Barbie Hallem is pulling a Zou Bisou Bisou, making herself the center of attention at a proper conservative 50’s party where all the men are wearing ties and the dames have not a tattoo to be seen.

For a straight-laced house party (and episode of a 50 year old TV show), Barbie’s dance is very seductive.  She is swinging them hips and showing off some skin in that spaghetti — or at least linguine — strapped little number.  But, everyone seems to be enjoying her display, smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, snapping fingers, clapping along, laughing.

All except the chick on the top-right.  She is immediately identifiable as the heavy in this piece — alone, self-absorbed, jealous.  The strange thing is, after this obvious bit of wordless exposition, that’s it for her.  She is never seen again.

Barbie begins dancing with one of the men, then orders him to go fix her a Horse’s Neck. While he obediently fetches her drink, she goes out on the balcony and swaps spit with an older man (an action I encourage in young blonde floozies).

When her dancing partner finds her with the drink, he asks why she does things like that.  She very reasonably explains, “I did it because I wanted to.”  Despite being 1:00 in the morning, Barbie decides she wants to go to the mountains to see a cabin which she recently inherited.  Her boy-toy tags along.  When he complains about her driving, she ditches him and drives off.

Unfortunate composition as the visor makes her head look flat.

She pulls up at Ed Mungo’s Cabins & Food and orders a black coffee.  Ed tells her the other customers there have just come off the mountain where they have been searching for his brother Benny, who killed a girl; and her little dog, too.  Which would explain why they are all packing rifles.

When she arrives at the cabin, she finds a man (Vic Morrow) trespassing there.  Quite the dapper host, he is eating a can of beans opened at the wrong end, and offers her a generic beer.  After taking a swig, she turns on the record player and starts dancing again.  When he tells her his name is Benny, she thinks it might be time to leave.

He can tell she is scared and thinks it is because he killed the girl’s dog which, to be fair, had bitten him.  He seems to not know the girl has been murdered.  When Ed shows up there is a confrontation when Barbie tells Benny that Ed actually killed the girl.

Benny and Ed get into one of the best fights I’ve ever seen on TV.  The hits look real, the sounds are not quite the usual fake slaps, they take some good falls — really good stuff.

There is a nice twist which might have played out better had TV not been so restrained in the 1950s. Benny is clearly intended to be mentally challenged — in the bar, Ed refers to him not being a boy “in most ways,” and he doesn’t seem to know what is going on with his brother or the girl; plus, he is named Benny.  But his condition is so subtly implied that it is very easy to miss.

The audience makes certain assumptions based on believing Benny to have all his marbles.  This ends up undermining the ending.  However, it still ends up being a nice story.

What really carries the episode, though, is Barbara Cook as Barbie Hellam.  She is attractive, but not classically beautiful, and not the standard Hitchcock blonde babe. However she is something much more that the sum of her parts.  When she is dancing at the party, or even just driving in the car, she is absolutely smoking.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  Barbara Cook is hanging in there at 87.  She had no IMDb acting credits after 1962, but was a big star on Broadway and singing in cabarets.  In 2011, she was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.
• Vic Morrow was less fortunate, dying in 1982 when a helicopter crashed on top of him while filming a scene in The Twilight Zone Movie.
• Was the upside down bean can a sign of Benny’s mental issues?

What’s up with the Weems?  First Borgus, and now the indestructible Clarence.  OK, they aired 14 years apart, so I guess there is no conspiracy.

The board of the Knights of the Golden Lodge came up with a boffo idea for their members.  They bought a plot of land to be used as a cemetery.  The problem is, people aren’t exactly dying to get in.  Taxes and upkeep are killing their cash flow.

They agree that the problem is that no one wants to be the first, so they must find someone to occupy the first grave.  Their first thought is of Clarence Weems, a member who has been in ill health for the past year.  They decide to offer him $50 / week (over $400 in 2014 dollars) until he dies if he agrees to be the first customer at Elysium Fields.

The men go to Weems’ 4th floor apartment to make their pitch.  He doesn’t want charity but agrees to the deal as a business proposition. Papers are signed.

Weems immediately takes a turn for the better; also for the nurse, as he begins feeling frisky.  He applies to have his membership in the lodge reactivated.  The board climbs the 3 flights of stairs to visit him again, but he is asleep.  He does manage to make it to the lodge dance, though.  And enter the cha-cha contest.

The board pays another visit to Weems.  His doctor tells them that they are responsible for his amazing recovery, that having the security of the lifetime annuity has added years to his life.

They decide to see if Weems will accept $500 to release them from the contract.  When they go to his apartment, they see him moving a piano (correction, seems to be something else, but I like my idea better).  This so enrages the Grand Poobah of the lodge, that he keels over on the stairs.  Weems generously offers his grave for the Poobah to be buried in.

A simple, fun little episode even though the Poobah didn’t really deserve to die.  They could have ended the episode with the face-palm realization that it was their generosity that doomed the lodge.  It would have been a bloodless, A.A. Milne type episode, but still rich with irony.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors, but Don Keefer gave it good try, just passing away in September at age 98.
• Keefer was in The Caine Mutiny where there was a character named Keefer.  There was also a character named Keith, and the similarity always confused me.

Set in London seven years before The Hands of Mr. Ottermole.   1912 slacker Sam Saunders is in his father’s pawnshop hitting him up for money.  His father tells him that at 35 it is time he stood on his own two feet, and he will not give him any more money.

Sam is not much of a negotiator, saying to his father, “Are you afraid if you give it to me there won’t be enough left for you to get drunk on?”

At the saloon, Mae has just finished pounding out a tune on the piano when Sam starts hitting on her.  When Sam finds out she is going off on a holiday, he says, “I ought to have my head examined, wanting you, knowing what you are,” basically calling her a whore.  This guy could really benefit from the Dale Carnegie course; and in 1912, he could take it from Carnegie personally.

She laughs off his proposal saying he is gutless and never has any money.  He says he’ll come back when he has plenty of money.  She says to ask her again when he has the money.

What a whore.

Sam overhears his father talking to an old friend.  The friend is dodging the police who wrongly suspect him in a murder, and there is a 50 quid bounty on him.  Sam goes to the police and rats out his father for harboring a criminal, leading to an awkward meeting at the police station.

However, the friend has disappeared after getting a warning from Mae, who was disgusted by Sam’s weaselly maneuver.  He does get the reward, however.

On the way out of the police station, he falls down the steps.  This episode is just unbelievably lame — he doesn’t even die, he just hurts his knee.

I give it 1 out of 3 pawnshop balls.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch: No survivors.
• Edmund Gwenn played Santa Claus in Miracle on 34nd Street.

The episode opens at the Tiffany Studio of Creative Taxidermy.  Early that-guy Henry Jones hands over a giant ram’s head that he has stuffed and the customer tells him to put it on his bill.  If you have a tab running at a taxidermy shop, you’re already a suspect.

But this is Jones’ story, not that of the evil customer who then returns home where he has a young woman captive in a stony oubliette (just speculating here). Jones goes back into his workshop where is he is working on stuffing an enormous horse.  Tiffany is donating the horse, Napoleon, to the city at a celebration to be hosted by the mayor.  Napoleon had given kids rides at the city park, but now — and this is great! — the hollowed-out horse is to be used as a time capsule.  Current day items will be placed inside the horse, to be opened in one hundred years.  I like to think it will be opened like a piñata with kids literally beating a dead horse.

At lunch, he goes to his home above the shop.  His wife gives him the bad news that her brother Waldren is coming to visit.  When Waldren arrives, his sister does not recognize him.  OK, it’s been 25 years, but she was expecting him, so this is strange.

When Jones comes back upstairs, he is baffled by this strange man in his home with his wife.  He is positively stumped by the presence of this stranger . . . who had told them he was coming.

Waldren is a lazy ungrateful slob, plopping down in Jones’ favorite chair.  He hangs out for a week, complains about drafts, eats their food.  When Jones’ wife collapses in the kitchen from exhaustion, Waldren can’t be troubled to go see what the racket was.

Jones reaches his breaking point and types a going-way note from Waldren.  When Waldren comes downstairs to nag Jones to cook dinner, he hands Waldren a large syringe and a large glass bottle of formaldehyde.  Then he does a new stuffing job — stuffing a hammer into Waldren’s skull.

I assume he handed those things to Waldren to occupy his hands during the attack.  But why did he hand him the glass bottle of formaldehyde? Upon attack, the bottle will surely break.  An alternative Hitchcockian ending could have had Jones passing out from inhaling the fumes, and being busted for the murder.  But I wouldn’t trade that for the ending used.

As the horse is being loaded onto a truck, one of the men comments that it is a lot heavier than he expected.  Hey, you don’t suppose . . .

At the commencement ceremony, the mayor tells Jones that he expects when this time capsule is opened in a hundred years, it will put the town in the national limelight.  Jones agrees.

Another great episode, from performances to story.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
• The actor playing Waldren had almost as short a lifespan as his character, dying at 28.
• I appreciate this creative use of taxidermy much more than in the tedious Tales from the Crypt episode.

Mabel shuts the alarm off at 7:30 am and yells for Henry to bring her coffee. When Henry asks what’s for breakfast, she instructs him to see what’s in the kitchen.  Mabel is just the latest in a long line of shrewish wives on this show.

While Henry is toiling away at work, Mabel does pry her butt out of bed to go see the latest film of her idol Martha Mason.

Leaving the theater, she admires the poster of Martha Mason and imitates the actress fainting into a policeman’s arms.

She returns home, nearly running Henry down in the garage as he hoists a bag of fertilizer, and tells him to look where he’s going.

She then mocks his interest in gardening and berates his previous efforts to grow anything. When he begins building a wooden frame for his garden, she is effusive in her lack in interest.  In fact, she scolds him for generally being such a dullard.  But there is a hole in the ground and we know one of them is going to end up in it.

Henry seems like a good egg, so it is unfortunate that he ends up in the hole after Mabel whacks him on the head with a hammer.

The next morning, she shuts the alarm off at the crack of eleven.  Henry’s boss calls looking for him, and Mabel makes up a tale story that Henry ran off with another woman — a perfectly believable scenario.  Well, believable that he would leave, less so that he could persuade another woman would go with him.

His boss comes to the house to see for himself. He doesn’t believe that Henry ran off; or if he did, it is just a “fling normal for a 47 year old man.”  He suggests Mabel buy a new hat to raise her spirits.  Now, here’s a man that knows people.

Mabel is called to the police station to answer some questions.  She sticks to her story that Henry ran off with another woman.  Her story takes a hit when a woman in the station says, he didn’t run off with another woman “because I’m the other woman!”

Mabel once again assumes the fainting pose from the poster, this time for real.

It would have been nice for the ending scene to be staged exactly like the movie poster, but in 1957, who knew that such comparisons could be easily made.  After 25 minutes, the 2nd pose probably seemed exactly like the poster.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
• Not to be confused with Martha Marcy May Marlene.
• Or Marsh Mason.