I watched the uncut LOTR: Return of the King at Alamo Drafthouse in January.  It was over 4 hours long and felt shorter than this episode.  So did January.

Customer Marty is buying a vinyl record for $.75 which is shocking because, I half-expected a wax cylinder.  The elderly record shop owner, Mr. Brockman ^[1] tells his clerk Fred that he is just the young fella to take over the shop.  He then goes to get a haircut.

A shifty-looking guy enters the shop wearing a fedora and 1940’s suit, but I guess that wasn’t really suspicious in 1949.  Fred profiles him as a Beethoven fan, providing the 2nd consecutive shout-out on this blog and, shockingly, neither refer to the dog.   

The man — Mr. Evans — asks Fred when he gets off work.  He gives Fred a wad of cash and his room number at the Griffin Hotel, and tells him to show up as soon as possible.  He says he really needs Fred’s help.  It is hard to believe there was once a more innocent time when this scene would not be viewed as squirmy as it seems now.

The shop’s upstairs neighbor comes down to complain about the noise from this awful TV show.  She threatens to call the cops and leaves.  Brockman comes back early because the barber was busy.  Hey, it’s 1949 — just wear a hat!  Fred is a good egg — he is genuinely worried about Mr. Evans, so goes to the hotel to make sure he is OK.

In the small hotel room there are several people, including a dame named Millie, his customer Marty, several gangstas, and Mr. Evans. 

They grill Fred about what Evans invited him over for.  Fred finally notices Mr. Evans is also there, covered in blood.  His final words are a warning to Marty, “3-3 drums”.

Fred awakens alone to find Evans dead.  Millie returns and warns him that the gang is trying to frame him.  The police show up, so Millie and Fred escape to a diner.  Millie says they were torturing Evans for government secrets and taking a $12 Snickers from the mini-fridge.  Fred concludes it must have had something to do with the records.

They return to the shop where the neighbor is trying to lure Brockman upstairs for a nightcap, perhaps to cover his unkempt hair.  Fred deduces that Evans was referring to a Drums album.  Fred discovers that played at 78 rpm ^[2], the record sounds like drums, but played at 33 1/3 rpm, it recites the nuclear launch codes!  And played at 45 rpm, it sounds like REM. ^[3]  

Brockman is in on it.  Evans was a G-man.   A cop shows up in response to the neighbor’s noise complaint and hauls them all in.

A pretty sad showing for Suspense this week.  At its relative best, the series is archaic and simplistic.  This was just too much, or maybe too little.  The story was LP-thin, the twist was Ludacris, and the background music muffled the dialogue.  Most of the episodes so far at least tried to manufacture some suspense, but this was just very ♭.

I rate it 16 rpm. ^[4]

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Julian Noa (Brockman) was born in 1879, before phonograph records were invented.  Lon McCallister (Fred) died in 2005, so mostly outlived records.  
• [2]  Most of the records in the shop would have been 78’s.  They had only started being replaced by 33 1/3’s in 1948.
• [3]  The fastest song I could think of.  Would also have accepted Flight of the Bumble Bee or Life is a Rock.  That one is fun because you get excited when you can actually make out a couple of words — like with Bob Dylan in concert.  BTW, I know 78 rpm is faster than 45 rpm, but it’s getting late.
• [4]  16 rpm was an actual standard that was an option on record-players of the day.  Music historians believe it was a brief effort to silence the insufferable Miles Davis which failed (i.e. you could still hear the caterwauling ^[5] ).  Scientists and humanitarians eventually found a solution in the 0 rpm format.  

[5]  Technically hep-caterwauling, I guess.

One good thing about Suspense is that there is no time excruciatingly wasted by the odious Cryptkeeper or odious crypt-occupier Henry Rollins. ^[1] Alfred Hitchcock was great in that capacity, but there isn’t enough of him to go around. Well, not without making a big mess, anyway.

Mrs. Griffen comes to Mr. Crabtree’s apartment to collect his past due rent. He assures her that he will pay the 18 months due once he gets a job. Since he is 64, it better be soon. She gives him 2 weeks notice.

Sadly, he is supporting his daughter’s residency at a fancy private, er . . .  spa that has 500 thread-count walls. He has done everything he can to conserve money — did a reverse mortgage, sold his life insurance policy, claimed he would move to Camp LeJeune 1953 – 1987, and bought gold from that 10 year old Devane kid downstairs.

A young woman ^[2] listed on IMDb as Mrs. X (née Mrs. Twitter) knocks on his door and offers to pay him for his services, which is opposite the transaction that I’m used to. But, to be fair, she is responding to a job application he sent in, not a card shoved at me on Las Vegas Boulevard. I mean him. I said me, but I meant him.

The job specifically calls for an old dude with an accounting background so that he is used to the tedium.  The hours are the same as his odds of living to see Ike elected:  9 to 5.  It pays $100/week which, sure, sounds princely — but that is for 6 days.  He is really being paid to not do a goddam thing — like George Costanza with the Pinsky File, Sherlock Holmes’ Red-Headed League, or a University Presidentette. ^[3]

After leaving Crabtree, she calls Mr. X whose name she unwisely took at marriage. Mostly, she just compliments herself on her Marlingesque ^[4]  performance.

Crabtree goes to his new job and admires his name on the door. Inside, he finds a small office with a large window, no visitor chairs, a desk nailed to the floor, a calendar, and a cat. And get this — all of these are important to the story!  I’d say Suspense was ahead of its time, but I’m not sure most shows today are that well-crafted. Kudos!

Hey, for an office with no chairs, something looks pretty sit-able there!

Six months later, Mr. X finally visits the office. Crabtree says he is happy to meet him at long last. X reveals that the reports Crabtree submits are routinely burned without reading, like Kristi Noem’s unsold books in her publisher’s warehouse. Crabtree was actually hired to assist Mr. X in, as he puts it, “a very ingenious murder.” Boy, that X family really thinks a lot of themselves!

X marks the spot by saying the target is Mrs. X’s first husband — X’s Ex, who is blackmailing them. He is threatening to accuse Mrs. X of being a bigamist. Mr. X is a public figure and such an accusation back then would ruin them.

Later that day, as X told him, a man arrives asking for a “contribution”.

Spoiler!

What follows is one of those situations where writing it out would take forever, and be even more tedious than usual. Shockingly, this is because it is a good, twisty episode.

Of course it is primitive, and the organ is still overwrought and intrusive.  However, there was a creativity in this series that was missing from, oh say, Science Fiction Theatre.   As frequently happens, I’ll never watch it again, I can’t recommend it, but this was a great episode . . . grading on a curve of Sweeneyesque magnitude, of course.  Well done, Suspense!

Other Stuff:

[1]  Honestly, I thought I read he had died recently.  Also, WordPress Blocks is garbage.  It took me forever to figure out how to make the icon appear to create the [1] super-script.  At least Adobe gave me the option to roll back their update which is a massive, chaotic piece of shit.

[2]  Well, relatively young. Otto Kruger (Crabtree) is in contention for oldest actor I’ve covered yet — born in 1885.

BTW, the landlady is played by 70’s mainstay Ruth McDevitt. I say 70’s mainstay not because of the numerous 1970’s TV series she appeared in, but because her age stayed in the 70’s throughout her entire decades-long career. Like Burt Mustin, she seems to have been born at age 75.

[3]  Certainly there is no reason a woman can’t do this job, but why is every moron university president that makes the news a woman?

[4]  Referring, of course, to my favorite actress Brit Marling.  I stand by that despite her last effort, which was literally years in the making, being a collosal bore.

I see the short story Help Wanted was later adapted as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (five episodes before I started this nonsense).

Being from the 1940’s, Suspense gets graded on the biggest curve here.  But this is just dreadful.

England 1897.  Exterior.  A Salvation Army woman is soliciting donations.

Another woman stumbles into the scene.  Let us savor this moment because it is the sole sign of a pulse in this episode: The woman drunkenly proclaims her name is Hettie . . .  Spaghetti!  Sure, it might be a joke worthy of a 3 year old, but here it is gold!  And by here, I mean this blog, not the episode.

After telling a constable she has “no kith or kin”, she starts to pass out.  The cop goes to call “the wagon” to remove this riff-raff from the street.  So I guess that bridge in the background was not the Golden Gate. ^[1] She is approached by a hornblower ^[2] — wait, maybe that is the Golden Gate Bridge!  No, that is Tom, also in the Salvation Army ^[3], who literally plays a horn.

Boris Karloff sees this out his window.  He goes to the door and offers Hettie shelter.  He offers her a room to herself, to feed her, buy her some clothes, and give her a pounding a week “to perform the duties of an indoor servant“, and that euphemism, I’m going nowhere near!  Oh wait, that was one £ pound a week.

But there are 2 rules:  1) always keep the front door closed, 2) never leave the house alone, except for the morning shopping.  He points to another door which leads to his laboratory.  No one goes in there except his assistant and his clients. She is never to enter that room.

Karloff tells his assistant Tilson that Hettie will do fine.   “She will sit in front of the shop to allay suspicions”, which seems to violate both rules.  He says their “special clients” will be able to come and go as they wish.  Tilson asks what will happen if she finds out what they really do there.  Karloff says he will marry her!  No, as my president says, joke.

Months later, she hears Tom playing a horn in front of the shop.  She puts her hands on his chest and says, “What a chest you must have!  What windpower! And you must have real muscle in your lips.”  Oh sure, but I get sent to HR.

Karloff is working on a paralyzed man when Tilson rats out Hettie about opening the door.  Or maybe it is a corpse sitting up.  Still no clues what’s going on here.  I guess that’s the titular suspense.  This is going to have some great payoff, I tells ya!

She moans about being cooped up.  He asks if there is any detail of their Clintonian marriage agreement he has not lived up to?  She has her own room, her own clothes, enough allowance, and he has made “no demands on her person.”

She says she just wants him to talk to her at dinner, or say he likes her dress, or even just smile.  He reminds her of the 2 rules and wants to get back to work.

The next time she sees Tom, he gives her the titular yellow scarf that he got from the donations bin.  He says on their next hookup maybe they can go shoplifting at Goodwill.  She says she can’t come out, but Tom says he can come in. Maybe he’s in the Salvation JAG.  Boris sees them smooching.

A month later, at dinner, Hettie spills soup on the scarf.  Boris asks where she got it.   Tilson again rats her out about Tom.  She claims Tom gave her the scarf for taking a temperance pledge, although that might have been a clever ruse to steer her away from the chastity pledge.  Boris demands it, saying his wife will not accept presents from other men.

Hettie goes nuts and in a rant, finally says she is inviting Tom to dinner.  Boris takes the scarf into his lab and stuffs it in a beaker where he says it will be slowly destroyed.  He does, however, decide to allow Tom to come to dinner but they can go to hell if they expect him to serve amuse-bouche.

Karloff is not around when Tom arrives for dinner.  He and Hettie enter the lab to look for the scarf.  They see it in the beaker, but when they remove it, it is covered in a powder.  They flee back to the lobby just in time to meet Karloff and Tilson.  There is a bit of business where Karloff has Tom help him open a can of salmon with a hunting knife.  Though the series does not hold up, I appreciate that they usually take the time to inject some manufactured suspense.  Seriously, kudos.  Sure enough, Tom gets cut “by accident.”

Hettie acts quickly, pulling out the scarf to wrap his wound.  To be fair, Karloff seems to be concerned for Tom when he tells her not to use the scarf.  Rightly so, because Tom croaks within seconds.  Hettie is so distraught at his death that — and this is pretty good for this show — she grabs the knife which has been foreshadowed, stabs Karloff in the hand, and in his pain she is able to wrap his hand with the killer scarf.

She stumbles outside and tells the same constable she’ll be needing that wagon after all.  It might have felt like months to us, but it has been months for him — does he even now know WTF she is??

By all modern (or even 10 years later) technical standards, it is a disaster.  However, I admire some of what they attempted.  The two big failures were 1) as always, the oppressive, omnipresent organ score, and 2) the complete lack of backstory or even sidestory for Karloff.

Please consider this episode NSFW!  Not because it is lewd, but because your boss should smack you for watching TV at work.  Is this what you were doing while working remotely?  POW!  Oh sure, but I get sent to HR.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Rigorous New Yorker-level fact-checking reveals the GGB was opened in 1937.
• [2]  It seemed to me that hornblower would be an amusing euphemism for a gay dude (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In checking it out, I confirmed that it is, and learned it also can mean a chronic masturbator.  BTW, a Horatio Hornblower is the act of farting on another’s head with such force that the hair is blown back.
• [3]  Sadly, could not work in Piano Man reference:  . . . talking to Tommy, who’s still in the Salvation Ahmy, and probably will be for life . . .
• Proximity Alert:  Russell Collins was just in last week’s episode.  Collins is a genresnaps-fave, but give someone else a chance!  What the . . . Douglass Watson (Tom) was also in both episodes.  Was there an actor shortage in 1949?  My heavens, where ever did people get their political and climate expertise? ^[4]
• [4]  The same gibe appears in the underrated Get Smart movie.  The writers had no non-sequel writing credits for 5 years.  Coincidence?

We open on two dead women having lunch.  Well they’re dead now, not in the scene below.  Although the one on the left is iffy. ^[1]

Agatha asks Sally ^[5] (pop quiz, hotshot: which is which?) how work is going.  Sally says the hours are long, but it keeps her in New York.  She also mentions seeing a lot of George who lives in her building.

Well, hey, George drops by the table and greets his Aunt Agatha.  He says he is surprised Sally isn’t working.  She says, “The typewriter’s under the table” although I’ve never heard it called that.  George has brought a taxi to pick up his elderly aunt.  She has not finished her tea so tells him to have the taxi wait.  Sadly, he does not have enough cash.  Agatha gives Sally that knowing look.  They hear thunder, so Agatha decides to leave after all.  She gives Sally cash to pay the bill and asks her to drop by her apartment that night.

This is some swell apartment building with a doorman, a mailman, a bellhop, and an elevator operator.  Unfortunately, they are all one creepy guy named Andy.  He takes George, Agatha, and her neighbor Harry Crane ^[2] up to the 13th floor.  On the way, Harry complains that Agatha is playing her radio next door too loudly at night.  Although, because the show is Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, it is actually coming from across the alley. ^[6]   They get out on 13, but George asks Andy to wait because the elevator doesn’t have a meter like the taxi.  Agatha asks him to stay, but he says he has things to do.

After he leaves, she notices that a jade Buddha and some other items (a pyrite Joseph Smith and a rare Reese’s Jesus made out of chocolate and peanut butter) are missing.  The window is open.  She calls the cops, but a beefy hand covers her mouth.

Sally comes home.  She knocks on Agatha’s door, but gets no answer.  Harry comes out into the hall and tells her 1) it is too late to be knocking on doors, 2) her smelly cat sneaks into his window at night and wakes him up, and 3) he believes FDR is still alive and we never landed on Guam.

After she puts away the groceries, she decides to try Agatha’s door again.  She discovers her own door will not open.  She does not see what we see — an eye staring in through her peephole!  She tries to make a call, but the phone is dead.  Yikes!

She writes a note for the milkman that I-am-trapped-by-a-killer-please-for-the-love-of-God-let-me-out!, and also no more cheese because it makes the cat fart.  She slides it halfway under the door, but seconds later notices the paper has already been taken.  Through the peephole, she sees Andy leaving Agatha’s apartment.  Well wait, was he doing wind-sprints from Agatha’s door, to Sally’s door to grab the note, back to Agatha’s door, then fleeing Agatha’s door again?  She tries to get the attention of the Peeping Tom across the alley, but his wife busts him before she can get her blouse off.

Next, she ties a note to her cat’s collar and sends it out on the ledge to Harry’s window. ^[3]  A little later Harry knocks on her door, and she opens it right up. Hunh?  OK, maybe someone unlocked it from the outside, but she did not know that and she did not hesitate for a second to open it.  Anyhoo, he chews her out for letting the cat go in his window again.  She tries to explain about her door and seeing Andy, but he doesn’t care.

She tries the fire door to go drag George into this, but it won’t open.  She sees a paper on the floor.  But wait, this note is folded up like the one she attached to her cat, not flat like the one she shoved under the door.  How the heck would that have gotten there?  I guess Crane could have dropped it when he returned the cat, but why should this be worth dwelling on?  Even if it was the milkman note, so what?  She goes to Agatha’s apartment, but does not see her.  There is a single shoe beside the refrigerator. She opens the refrigerator door and screams in revulsion at some old cottage cheese, and the old woman’s body.  Oh, wait, that’s not cottage cheese.  Sally staggers to the phone and calls the police.

At the same time, Andy and George are dragging a large wicker basket from the elevator to Agatha’s door.  Andy says he killed Agatha because she came home early and caught him in her apartment, and that he fortuitously just got a great deal  on the basket at at Pier 1.  They open the door and drag the basket in — wait, if  Andy has a master key, why did he come in through the window for the heist?  And, hey, where is Sally?

Andy and George argue over how Agatha’s leg came to be sticking out of the door, and whether she might still be alive.  As they argue, there is a shockingly well-composed shot of Sally hiding in the living room.

The men begin pulling Agatha out of the refrigerator and the credits begin.  Well that didn’t resolve much.  The abrupt conclusion on Tubi is noted by reviewers at IMDb.  It just seemed egregious even for this series, so I searched for another copy of the episode at YouTube after finding nothing at Pornhub.  Sure enough, the last 2 minutes had the climax.  At YouTube, I mean, not Pornhub.

Sally tries to flee the apartment, but George catches her.  She distracts him, runs out into the hallway and locks Agatha’s door.  What kind of crazy apartment building is this where tenants can be locked in?  Where does this take place, Wuhan?  No wonder the cat is always trying to escape.  Naturally Harry comes out to complain about the noise and fluoride in the water.  He threatens to call the police, and Sally begs him to.

Of course, the episode is dreadful by today’s standards.  But is that really an excuse?  They had made some pretty good movies by this time.  Hitchcock had several suspense classics under his belt, but who could ever see them there? ^[4] All the pieces were there, but the low budget, live TV, poor picture quality, and intrusive organ music undermine the whole production.

Maybe it is better to judge these episodes on what they were attempting.  There were a couple of set pieces designed for the titular suspense here, so they did make an effort.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, what the hell happened to this country where we can’t count all the votes in 2 freakin’ weeks?

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Nell Harrison (Agatha) was born in 1880.  She might be the earliest-born actor I’ve encountered here yet.  18 years after this episode, in a stretch, she played “Old Woman” in The Producers.  Paging Oscar!
• [2]  Harry is played by Russell Collins who I previously anointed as the greatest actor in history.  To be honest, he isn’t very good here, but it is one of his first roles.
• [3]  In a quaint sign of live TV, she can’t make the note stay attached.  Luckily she releases the cat just outside her window so we can’t see her hands as she drops it.  Bravo!  However, she also releases it in the opposite direction of Harry’s apartment.
• And how crazy do you have to be to use a cat for anything on live TV?
• [4]  Blatant fat-shaming.  And isn’t the phrase fat-shaming just more fat-shaming?
• [5]  Where are all the Sallys today?  Seems like a fine name, with attractive connotations.  Sally Ride was cool, Sally Field is still cute at 95.
• [6]  If this doesn’t make sense, have a séance and ask your grandparents; or a dead nerd.

At the Royal Crown Life Insurance Company, Investigator Westcott (no first name) pounds the hell out of a cigarette. ^[1] He tells his boss he thinks they made a mistake paying out the Mead claim.  His boss grabs the cigarettes from him and says, “There was nothing fishy about the death certificate.  You saw how he died.”  Westcott says the doctor who issued the death certificate had his license taken away — and married Mead’s widow!  Not only that, but Westcott says she had just taken out a “big hefty” policy naming the doctor as the beneficiary! ^[3]  His boss is shocked by this revelation.

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 pays a visit to Mrs. Mead (now Mrs. Archer) who is smoking, but not smokin’ if ya get me.  This show must have been sponsored by Lucky Strike because there is a lot of smoking.  Mrs. Archer’s first line is the oddly singular, first person, present tense, “Oh, I just love a cigarette!”

Westcott asks how she hurt her arm.  She says she fell down the cellar stairs like Don DeFore’s mother.  “It wasn’t very bright of me to leave the rolling pin at the top of the stairs.  I haven’t the slightest idea why I left it there.”  WTF? ^[4]  He asks if she has had any other accidents since her husband has taken out a big policy on her.  She tells Westcott she can’t understand why her husband would take out a big policy on her.  Ach du Lieber, this dumbbell could work for the Royal Crown Life Insurance Company!

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]

Mrs. Archer throws him out, but not before he makes two parting comments:  1) Be very careful, and 2) I’ll leave the cigarettes for you.

That night, Mrs. Archer gets a telegram addressed to Mrs. Mead.  She has won $150,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes!  I wish I knew how to make a gif because Dr. Archer’s delayed reaction from ho-hum to WHAT’S THAT ! is classic.  Mrs. Archer says her dead husband must have purchased it.  Fortunately, you don’t have to be present to win the Irish Sweepstakes or, of course, sober.  You do need the ticket, however, and they have no idea what Mr. Mead did with it.  After searching the house, they conclude it must be in a pocket of the suit he was buried in.

Mrs. Archer suggests they could get a court order to dig up the body.  Dr. Archer doesn’t want the cops sniffing around the exhumed body; and, after 6 months, it wouldn’t be too pleasant for the cops, either.

Dr. Archer has some goons dig up the coffin.  He doesn’t find the ticket.  Some cops stumble upon the site.  They all get away, but the cops decide to haul the body in for another autopsy.  Archer gets a call that arsenic was found in Mead’s body.  He tells his wife the call was from a patient.  But wait, his license was revoked.  Also, wasn’t he a coroner?  Spooky.

He writes a letter confessing to the murder of Mr. Mead, and sign’s his wife’s name.  Yada, yada . . . Dr. Archer tries to kill his wife, fails, and is busted.

Robert Coogan (Westcott) does a great job.  Literally, every other actor hams it up just as much as the intrusive organ (my nickname at the gym).  While looking up some background on the episode, I discovered that the same story was the basis of an AHP episode that I somehow skipped.  That will be the next post.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  I had to Google why smokers tap their cigarettes.  It is to pack the tobacco in tightly because in the old days, the tobacco would fall out.  Or it is to loosen the tobacco allowing it to breathe.  Gee thanks Google.  Do I have to send Elon Musk over there to straighten your ass out, too?
• [2]  Sorry for two consecutive posts with Chappaquiddick references.  I couldn’t figure out how Dr. Archer could have insured the Lindbergh baby which would have least been close in the timeline.
• [3]  To be fair, I finally figured out that they mean that Mrs. Mead took out a new policy on herself that names Dr. Archer as beneficiary.  It is misleading because Westcott says she “had taken” not she “has taken”.  It is just poorly written.  On the other hand, it is stated later that her husband bought the policy on her.  I’m writing this at 3 am.  What’s their excuse?
• [4]  The incongruity of the rolling pin reminded me of this from almost 50 years ago.  There is a better clip here, but I couldn’t make the embedded video skip to the right timestamp.  The wording is vastly superior at the first link, but the fishing rod is in Tim Conway’s face the whole time.  Directoring!