Hey Grampa, what’s for supper?

Mr. Paige arrives home at his hotel. He is complaining about the heat while wearing a suit and tie on this sweltering day.  Did people not make the connection back then?  And the smell!  My God, the smell!

A neighbor that he passed on the stoop mentions that he always has hot soup for dinner.  Really, he doesn’t see the problem?  How about a nice vichyssoise?  Thank God jalapenos had not been invented yet, or this guy would spontaneously combust.

Across the courtyard, he sees a man looking around an apartment.  I’m not sure why Paige was immediately concerned unless he has made a habit of peering into that apartment and knows it is occupied by two hot college girls who beat the heat by lounging around topless and giving each other cool sponge-baths.  But I might be reading between the lines.

As the man is looking around the apartment, he finds a jewelry box.  Hearing a noise, he hides as a blonde woman comes into the room wearing a robe.  She finds his burglar bag — poor sap couldn’t even afford the fancy one with the $ on it — and he confronts her.  Paige watches helplessly as the burglar strangles the woman, flashing back four years earlier when he saw this same scene in a movie. ^[1]

Paige turns off the soup on his hot-plate — a nice touch — and dashes out of the room to report himself for peeping-tomming.  Since phones had apparently not yet been invented, he actually runs to the police station to report the murder of the “pretty blonde”.

The police show up and enter the apartment with Paige.  This burglar is damn good at his job — in minutes, he made off with the the jewelry, all the furniture, the woman’s body, the paintings on the wall and even shampooed the carpet based on the paper on the floor. Or maybe Paige is crazy and the apartment is vacant.

I’ll stop here and say this is why the series only lasted 10 episodes.  I predict that he saw a premonition of a future event.  The blonde will seen moving in later and he will be able to prevent her murder.  Continuing . . .

Paige and the police go back to his room and look across the courtyard.  Much as I wish the courtyard were some kind of portal, they only see the vacant apartment they were just in.  Paige seems pretty reliable, but the cops attribute his story to being hungry and crazy from the heat.  When Paige protests, the cops haul him away.

Moments later, the “pretty blonde” asks Paige’s neighbors for directions to an apartment she wants to rent. Well, well, well . . .

Apparently the cops didn’t take him to the police station, they went directly to Bellevue where he is sedated and questioned by Boris Karloff.  After he tells his story, Karloff tells him he can go back to his room — well, not his room, but one at the hospital.  He calls in the police and tells them that Paige is perfectly sane.

The next scene is a replay of the murder, exactly as Paige third-eye-witnessed it.  The burglar clubs the blonde on the noggin and steals her jewelry.  He then rushes out, leaving the body, the furniture, paintings and dirty carpet.

The police get a report of a murder at that same apartment and return to the scene of the crime.  They discover that Paige was released from the hospital three hours ago, and see him enter his apartment across the courtyard.  He could not have been the murderer as he described the woman and her furniture before, but the police continue questioning him.  He finally remembers the burglar had a cauliflower ear, which I’m sure has some more politically correct name now.

This isn’t really pertinent to the story. I just had not thought about these in a long time — not the LPs, but the record-changer.

They haul in a thug matching that description who naturally denies any wrong-doing with Clintonian arrogance.  The police then bring in Paige who recounts every detail of the burglary and murder.  Aha! That tells the thug that Paige really saw the murder, but it doesn’t offer up any corroborating evidence for the police.

Uh, maybe this show is too smart for me after all.  Paige informs the police that the blonde bit her killer on the arm.  They roll up his sleeves and see bite-marks. There’s yer corroborating evidence.  Unlike Clinton, a doormat wife, the press and a phalanx of sycophants aren’t going to protect this guy — he’s going to the big house.

So I was wrong in my presumption of the simplicity of this episode.  A lesser man would go back and delete that paragraph.  And by lesser, I mean less lazier.  It turned out to be pretty good.

I rate it 86 degrees.

Post-Post:

• ^[1]  Jimmy Stewart helplessly watched Raymond Burr threaten Grace Kelly in an apartment across a courtyard in Rear Window.  In that case, Kelly was the burglar . . . the hot, hot burglar.  She was not murdered, but merely arrested and taken in for fumigation and a shower surrounded by young, pretty guards.  At least, that’s how I remember it.
• Hey Grampa, what’s for supper . . . how can there be no YouTube clips of this?