We open with a tight shot of a check.  What can we deduce from this?

1. A 50 pound check was written by Felix Manbridge to his son John Manbridge .
2. John Manbridge has hauled this unwieldy check from Felix Manbridge to the Townbridge Branch.  They are in London; probably near the bridge.
3. It is 1930; Felix has foolishly purchased check stock with “19__”  pre-printed which will be obsolete in 70 years.

After actually watching for 5 seconds, I see my errors.  The check didn’t weigh 50 pounds; WTH was I thinking?  However, I had no way of knowing that John forged his cousin Felix’s signature.  He explains, “You needn’t blame me for that.  I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had any alternative!”  He is now back to shamelessly ask for another £100.

Felix tells his parasitic brother that he simply doesn’t have the money.  I believe he is sincere, but coming from a guy in a snappy three-piece suit, sitting in the mahogany-walled library of his country home, being attended to by a butler, I can see how John would be dubious.  On top of that, Felix says he is very ill and John will soon inherit everything anyway.  So no reason to murder him, nosiree . . .

Felix warns John that if there is another forgery — just one more little felony — he will prosecute.  Denholm Elliott must have specialized in portraying this kind of upper class leech.  In The Crocodile Case, he murdered his girlfriend’s husband and assumed his comfortable life ^[1].  In The Coffin, he constantly sponged off his brother ^[2].  Indiana Jones was wise to keep him away from that Crystal Skull.  Or maybe his agent was wise to keep him away from it. ^[3]  He leaves in a snit, complaining that this was a waste of his time.

Like any responsible broke bloke, his first stop is at the bookie.  He finds the odds never in his favor, but really just stopped by to see if the bookie had cashed the check “from Felix” he gave him yesterday.  Sadly, it was deposited and will soon be bouncing back the bookie’s way, causing Felix to call the coppers.

Like any responsible broke bloke, his second stop is at the pub.  This time it is just to make an appearance to establish an alibi.  If only he worked this hard at getting a job.  He trots down the road in his nice shoes, three-piece suit and gloves to where he stashed a bike to throw off the timeline.  He ditches the bike in a pond near the house and continues on foot.

Through the window, John sees Felix has understandably dozed off listening to the most boring radio show in history not airing on NPR — a lecture about life insurance and actuarial tables. Getting no answer at the door, he knocks on the window. Felix does not respond, so he opens the window and climbs in.  Felix still doesn’t move, so John takes this opportunity to poke him in the head with a fireplace whacker; no wait, to whack him in the head with a fireplace poker.

In his dead brother’s pocket, John finds a check made out to him for £100.  Awww, what a softy the old guy is; especially around that bloody spot on his noggin.  For some reason, John burns the check — the one piece of loot he actually is legally entitled to.  John dumps Felix out of the chair and ransacks the library to make it look like a robbery.

He then doubles back to make it appear he just arrived.  A constable is biking by as John is rapping on Felix’s door.  I guess the police don’t get guns or cars in England.  The constable walks around to thewindow and sees Felix on the floor.  He climbs in, checks the body and goes through the house to let John in the front door.  The constable tells John he doesn’t know what happened, then produces a suicide note signed by Felix.  This guy is not detective material.

The 2nd half of the episode is a real detective trying to makes sense of the crime scene.  Both the writer and John Manbridge did fine jobs of planning the crime, establishing an alibi, and enabling the detective to deduce his way to the truth.  Elliott’s performance made the first half and the unraveling of the story made the second half.  I can’t bring myself to spoil it.

Despite being pointlessly set a long time ago in a country far, far away, this was another great episode.

[UPDATE] Going back in for pics, I realized I had missed some awesome foreshadowing when John read his brother’s suicide note.  Bravo!  Just great stuff!

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Until he was sent to prison for murder.
• ^[2] Until his brother murdered him from beyond the grave.
• ^[3] Or maybe he had been dead 15 years.
• AHP Deathwatch: No survivors.

Mr. Thurgood marshalls the staff for another day at Maynard’s Jewelry. The all-male sales staff is nattily attired, and the elderly doorman Henry is in a spiffy uniform.  As Henry is carrying the jewels from the safe to the display case, he accidentally drops a $165,000 necklace ^[1].  As is always the case in real life, this is the moment the boss chooses to walk in.

Maynard calls Thurgood into the office to show him plans for a renovation to the store. Thurgood prefers it the way it has been for 50 years, but Maynard wants it airy and full of light.  Unfortunately one of the musty old relics wants to get rid of is Thurgood.  The Thurgood family has worked at Maynard’s for 117 years, but the owner can’t wait just 3 more years until Thurgood was going to retire anyway.  He is given 5 days notice.

Thurgood is a bloody pro! ^[2]  He works diligently that last week, calling old customers, making sales.  On the afternoon of his last day, a woman sporting a mink and unidentifiable accent is shopping for an anniversary gift for her husband, the psychiatrist Anton Rudell, to give her.  The $165,000 necklace catches her eye.  The lady clearly has an eye for jewelry and idiot-men.  She instructs Thurgood to bring it to Dr. Rudell’s office.

Mrs. Rudell meets Thurgood there and puts on the necklace.  She goes into an office to put it on.  She just misses Dr. Rudell as he comes out to the lobby.  AWKWARD!  Not awkward because Thurgood is about to spoil the surprise.  Awkward because Dr. Rudell calls his wife out of a different office to give her hell, and it is a different woman.

Back at work, Thurgood is distraught.  He is near tears at having disgraced the name of Maynard and his family name Thurgood; although, to be honest both monikers are a little silly to begin with. Maynard is actually pretty cool, allowing the police and insurance company to take care of things.  Maynard offers to call Thurgood’s daughter to pick him up, but Thurgood is too ashamed for her to know.

Thurgood gets home somehow and calls for his daughter Thelma.  She is not home, but the doorbell rings.  It is the woman who stole the necklace.  “Daddy, we did it!” she says.

He says he is going to invest the money the same way his father and grandfather did.  There were two previous robberies in Maynard’s history and both were also inside jobs by the Thurgood family.  He says that is the Thurgood tradition, taking what is rightfully theirs.  Sadly it can’t be carried out by his daughter as they only hire men.

They are surprised by Maynard at the door.  He tells Thurgood, “I suppose you know you can’t get away with this.”  Psych!  He hands Thurgood his gold watch and severance.  He says he knows that “forgetting” them was his way of making restitution.  Thurgood calls his daughter out to meet Maynard.  He is so overwhelmed by Thurgood’s loyalty that he breaks the men-only tradition and offers the daughter a job at Maynard’s beginning Monday morning.

It is all well-done and it has a nice, if not entirely surprising, twist.  It was just a little bit too much of a happy ending.  Sure, there is the obligatory suggestion in the coda that they were caught in another robbery, but I don’t consider the epilogues to be canon. So, in effect, the Thurgoods stole a $165,000 necklace, got away with it, and invented equal rights for women.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] That would be $1.35M in 2016 dollars — about 2.5 Hillary Clinton speeches, or an Ambassadorship to be named later.  But I would suggest rounding up to $2M so she provides adequate security for the Embassy.
• ^[2] Claude Rains (Thurgood) is a bloody pro too.  He might be the most natural actor I’ve encountered so far.
• AHP Deathwatch:  Both actors credited as Jewelry Salesman are still alive.

Newlywed Helen wakes up and reaches over for her new husband Phil.  He is not in bed, which I guess accounts for them sharing a bed. On 1950’s TV, if he were still in bed, they would have had twin beds. That’s some catch, that Catch-22. She leaves her room, stares at the bedroom door of her mother-in-law who she has somehow never met.

Helen thinks back to five years ago when she had dinner with her mother-in-law — well, almost.  As she is preparing, she gets a visit from her roommate Pat ^[1].  And, thank God too, because Helen had neglected to put her shoes on yet.  This is treated as catastrophic, “To meet Mrs. Pryor without my shoes on?  I would have just died.”  Pat says she will slip out the back door.

Phil arrives without his mother.  It just so happened that he got his orders to ship out to Korea that night, so the little hootenanny was cancelled.  With Helen’s roommate gone, Phil’s mother absent, candles lit, his gal dolled up with shoes and everything, him shipping out to Korea . . . he gives her a kiss on the forehead and leaves.

Seconds after the door shuts — there is not even an edit — Pat returns and says, “Helen, I’m sorry.”  There is just no way she could have known what just happened unless she was spying on them, hoping to witness some hot shipping-out-tomorrow sex.

Helen flashforwards, but not yet to present day.  She recalls when Phil returned after the Korean War was cancelled ^[2].  They meet on a park bench and Studly asks if she is proud of him, “I feel like a kid with a good report card.  I want my head patted.”  He talks about his job and his mother.  He still hasn’t gotten around to telling Mom that he and Helen are a couple, though.  He has to run back to work, but promises to inform his mother in a month or two.

Flashing a little further forward, Helen decides to go see Phil’s mother on her own.  As she approaches the house, she sees a woman rushing away.  She calls out to her, but the woman shouts back, “There’s no one here!  No one at all!”

Later, at a restaurant, Phil gives Helen a present from his mother — David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.  Psycho by Robert Bloch would have been a better choice, and was published the same year this episode aired.  He tells Helen that the woman at the house couldn’t have been his mother because she is practically bed-ridden.  He suggests that it must have been Mrs. Beasely, the cleaning woman — a yuge flaw in the screenplay. ^[3]

Helen tells Phil that she is dumping him.  He asks her to marry him immediately, so all is peachy again.  They get hitched that night and return to the house he shares with his mother.

Back in the present, Helen goes to Mrs. Pryor’s room.  In the empty room, she finds an obituary for Mrs. Pryor which is ten years old.  Phil appears in the doorway and Helen says, “I don’t understand.  She’s been dead for seven years.”  So I guess reports of her death were widely exaggerated for 3 years.  Phil gets a shawl from the closet and says, “You never remember to keep warm, mother.  You’ll get another chill if I don’t watch over you every minute.”  Yuge flaw #2. ^[4]

Helen, horrified:  “Oh, no no no.”

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Pat Hitchcock, making her 8th appearance on the show.  In a departure, her average looks are not used against her.  Despite being the boss’s daughter, she is usually cast as the schoolmarm, a maid, or as the office nottie for a cheap joke.  I do find it amusing that a review at IMDb still refers to her as a maid even though she is clearly a roommate.  But who says maids can’t be hot?
• ^[2] Which lasted 11 years as we public school graduates know.
• ^[3] Not so much a flaw as a missed opportunity.  I would rather it had been Phil in his mother’s clothes being caught.  I guess that would have been a little crazy for TV in 1959.
• ^[4] The direction here — by a good director — baffles me.  Phil gets a shawl from the closet, then drapes it over . . . what?  The camera never drops below his chest.  Did it fall to the floor?  Was there an empty chair that Mom used to sit in?
• Then Phil bizarrely bugs his eyes out as he looks where his imaginary mother is imaginarily sitting.  Then he scans across, directly into the camera for just a second.  Then his eyes meet Helen’s.  He raises his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Well, what do you think?”  I am baffled.  If he knows this is a sham, why the funny faces.  Or if he truly believes his mother is sitting there, why the funny faces?
• Barbara Bel Geddes (Helen) is best remembered as Miss Ellie on Dallas.
• AHP Deathwatch:  Pat Hitchcock still hanging in there.
• Hulu still sucks.

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.

Jan Manning has taken over her husband’s dress shop, but business is not going so well. If sales don’t improve, she might lose the shop the same way she lost her husband — to another man; in this case, a banker. OK, maybe her husband died; I was dozing off during part of this.

Salesman Mel stops by the shop, mostly to check out Jan’s gams as far as I can tell. After checking her out making a literal display of herself in the store window, he enters and greets Jan and her assistant Evy.  He has that swagger, smarmy demeanor and big insincere smile that women hate; wait, I mean that women fall for every time.  When she says she is not buying, he replies, ” Anyone starting out with your physical assets ought to be worth a cool million by now.”

Jan takes Mel in the rear.  He can see that she has junk in the trunk, and don’t get me started on her and Evy’s overflowing racks.  Of excess inventory, I mean — come on!  As Mel is making his move, a tea kettle begins whistling.  Jan has inventively wired up an alarm clock to a hot plate and tea kettle to automatically make her tea every afternoon at 1:00 PM.

At the bank, the manager tells her she has too much money tied up in inventory.  He advises her to advertise, “That’s the way to get people in and move your stock.”  As she is already selling at 50% off, this does not seem like the solution or the problem.  Mel is waiting in the lobby and takes Jan to lunch.

He orders a couple of double martinis.  Mel suggests there is a way out of her financial problems.  “There’s nothing wrong with your shop that a good fire wouldn’t fix.” And he knows a guy who knows a guy.  And that guy knows a guy fieri (which, I believe is Italian for arsonist).

He starts talking about her alarm system and her skylight.  He describes a scenario where a burglar might break in and carelessly drop a cigarette butt onto some papers. The “burglar” would get a cut.  Mel’s reward would be a partnership in the store; you know, the one they plan on burning down, so I’m not sure what a piece of that burnt pie would be worth.

Mel advises her to have her accountant take the books home with him so her records are not destroyed if there happens to be a fire.  If Hillary Clinton were this diligent about protecting her records, she wouldn’t be indicted. ^[1]  Back at work after her ti martooni lunch, she tells her assistant to have the auditor take the books home, then leaves with her sister.

At 4:00 am that night, she gets a call from the fire department.  They say Evy got 3rd degree burns going back into the shop to get the records.  Jan walks through the burned out store and sees the skylight busted just as Mel had theorized.  Overcome with remorse, she tells her insurance man the whole story about the arsonist.  He points out that it was her alarm clock tea maker that started the fire.  But now that she’s mentioned arson . . .

Ralph Meeker as Mel was just so unctuous that I was irritated whenever he was on the screen; but I must say, he played the part very well.  Nancy Olson was quite attractive as Jan.  The ending seemed a little muddy, though.  We know what happened, but the insurance man’s perspective is not clear.  Did he originally think the fire was an accident and Jan’s arson talk changed is mind?  Or did he always think she set up the fire with her gadget and was letting her talk her way into jail?

Or do we know what happened? Was the gadget the arsonist’s way of starting the fire?  It fired up at 1 am instead of 1 pm, and Mel did have an opportunity the fiddle with the timer. Mel acts as if his plan was carried out, but the insurance man said the skylight was blown out by heat, not as a means of breaking in. I’m going with Mel in the back room with a tea maker.

Certainly not a titular Total Loss, but maybe those 50% off signs apply here.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Pffft — she could set fire to them on the steps of Congress surrounded by reporters and not be indicted.
• AHP Deathwatch: The Manning sisters are still with us.
• Two characters use the term Dutch Uncle.
• Mel states Jan’s zip code as being 40470 which would place her in Dusselfdorf.
• Correction, that was the last 5 digits of her phone number.  What was it with people not using the first two digits of phone numbers back then?  I know the cliched Klondike-5 means 555, but why not just say 555?
• Available on Hulu (which sucks).  I’ve been saying that for some time, but now they’ve put all 4 seasons of AHP behind the firewall.