Are you getting déjà vu of another time you wasted time on the internet? Maybe doubly so if you read last week’s post. Post Mortem came up in the rotation last week as an episode of Suspense. Turns out the same Cornell Woolrich story was also the basis of an AHP episode which I inadvertently skipped 6 years ago. OMG, six years?
The AHP version is an immediate improvement. Although the story involves multiple scenes of a bathtub and sunlamp, there was nary an inch of skin to be seen last week. Here, not at all gratuitously, we begin with a dame in a bubble bath. [1]
Her hubby Steve brings in a sunlamp and says, “Honey, you’re so beautiful you must be perishable.” That might seem like a dopey line, but what’s the last thing you said to a naked woman? I think mine was, “Why, yes, that is my MAGA hat on the dresser.”
Steve wants to make some investments but his wife Judy wants to keep their nest egg safe in the bank. He scoffs at the 3% it is earning, which this week sounds pretty great to me.
That afternoon, Judy gets visited by several reporters. They tell her that her late husband’s horse won the Irish Sweepstakes. Did he own a horse that bought a ticket? The Irish Sweepstakes was a lottery, not a horserace. [3] She invites them in and throws some o’ them Belmont Steaks on the grill. The ticket is worth $133,000 [4] — if she can find it.
Judy and Steve search the house. Judy is sure she searched her husband’s clothes before giving them to Goodwill. Ergo, they deduce that the ticket is in the suit her dead husband was buried in. Who says you can’t take it with you?
After meditating during the commercials, Judy says they should dig up the body; and also . . . must . . . buy . . . Lucky . . . Strikes. [5] Steve is against it, saying it would give him nightmares.
While Steve is out of town at the AVN Awards, Judy goes to the Shady Rest Cemetery. She hires the caretaker to dig up her husband who is buried next to Uncle Joe who’s moving not at all. And if you get that reference, you watch too much MeTV.
A man claiming to be a reporter shows up. He offers to watch the body being dug up, and will search it for the ticket so Judy is spared. He finds the corpse’s jacket has the ticket and an I VOTED sticker. In a shockingly honest move for a reporter, he gives the ticket to Judy.
When Steve gets home from the convention, he is upset that Judy dug up the body. He is soon calmed after hearing the exhumation was uneventful, by the thought of $133,000, and by the fresh toasted flavor of Lucky Strike.
Some time later, the man who helped her at the cemetery stops by. He admits he is not a reporter, but an insurance investigator named Westcott. He became interested that Judy’s current husband sold her a $25,000 life insurance policy on her late husband just a month before he croaked. As long as the body was just lying there, he decided to order an autopsy; and, hey, that jacket would be a nice fit. Arsenic is found.
Just like in the Suspense version, Steve waits until his wife takes a bath, and tosses the sunlamp in. Again, his character does not make sure his wife is dead before telling the cops. Her surprise return and the arsenic report seal his fate. She nearly forgets to retrieve the ticket from his pocket before he rides, ironically, Old Sparky. [6]
Now is the literary analysis where I methodically deconstruct the Suspense vs AHP adaptations of this story. Er, the big difference is that I watched the Suspense episode 2 weeks ago and barely remember it now.
Other Stuff:
- [1] Bonus Points for scratching her foot with a hanger. Bonus Bonus Points for it not being a wire hanger, causing me to think of Joan Crawford in a bathtub. [2]
- [2] Would also have accepted “Bonus Bonus Points for not being a wire hanger, causing me to think about the turnover of Roe v Wade.”
- [3] It is not like AHP to make a mistake this yuge. I suppose the reporters must have been talking about a metaphorical horse, but it sure isn’t presented that way.
- [UPDATE — Dammit! There actually was a horserace component to the Irish Sweepstakes. I have to either start fact-checking these things, or stop fact-checking them.]
- [4] That would be $1.3M today, or $3.1M at the end of the Biden presidency.
- [5] Not everyone is smoking like a chimney in this version, but Steve is smoking in this scene.
- [6] Sadly, it appears that the electric chair was never used in California, almost certainly dooming my proposal to maximize efficiency with the electric couch.
Well wait, they just paid the claim. Didn’t these chowderheads already know when the policy was purchased, who purchased it, and who they just cut a check to? And did it not arouse suspicion that Mrs. Mead bought a policy on her husband and made another man the beneficiary? [3]
Westcott tells her that in 1933 her husband’s mother tripped over a broom and fell down the stairs, leaving him a policy worth $25,000. Then the steering failed in his brother’s car and he collected another $20,000. Then he set his sister up on a date with Ted Kennedy. [2] She demands, “What has this got to do with how my first husband died? Certainly my husband didn’t get anything out of that!” Well, except for the life insurance proceeds that we were told in the first scene were paid directly to him. [3]
He cruises past the world’s oldest and best dressed hitchhiker. Then he has a second thought and slows down. The old gentleman trots up to the car and asks if Paul is going to London. As they drive off together, Paul is seen to be one of those lunatics that actually likes meeting people, enjoys talking to them, and is genuinely interested in what they have to say. Wait, I have a feeling I’m rooting for the wrong guy here.
Paul tells the HH to fasten his seatbelt, and he puts his on too. I guess going a mere 70 without them had been OK. They are thrown back in their seats as Paul accelerates. He gets the speed up to 125 MPH, then sees a motorcycle cop in the mirror. The HH urges him to just outrun the cop.
Watching all three of them work is a 
Dr. John Hustead has been experimenting with a magnetic field “that will not only make objects weightless, but actually reverse the effects of the earth’s gravitational pull” so that dropped toast will finally land jelly-side up, but on the ceiling. Elizabeth Wickes enters and tells him she just filled in at a lecture that he absent-mindedly forgot. Later, from 4:00 – 4:10 she will cover his weekly office hours.
After way too much talking, Hustead figures out the device needs fresh air . . . or cool air . . . or 
Lisa asks Ben how a man could change so much in just 2 years, “He seemed so strong, so capable.” To be fair, Peter is now 23 years older than his wife. When they married he was . . . oh yeah.
Despite being adults, they take the car out for a make-out session which seems to be on the planet Vulcan. Ben breaks the mood when he says he needs $10,000 to meet the payroll at his silver mine which is no gold mine. They decide to fly to Phoenix together. Ben says he is going to pay Peter a visit tomorrow. 
