Just a quick aside. Or since this is the beginning, maybe it is an atop. Rather than being here, you should be watching Fargo.
It took me a while to find it, but holy crap! Season 2 is merely great so far. Season 1 was an absolute freakin’ masterpiece. They’ve been making TV & movies for a hundred years. Why can they only crack the code about .5% of the time? Is there no learning curve in Hollywood? Anyhoo . . .
Tuxedoed buttinsky Albert Martin tells Mrs. Bedsole that her niece-in-law Virgilia [1] is out in the garden among the vidalias, azaleas, and bougainvilleas with a man who is not her husband. Even worse, it is Virgilia’s ex-husband Cam. She asks Albert to check on them. He finds them fooling around in the bushes.
On the way home, Virgilia’s husband Joseph asks her where she disappeared to. She says she was just visiting with old friends. He says that is fine and even insists they have one of them over for dinner. She says she will invite “a very old admirer.” Once again, we have an AHP marriage which makes no sense. While Virgilia is beautiful and vivacious, Joseph comes off as a sad sack. He knows his wife is cheating on him, but is so needy he wants to be friends with the other man. The scene in the car is shot so that, not only is Virgilia driving, she towers above her husband. Why would she have left Cam, inventor of the Condo Fee, to marry Joseph? Maybe Joseph invented the Assessment.
She invites Albert over for dinner. There seems to be some point to Albert asking for a sherry, but I’m not sure what it is. Joseph McFlys away to find a bottle. After dinner, Virgilia takes Albert out to see some metal chairs Joseph made. She says she thinks Albert prefers to have a woman on his arm rather than in his arms. Hmmmm, I think I see where they were going with that Sherry thing.
As they are going back inside, some scaffolding falls on Virgilia. If this were a play, the audience would applaud. Albert examines the frayed rope. Joseph conjectures the wind must have cause the pulley to wear away the fibers.
The next day, Albert is finishing 20 push-ups. He says to himself, “I’m out of condition. I got no wind.” If he is doing push-ups so fast that he can get winded, I’d say he’s in extraordinary shape. That reminds him — there was no wind when the scaffold fell. Why would Joseph cite the wind as the cause of the frayed rope? Well, it might not have been windy at the second it fell, but it was heard clanging against the house earlier in the evening.
Pajamaed buttinsky Albert calls Virgilia to check on her. She is OK, but bedridden. He asks if she has had any other “accidents”. No. End of brutally expository scene.
One evening, Albert goes back to their house. Joseph is napping and Virgilia has been delayed, so he goes to Joseph’s workshop to look for evidence that Joseph is trying to kill his wife. He finds rope like that used on the scaffolding. After only a few strokes with a metal rod, he manages to cut into the rope. The demonstration actually makes Joseph’s story more credible; although he is buying some cheap-ass rope.
Then he notices a can of arsenic is missing from the spot he saw it on the night of the accident. Necktied buttinsky Albert goes to Mrs. Bedsole and tells her Joseph is going to murder Virgilia. They agree he can’t go to the police, but he will let Joseph know he is watching him.
He returns to Joseph & Virgilia’s house. Joseph is just getting over a case of ptomaine. His doctor prescribed fresh air, so he invites Albert to go fishing with him in Mexico.
They grill up some fish and make some coffee over a camp fire on the beach. They begin discussing murder. Fishinghatted buttinsky Albert begins a story about “a man I knew who intended to commit a murder”.
He continues that the murder did not occur because “a third person who was a friend of both the intended murderer and his victim intervened.” This third person caused the murderer to weigh the consequences against the small satisfaction of killing his wife.
Joseph says it is very similar to a situation he knows of. The husband knew his wife was cheating on him. He says the man was kind of a slob but did love his wife. “The fellow set out to protect his property.” Wait, his what? “The way he did it was simple. He encouraged his wife to bring friends to the house.” Then he saw them fooling around in the garden.
Albert is increasingly uncomfortable at the story which is clearly about him and Virgilia. He realizes the scaffolding was meant for him. Joseph says the man had another plan — to take the wife’s friend camping. In a lonely spot, they made coffee in a tin can because the man had forgotten the coffee pot. Both men got arsenic poisoning, but the man had built up a tolerance. The other man died, but he got well.
Albert blurts out, “”But it wasn’t me! It was Cam!”
“Cam!” Joseph cries in horror.
All the pieces are here. It is a well-constructed piece with nice misdirection and great twist. Joseph’s apparent tolerance of his wife’s fooling around just irritates me.
I was also distracted by the resemblances of both male leads to other actors. Gary Merrill (Joseph) reminded me very much of Humphrey Bogart. Sometimes it was the PTSD’d Capt. Queeg, sometimes it was Fred C. Dobbs, and sometimes it was his hot decades-younger blonde wife, [2] but the specter was always there. Alan Hewitt (Albert) was a dead ringer for James Gregory in both looks and voice.
Post-Post:
- AHP Deathwatch: Cam was present in the episode more in spirit than he was in person. Now as the only survivor, he is the only one who is a person and not a spirit.
- AHP Proximity Alert: Lillian O’Malley (Flora the Maid) was just in an episode two weeks ago — give someone else a chance! There she played “Housekeeper”. In the very first AHP episode, she played “Hotel Maid.” Whatever happened to Pat Hitchcock? This used to be her beat.
- [1] Virgilia was the wife of Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s play. Heh, heh . . . anus. Virgilia was like June Cleaver, though, so the name doesn’t really carry any meaning here.
- [2] Lauren Bacall has the honor of being ID # nm0000002 at IMDb. Fred Astaire is # nm0000001.
- For a more in-depth look at the episode and its source material, head over to bare*bonez ezine. Where the heck do they find this stuff?
Beware any TZ segment that begins with that little
Ellie has had a mind-blowing experience at work, she is stood up by her sister, she has writer’s block, she is frustrated at the “cheapest drywall in the world”, she is angry at her inconsiderate neighbor, she confronts him and he is an obnoxious jerk. So naturally the score sounds like public domain music that would play under two young lovers having a picnic lunch at a lake watching the sailboats. It is inconceivable to me that this selection wasn’t drawn out of a hat. OK, looking again, I guess this is the music on the neighbor’s stereo, but it is still a poor choice.
Ellie edits his volume so he is a successful real estate developer. She sees de wealthy DeWitts as she is coming home from work. Mr. DeWitt tells her not to be late with the rent, and “and whatever your sister is trying to pull in that tea party upstairs, it’s not gonna work.” Her sister is organizing the tenants in a rent strike against the over-bearing, do-nothing criminal landlord. Heh,
Truman Bradley points out a coil of rope and a pyramid, saying “both are unsolved mysteries of the ages.” He demonstrates how a fakir does the ol’ Indian Rope Trick. Well, he does the rope trick, but disgracefully leaves it open whether it is science or magic. In suggesting the Rope Trick is a legitimate scientific mystery, he says this kind of anti-gravity trick is nothing new — that may be how the pyramids were built. I love
They find a photo from inside the tomb. A sword appears to be hovering in the air over III’s sarcophagus. Notes on the back suggest a force field and mention Seja Dih who Kincaid saw perform the Indian Rope Trick in Benares and make a lady disappear at The Sands.[2]
When Berensen gets home, he finds Virginia Kincaid there. Before saying a word, he offers her a cigarette. She says she ran away because after her husband’s death, the house was scary. She says the minerals weren’t stolen, they were given to her husband by the Egyptian government for research.
The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson is based on a story by Stephen King that appeared in Rolling Stone. I am unable to determine whether they printed it as
She microwaves two Swanson Hungry-Rube Dinners and starts eating before her husband Joe gets home from his job as a mailman. He is only mildly miffed as he wolfs down the meal and reclines in his La-Z-Boy to check out the “Sports for Sports” Swimsuit Edition like a Horn-E-Boy. Becka is bored with her husband and her life as he doesn’t care about the Christmas decorations, isn’t much for conversation, and gives her a pretty listless rogering in bed. She even turns picture-frame model guy down so he doesn’t have to see this.
In another good comic performance, Fink checks out her wound. Being a vet, he doesn’t really do much for her, but at least doesn’t give her a cone to wear around her head. There is some fun dialogue and I got a laugh out of the occupational hazard scratches on his head that are never mentioned.
The episode opens with carefully composed shots of a priest killing himself. The shots call attention to themselves, but in a good way. They don’t take you out of the story, but they do let you know the director isn’t just a point-and-shoot guy — hey, it’s TV’s Carl Schenkel, director of the great
After that blatant bit of exposition, Sheen returns to the convent with the key. He sees the young nun. She says she was a novice here. The dialogue is a little dry, but it is intriguingly shot. Schenkel shoots her very close so that the entire frame is her cowl tented over her lovely face like she is peeking up from under the sheets. If that was the intent, more kudos to Carl; if not, I really need to get some help. She says she knows Sheen is a cop “by the bulge . . . of your gun.” She tells him to watch out for the demon and walks away.