Hermie Jenkins tells a caged toucan, “Shut your stupid beak.  A dog gets house-broken in 3 months.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”  Well, what could the bird have possibly done wrong?  He sits on a perch in a cage and shits.  There’s not a lot of room for error.

Hermie takes care of his wife Myra’s menagerie.  She has cages of birds, monkeys, raccoons, etc and bowls of fish around the house.  Hermie is also kept on a pretty short leash as Myra gives him a shopping list for the animals’ food along with his $10 allowance.

Hermie’s neighbor George envies his “family” and 15 years of marriage.  His wife died 9 years earlier.  The homophobic transphobic fascist patriarchal h8er George says “a home ain’t a home without a woman.”  And speaking of transphoboic, WordPress better get their ass in gear and update their spellcheck dictionary unless they want trouble.

Given his own unhappy situation, Hermie comically just assumes George killed his wife (i.e. death by natural causes on AHP).  Turns out she died from pneumonia.  Strange this had never come up before — they live in Florida where “How did your [husband / wife] die?” is second only to “Hot enough for you?” in conversation starters.  George spent two years trying to get over his wife’s death.  He traveled to “Hawaii, Acapulco, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo” which sounds pretty good to Hermie. George laments, “Since she’s gone, my life is nothing but beer and fishing.”  Which also sounds pretty good.

After going to the store to buy brine shrimp, Hermie picks up Myra’s copy of Pet News.  He sees an ad for Hansel Eidelpfeiffer selling snakes by the seashore.  He drops the hint to Myra that “Snakes are the most affectionate pets in the world.  Everybody knows that.”  He tells her that snakes are great, just misunderstood.  He reminds her of “that act in Tampa you wouldn’t go see — the snake dance striptease?  That dame had ’em twining all around her.”  He convinces her she should get a little one and she says she could carry it around with her.

The next day, Hermie goes to see Hansel Eidelpfeiffer.  And if you’re going to have a Hansel Eidelpfeiffer, he should probably be played by Michael J. Pollard.  Hermie tells Hansel he is a professor working for “that Cape Canaveral thing”.  He says they need a poisonous snake for an experiment.  Hansel suggests a Coral Snake, very handsome with bands of black, red and yellow which might have been diversity overload for 1960s NASA.

He gives the snake to Myra as the titular anniversary gift.  From a safe distance, he tells her the snake loves to be used as a garter or a necklace.  Garter snake — ha, I just got that!  After unsuccessfully trying to make friends with the cold-blooded snake, she tosses it back to Hermie.  The snake bites him and he drops dead — literally just drops right of frame — in a classic death scene.

After the coroner arrives to collect Hermie’s body, now also cold-blooded, George finds the snake.  He and the coroner both identify it as a non-poisonous King Snake.

George assures the grieving Myra, “Hermie would never slip you a hot snake.”  No wonder she was such a shrew.  Heyoooooo!

Turns out Hermie had merely died of a heart attack, thinking Myra had just handed him a poison snake.

There is a lot to like here — several live animals, a real snake.  Barbara Baxley is entirely adequate as the controlling, emasculating, oblivious Myra.  I really did despise her, but I think it was more from the writing than the performance.  Hmmmm, maybe that means she played it just right.  She was childlike and pleasant, yet evoked those negative reactions. On second thought “well done!”

Harry Morgan, like The Wizard of Oz, is both great and terrible.  He wasn’t much of a nuanced actor. His stiffness worked for him in roles from Dragnet to MASH.  When he loosens up, it seems so against type, that it is pretty funny.  He milked a lot of good laughs out of this one.  On second thought, he was great too.

20 year old Michael J. Pollard was just magnificently odd as Eidelpfeiffer.  My only minor complaint is the handling of his character.  Both the coroner and George identified the snake as harmless, so I’m taking their word for it.  I just don’t see Eidelpfeiffer making that mistake. ^[1]

Great stuff.

More, More, More:

• ^[1] For more background on the story and production, head over to bare*bonez e-zine.  Jack says Eidelpfeiffer took advantage of Hermie.  So I was wrong about that too.  Man, I suck at this.
• AHP Deathwatch:  Michael J. Pollard is the sole surviving performer.  However, director Norman Lloyd will be 103 in November.  Or maybe I should say, he is currently 102.
• The 35th wedding anniversary is Coral, but I guess Hermie couldn’t wait that long.
• On two occasions, Hermie calls Hansel “Assenpfeffer.”  What the hell?  [UPDATE] After some research (mostly of the theme to Laverne & Shirley), I guess he was mocking Eidelpfeiffer’s moniker by calling him “hasenfeffer.”
• It has stuck with me for years that Harry Morgan on MASH once referred to snakes as a poison ropes.  That’s pretty good.

Millionaire Dave Rainey — make that Six Million Dollar Man, Dave Rainey — is stuck in an iron lung. He’s pretty insistent on making sure everyone knows he’s worth six million.  I don’t know if people still know what an iron lung is — kids today, with their science and progress!  Actually, I never knew what was going inside those contraptions until I just looked it up.

The body from the neck down is sealed into metal tube.  A ventilator creates an oscillating atmospheric pressure inside to facilitate breathing.  It doesn’t seem like it would work, but people were’t spending years confined in these things for their health. Well, I guess they were in them for their health, but it was no fun.

Dave has a mirror angled over his face so he can see something other than the ceiling. His wife Cindy enters in a striped shirt over a bathing suit and a snazzy yachting hat. Their handsome pal Arnold has invited Cindy out on his boat.  In a brilliantly callous bit, Cindy uses Dave’s mirror — his sole lifeline to the horizontal world — to check her hair before boating off with another man.

While Cindy is gone, Nurse Collins turns the iron lung so Dave can see the ocean out their window just in time to see Arnold’s boat go by.  The nurse suggests that Dave should get out of the iron lung for 8 – 9 minutes as his doctor recommended.  Dave says he would rather just watch the boats. Although, really, who knows what he’s doing with his hands inside that thing.^[1]

Dave flashes back to his days before the iron lung.  He and Cindy were having fun on the beach.  He tells her he’s “seen more cover on a loaf of bread” which I can make no sense of.  They start making out and Dave asks Cindy to marry him.  He admits he was a mug 5 years ago, but having six million in the bank has changed him.

At Dave’s invitation, Arnold sticks around for dinner after the cruise with Cindy.  When he drives the nurse to the bus station, Cindy and Dave are left alone.  After a few drinks, Cindy, the director, and the composer take a long look at the electrical cord that poweers Dave’s iron lung.  Dave says, “I hope it will be painless . . . however you planned it for tonight.  The killing, I mean.”  She asks when he first suspected.  She does unplug the ventilator, but she is just doing as the doctor prescribed.  She slides him out a few inches like a file cabinet.

While she pours herself a drink, she compliments Dave on how well he is taking the news that she is going to murder him.  She admits they had a few good years before his disability.  She tells him that now he is more dead than alive and, “You know me.  I was never meant for those nobler forms of solitaire.”  What the — is she talking about masturbation on TV in 1959?  After the almost-incest of Touché and the almost-cannibalism of Arthur, AHP’s slide into depravity is getting more explicit.  Well, the 1960s are just a couple of months away.

Cindy says seeing him in this condition, she almost thinks he wants to die.  He says, “I haven’t figured out yet why a man with six-million dollars would want to die.”  He was already worth six-million a few years ago before they got married.  What, is he keeping it buried in the back yard?  Make it work for you, dude!  She says, “I wonder if you know how unfair this whole thing is to me.”

Sadly, despite this intriguing premise, there is a huge lull in the middle of the episode.  Brian Keith has never been the most expressive actor other than conveying a coiled spring of rage.  He is just a strange choice to play the helpless Dave.  I guess it was to contrast his former virility with his current condition, but it doesn’t work.  This scene we are observing should be more about the mind than the physical body.

Joanna Moore’s low key performance does not help. Cindy had 5 drinks on the boat and 3 more after they returned.  Played slightly inebriated, this just drags the episode down even more.  I can imagine this scenario being suspensefully played out with a more intelligent, manipulative Dave, and Cindy arrogantly thinking she is in charge while he works her strings. Unfortunately, these two and the script just aren’t up to it.

There is a twist, but even that is kind of hum-drum.  There was just a lot of potential in this one that did not get exploited.  Of course, this still might be the best episode I watch this week.  The AHP bar is pretty high.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Upon further research, I see that he is probably paralyzed . . . I feel terrible.
• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.  However, if IMDb is to be believed, director Norman Lloyd, will be 103 in November and is still working. He was in Trainwreck with the odious Amy Schumer in 2015, and optimistically — dare I say quixotically — has a new series in development for 2018.
• Joanna Moore (Cindy) was the mother of Tatum O’Neal.

Julie is stuffing the failing Sentinel Mesa Times newspaper into her shoe to compensate for a hole in her soul sole when a disguised VW Bus rolls into the Desert Hawk Service Station.

Things increasingly rare in 2017: Phone-booth, Real Boobs, Newspaper, General Store . . .

The Professor has rescued a baby coyote that was hit on the road while it was installing a giant Acme spring. The proprietor laughs at the thought of rescuing the animal. “Mister, we pay a bounty on coyotes in this part of the state!”  Inexplicably the Professor does not ask how much.

The gas-jockey says they are the most useless animal God created [insert political reference of your choice here; any answer will be correct].  The Professor says without coyotes, within a year they would be overrun with a plague of squirrels and rabbits; and presumably road runners. ^[1]

Julie hits him up for a lift to Sentinel Mesa.  The service station owner calls a vet, but the vet refuses to come work on a coyote.  When he comes back to tell the Professor, they find the coyote has ingeniously escaped from the cardboard box he was kept in.

On the way to Sentinel Mesa, Julie spots a man sleeping under a tree by the side of the road.  She yells, “Pops!” and tells the professor to pull over.  Pops jumps in the car and helps himself to the Professor’s cigarettes, and lighter.  The Professor is next railroaded into picking up Julie’s brother Harry, who is kind of a thug.

The rest of the episode is very, er, episodic.  That is not to demean the episode — far from it.  This is a fun episode which is well-performed and looks great.  It just gets tedious to document every scene; for you, I mean.

Throughout the episode, the Professor is constantly taken advantage of and scammed.  Edgar Buchanan is perfect as Pops.  He has an old-timer, country-bumpkin charm to him that masks what a snake he is.  You really want to like him.  Collin Wilcox Paxton as Julie is a paradox.  She seems to be a terrible actress, but she might have out-smarted me.  She comes off as such a sexy, feral maniac that you can’t help but like her.  Maybe Harry was adopted.

They descend on the Professor like a swarm of three locusts.  When they are done with him, they quickly ditch him by the side of the road and jump into a passing truck with their next victim.  The Professor isn’t done with them, though.

Not pictured: The Professor.

Excellent.  I rate it a full moon.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Actually, the coyote did not do much to suppress the road-runner population. But then, running down the road was his idea of having fun, so maybe there weren’t going to be a lot of little road-runners anyway.
• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
• Title Analysis:  Meh.  I guess the family was predatory like a coyote.  Not sure what the moon has to do with it.

Rated dead last of 268 episodes in IMBb’s increasingly credible User Ratings.  99.6% of the episodes were deemed better than this one. You could watch AHP every weeknight for a year and not get to this episode.

Even Hitchcock’s intro is off-putting. He is playing a bartender, but the TV is blasting so loud — gunfire, screeching airplanes, etc — that we can’t hear him speak.  I initially fast-forwarded through it because I thought it was an audio problem.  It isn’t just loud, it is offensively grating . . . like this episode’s Clint Kimbrough as David Logan.  I fear as AHP enters the 1960s this year, this episode signifies a change.  Will we lose the stoic war veterans, proper businessmen, reserved bankers, sturdy farmers, etc. ^[1]  Enter the weepy, screaming, self-indulgent man-child throwing tantrums in public.  I blame James Dean.

Sweaty David Logan is tossing and turning in bed before he wakes up from his dream shrieking.  He is living in a cramped apartment with his mother.  His bedroom has a window that is so comically close to their neighbor that he can see her nervously getting dressed to go to her first day on the job as the new librarian.  Wait, that’s my dream. His window faces a wall that is so close it looks like a framed painting of bricks.

I’m always happy to see directors get creative with their composition, but who thought this was a good idea?

David laments his father leaving them as if they meant nothing to him.  His mother just doesn’t want to hear any more about it.  She says what happened was between her and his father.  He has put on a suit and is going out.  His mother asks him to “stay here with me.”  That works about as well with David as it did with his father.

A blonde is hitting on David in a bar but he says, “I don’t like blondes.”  His blondist tendencies only seem to apply to girls with blue eyes, however, and this floozy has brown eyes.  He lays a big kiss on her and tells her a secret — he’s only 17. She seems more concerned with him repeatedly saying he will be born at 11:00 tonight than the fact that he was actually born just 17 years ago.  He tells her a story about his father fooling around with a blonde.

He goes on at length about his father with the blonde and how he left without even saying goodbye.  When he shoves her, a sailor takes him out back to teach him some manners and, strangely enough, how to tie a bowline knot.

In a nice scene, he is able to talk David down.  Like all sailors on leave, the old salt takes the 17 year old boy to the hot dog stand.  No that’s not a euphemism — they actually go inside and he has a frankfurter.  The sailor tells David about the Chief Gunners Mate that he is really going to “let have it” one day; maybe he was jealous of the Chief Gunner.  See, cuz he had a mate . . . . David commiserates that there is someone in his life he would like to see dead also.  He says ominously, “Tonight, somebody dies.” Well, I wouldn’t ever bet against that.

He leaves that bar and goes to Dooley’s ^[2] where his father played piano.  The bartender is more concerned about his age than the blonde, but relents and gives him a boilermaker — way to ramp up.  When the new piano player starts playing, David attacks him.

Blah blah blah, a news flash comes on the TV that David’s father has just been executed for the murder of his blonde girlfriend.  Who says the news is always bad?  As if that isn’t enough good news, he got fried only 2 months after the murder.  David doesn’t take it as well as me, however. He hurls a glass through the TV screen and tries to pull it off the wall.  He continues making a spectacle, crying, “I’m glad he’s dead!  I hated him!  I hated him!”

The failure of this episode falls squarely on the character of David Logan.  I point to the character because I suspect the actor Clint Kimbrough did a great job doing what the script and director asked for.  He is just such a whiny punk, though, it is hard to care. On the other hand, I found Norma Crane to be excellent as the blonde.  The sailor was either great or terrible; I’m just not sure which.  He did make an impression, though.

Rating it the worst episode of the series is pretty harsh.  While David Logan was insufferable, the supporting cast really came through.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Of course they were all thieves and murderers, but they were otherwise of good character.
• ^[2] Reference to Dooley Wilson, the piano player in Casablanca?
• AHP Deathwatch:  A new record, three survivors!  Most notably, Michael J. Pollard and Clu Galager still show up occasionally.
• Written by Evan Hunter who would later write The Birds for Hitchcock.  He also wrote 55 books about the 87th precinct.  Or was it 87 books about the 55th precinct?  It bugs me that he has a character named Meyer Meyer which is a rip-off of Major Major in Catch-22.  It is especially galling that he did it 5 years earlier.