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.