On some Brad and Janice evening, the aforementioned Brad has just given Janice “a kind of pretty piece of glass”. Janice is thrilled with it and eager to get married. She asks if they might set the date in the next couple of months and he counters with three weeks. He just asks for two or three days to clear up some business before the announcement is made.
As he is leaving for a business meeting, she says she hopes it is not to see “that lady novelist.” He assures her that it is over with Leslie. BTW, that’s a nice accusation to throw at a guy who not only just proposed, but gave you a phat ring and fast-tracked the wedding! What an ungrateful shrew! What a finger-pointing harpy! The nerve of that suspicious insecure bitch!
Then he goes to see Leslie. Oh.
Leslie greets him with a big hug and wet kiss. Brad is not very responsive, so she says, “You’ve either been out with another woman or you need a new brand of pills.” Taking place in 45 BC (before Cialis), I have no idea what that means. Is this what Geritol is for? I’ve heard of it all my life, but never had any idea what it does — good job Madison Avenue! Also in that category — Gold Bond Powder. What the hell? Something for old people, I think.
She is selling out by ditching the novel to write for TV. She tells Brad it is so she can continue to afford him. She tactfully reminds him of how she has financed his failed business ventures. He bravely tells her that he is going to marry another woman. Well, he doesn’t say it is another woman, but it was kind of assumed back then. Leslie threatens to cause a scene with Janice threatening “phone calls, letters, shrieking matches [1] that will raise the hair on her head like a $3 wig.” She threatens to harass both of them until they either break up or have a “nervous collapse”.
Kind of whipped, she asks him to put her car [2] in the garage before he leaves. And to call her when he gets home, which he agrees to. Before moving her car, he opens the hood and removes a couple of parts. This is so she will take a cab to work. Then he will pick her up and they will go to her beach house.
The next day, he dresses as a mechanic and takes her car to the beach house, but hides it behind some bushes. That night, he picks her up from work in a rental car and they go to the beach. [3] Before they go for a midnight swim, Leslie returns a knife he left at her place.
After a minute of frolicking in the surf, Brad stands in chest-deep water with his hands on Leslie’s head as he chokes her. Wait, he isn’t choking her, he’s killing her! That is, she isn’t going down on him, but she is going down. After drowning her, he moves her car in front of the beach house, then drives away in his rental.
When he arrives home, he find two detectives there. This being before the Constitution was written, the detectives had the super just let them in. They tell him “your lady friend has been murdered . . . and real good, too — the full treatment.” So not just a little murdered.
They have no hesitation opening his suitcase and rummaging around. When they find his wet, sandy robe he insists he has not been to the beach for a week. They then start patting him down. Next thing these guys will be quartering soldiers in his house. They do find a knife, though, so stop & frisk is once again proven effective.
In a superb double-twist, Leslie stabbed Janice to death, then set Brad up for the murder and his only alibi is that he was murdering Leslie at the time. Oh sure, we could quibble over the time-line. Or how she certainly seems devoted to Brad even after he threatens to end their relationship. But why overthink it?
This is a near-perfect example of what AHP is supposed to be. I especially appreciated the business with the cars. The sabotage of Leslie’s car, hiding it at the beach house, picking up Leslie at work — all carried out silently and directed so clearly and methodically that I had to look to see if Hitchcock had directed this episode.
Great stuff.
Post-Post:
- [1] The stilted delivery of this line makes it sound like a book of matches is shrieking.
- [2] A Triumph TR-3, just like Lila Kirby.
- [3] I love this undeveloped beach and the lone beach house on it. You just know it is now packed with condos or estates with no public access.
- AHP Deathwatch: Robert Horton just died just four months ago. Joyce Meadows (Janice) and Herbert Ellis (Detective Breslin) are still with us.
- Title Analysis: Once again, no idea. These titles are more cryptic than The X-Files’s’s’. At least they are in English.
Nine year old Cathy is making her father one of those breakfasts that only a parent would find edible. I must admit she is pretty adorable as she presents him with a crudely wrapped birthday present — a wallet that she made. He opens it to find a family picture of Cathy, himself and his dead wife. For Father’s Day she got him a mug with his prostate exam results on it. Dammit, this is not what I want from the Twilight Zone! But it is heartbreaking.
nuns are just wrapping up a rummage sale. A nun tells him that is impossible because all of the children have been adopted. No wait, they just moved to a new building. As he is leaving, he sees the girl on a swing. She points to a large lump under a tarp. When he looks at it, then back at the swing, she is gone.
That night, the little girl comes walking into Dad’s bedroom. She says she wants Toby, and that the Sisters will be mad if they find her out of bed. She leads him back to the bed he just bought and climbs in. She introduces herself as Sarah and asks Paul to tuck her in. He looks away for a second — at nothing! — then back at the bed to see that she has just disappeared. 
He is, of course, overjoyed to see his little girl awake. However, he is a little taken aback when she asks for Toby. But then she smiles and nothing else matters — like, what happened to Cathy’s soul.
Stephen has just rented a new house, and his girlfriend stops by. He immediately gets the feeling that “there should be an art deco chair and an oriental rug right there.” His deja vu brings on several jarringly edited, awfully-lit flashes to the past — exactly the motif that undercut New Year’s Day.
The next day, Stephen has more flashes of a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat. He later hears a woman’s voice calling for Maxie. He goes upstairs and in the same god-awful lighting sees a woman in the bathroom stripping down. I try not to purposely be negative in these posts, so I am being honest when I say the woman is singing one of the most annoying, terrible, tuneless songs I have every heard — it doesn’t even make up for the stripping [1]. A few seconds later, he sees her pop to the surface in a bathtub of bloody water. A hand forces her head back down.[2]
That night, Stephen awakens to jazz music and sees Max and Zelda bathed in the awful amber lighting. They are playing cards just as Stephen and Karen had played Scrabble [3] moments before. Once again, Max pulls a knife on her. Stephen tells this to his psychiatrist who hypnotizes him again . . . Max is at a party with Zelda. She is dressed as a flapper and flirting with some of the other guests as she dances to a song that is almost, but not quite, 
This is surely a waste of words but: In a featurette, the director made a point of saying that the walls were painted green in the present, but painted red in the past to reflect the passion of that era. So why is Zelda’s dress green in the past, and Karen’s dress red in the present? So she did not blend into the back-ground under the awful lighting?
aka 
Turns out the men are astronauts, but not from NASA. Their trip was subsidized by Standard Motors (a division of Average Mechanical, a wholly owned subsidiary of Just OK, Inc). The evil corporation will get half of anything they find, and any wallets they make. Bart is disappointed that they did not find any people on Mars. He suggests that since there is plant life similar to earth’s, that there should be intelligent life.
After Robbie leaves, Bart realizes his rabbit’s foot is missing and accuses Jack. Bart says it “didn’t just walk away by itself” which is a pretty god gag that I don’t think they even realized. Bart goes after Jack with a hammer and they start wrestling as we go to commercial. Robbie breaks it up and demands that they hand over their guns.