really gave her a sporting chance by starting in the middle and skipping several lines.  He immediately calls 9-1-1 and acts as distraught as Treat Williams is capable of.

At her graveside, he is joined by his business partner Morty who has assisted in his scheme to marry and murder several old women.  The law is closing in on them, and Morty thinks it is time to quit and flee to an island which he can’t pronounce and I can’t figure out even with subtitles.

Howard wants one more victim to really retire in style.  He fast forwards through a video-tape dating service until he comes across Effie Gluckman (Ma Clavin) who is just seeking a companion.  She rejects him as being too young and possibly a gold-digger until he claims that he can’t date women his own age because they have “certain needs and I am unable to fulfill.”  By feigning impotence, he makes his interest in her plausible, and has an excuse not to have the sex with her.  Birds: 2, Stone: 1, Bees: 0.  Brilliant!

Demonstrating the gamut of his acting range from A to B, this is exactly the same reaction he had to Wendy Jo Sperber in 1941.

He doesn’t foresee the fact that her late husband was also impotent so she had gotten quite horny. She throws him on a table and . . .

Well, I don’t really want to imagine what follows, but she brings him breakfast in bed where he nervously claims that he had not been able to perform like that since college.  She also gives him a letter that says “Another one? Stop before it is too late.”

Howard assumes it is from Morty, so pays him a visit at his office.  He shoves Morty’s tie into one of those TV paper shredders that don’t have a plug or an OFF button, and are more industrial strength than the one used on Hillary Clinton’s emails.  OK, her current batch of data is digital, but you know in the old days, she had a diesel cross-cutting shredder with a built-in incinerator.

The next morning Effie and Howard get married at city hall.  She has wasted no time in changing her bank accounts to both their names.  She goes upstairs to start the Jacuzzi, and Howard gets another note, “Another one!  What you’re doing to these women is criminal!”

Obviously with Morty dead, the list of suspects has narrowed.  So he goes to the video dating service and kills the owner.  Effie’s butler has suspicions, so he has to go too.

He tries the old poison wine trick on Effie, and soon she is dead.  That doesn’t quite take, so he throws her down the stairs.  When leaving for the airport,he finds another note asking him to go to the mausoleum.

Note to self, after you’ve unjustly killed a bunch of people, don’t go to the graveyard.

A pretty good episode.

Post-Post:

• One of two writing IMDb credits for Donald Longtooth, both on TFTC.  That was the very apropos name of the titular character in The Reluctant Vampire.  I smell a nom de plume.  Also oranges.
• WTF?  Treat Williams was in The Empire Strikes Back?
• Title Analysis:  Meh.  Song by Tchaikovsky and movie starring Cary Grant, neither containing anything similar to the themes here.