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!

The titular Ernest takes his gal Margaret to the movies.  And I mean takes her and leaves her — to see “a news-reel, a sports-short, a travelogue, Bugs Bunny, and a double-feature.” ^[1]  They figure that will time out about the same as the double-header he is going to see at Ebbets Field.  Unless both movies are The Ten Commandments, I think she should count on him being late. ^[2]

She makes sure that Ernest is wearing his medical alert bracelet and has his please-for-the-love-of-God-DO-resuscitate letter.  She puts it in the pocket of his Joe Mannix sports-coat and tells him not to take it off at the ball-game.

Skipping ahead to the Fran portion of the program.

As she enters the theater, he crosses the street and is almost clipped by a car.  This triggers his catalepsy — an affliction that makes it appear that he is dead.  It even imitates the early stages of rigor-mortis.  If this had happened after sitting in the sun in his jacket & tie for a double-header at Ebbets, he probably would have smelled dead, too.  Officer Chauncy Lindell takes off the jacket and makes a pillow for Ernest’s head.  His medical bracelet is kicked down a sewer grate.

An opportunistic haberdasher sees the coat just sitting there after the ambulance carts Ernest away.  So he takes it back to his shop and puts a price tag on it.  Writer Fran and her actor husband Henry enter looking for a sports jacket.  Inexplicably, the proprietor tells them to try Abercrombie & Fitch.  Fran says they are too expensive.  She sees Ernest’s jacket on the counter and says, “Hey, is that a Joe Mannix?”  Because of, or despite, some blood stains, they are able to buy the jacket for $5.

While Fran is scrubbing out the stains, she finds the letter.  She reads it aloud:

I carry this wherever I go.  It is to advise responsible parties that I am a cataleptic.  My body must not be molested for a period of 72 hours, neither by autopsy nor embalming.  The maximum period of my attacks rarely exceed 4 hours.  Please call my wife or doctor.  This is of vital importance.  It may mean my life.

Fran asks Henry what a cataleptic is.  He says, “Don’t ask me.  I went to a drama school, not Johns Hopkins.”  Wait, an actor not presenting himself as an expert in medicine, science, and politics?  This guy will never get hired!  They look it up in a dictionary — the old kind that can’t be instantly changed online to suit some 23 year old’s fascist political whims.

Credit where due:  Fran and Henry have a good, logical conversation deducing how the bloody jacket came to be at the shop, the timing of the event, and the condition the owner might be in.

We cut to a couple of yahoos in the morgue listening to a ballgame on the radio.  The announcer says Jackie Robinson has just stolen a base, “That boy can really run.”  Okaaaaay.  There is a refreshing flash of creativity as Ernest is wheeled into the morgue, toe-tag first.  He appears dead except, unseen by the attendants, one hand is opening and closing.

Henry, and especially Fran, prove to be pretty good detectives as they try to piece together what happened.  There is even a nice attempt at the titular suspense as they need to use a payphone and some woman is hogging it.  Fran tries to call Mrs. Bowers, but she is still at the theater on about Commandment #7.

So they go back to the clothing shop.  The owner is reluctant to admit he picked up the jacket off the street after being used to prop up a dead guy’s noggin.  He finally fesses up.  His description of the event convinces Fran and Henry that the jacket’s owner is in danger of being embalmed at the morgue.  They try to call, but the two yahoos don’t answer the phone.

As the two morgue monkeys assemble their needles and scalpels, the organ really starts in.  One of them has a problem with his glasses fogging up when he leans over the corpse’s face.  There is a nice fuzzy POV shot of Ernest through the steamy glasses — unfortunately, it is from the camera’s POV, on the other side of the body from the coroner.

Finally, they answer the phone.  In the 2nd of back-to-back errors, he answers the phone without it ringing — which is the opposite of what I do.  He says, “It is some dame babbling about a guy with no coat that may not be dead.”  His blurry-eyed partner comes to the same conclusion. ^[4]

Finally Ernest opens his eyes.

There was some good stuff here.  The title is awesomely grim for 1949.  The scenario has suspense baked in.  There was some intelligent dialogue as Fran and Henry pursued the mystery.  They manufactured suspense with the phone calls and Ernest’s imminent embalming.  Margaret Phillips was delightful as Fran.  She was smart, sexy, and had an awesome Mid-Atlantic accent that sounded like Katherine Hepburn, but less like a car-starting. ^[3]

On the down side . . . well, you have to just accept that it was made in 1949 for no budget.  I guess Auto-Lite did not cough up the big bucks like Alcoa on One Step Beyond.  They played the telephone card too much here, but again, you are dealing with those limitations, plus a short running time.  The main criticism, as in previous episodes, is the obnoxious organ music.  You could say that’s just how things were done at the time, but it doesn’t make it right.  Just ask Jackie Robinson.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  All for the low, low price of 35 cents.
• [2]  When Googling Ten Commandments, the first suggestion is the movie not the, ya know, actual Ten Commandments.  Just sayin’.
• [3]  I would give attribution for that great analogy, but I can’t remember where I heard it.  Actually Margaret was born in the UK, so I’m sure some of that is in there too.  She was last seen as a naughty, naughty girl in ToT’s The Evil Within.
• [4] There was another goof in the lab earlier.  One of the guys commented on Ernest being brought in with no clothes, then corrects himself to say no jacket.
• Suspiciously similar to Breakdown on AHP.  Catalepsy and a Get Out of Morgue Free Card also play roles in another AHP episode, One Grave Too Many.
• The first writing credit for Seeleg Lester.  That might mean nothing to you, but it means nothing to anyone else either.  He did have a yuge career, though.
• Not that anyone else cares, but it really bugs me that the top photo is not the Joe Mannix jacket.  He wouldn’t have been caught dead in that thing.  I think that was a Herb Tarlek.  It was just too tough to find any other shots of Margaret smiling.

Want to vague that up a little more?

Sadly, what lies ahead is equally murky; an abyss, devoid of humor or purpose.  And that’s just this review.  Heyyoooo!

The maid is going from window to window in the Inn, closing the shutters on each.  Hey, get over yourself, no one is going to be peeking at you!  Well, maybe those four gangstas playing cards in the lobby.  And I mean “lobby” in the same sense that the Kramden’s had a “living room”.

There is a knock, and Boris Karloff instructs her to answer it.  A motorist asks for a room.  The Maid nervously says they are all booked up —  Perry Como ^[5] is in town and his posse of cardigan-wearing fans have descended on the city in their General Motors sedans and have rented rooms with toilets and showers like civilized people.  Thank God music fans will never degenerate to drifters, slobs and potheads.

She returns to the men and asks if they need anything else tonight.  Boris says for her to leave out 3 meat pies and 2 bottles of Claret ^[1], and whiskey.  She says, “They’re on the dresser” and quickly pivots to leave.  This raises several questions:

• Who’s not getting a meat pie?  I don’t spot any likely vegans in the group.
• Is there a dresser in the lobby?
• Is the dresser in one of the rooms?
• Are the guys all staying in one room?
• Is there any point in continuing this episode?

Dull story short, the crew stole the ruby out of the eye of a statue.  They mention Bombay, but then the writer pointlessly makes up the country of Indostan.^[2] So maybe he meant the gin.  Trigger Warning: One says they luckily “gave those dark devils the slip.”  

They go on and on in hammy, overbearing English accents about merchant seamen, not being able to sell the ruby because it was stolen from a temple, escaping Indostan,  betraying Boris, and the gender fluidity of Jo in Little Women.

One by one, 3 men with turbans enter the inn to retrieve the ruby.  I gotta say, I’m kinda on their side.  Boris and his pals did steal the jewel and smuggle a piece of their heritage out of the country like the Elgin Marbles or the Djibouti Jacks.  You can’t really do that and be the good guys without a cool hat and a kick-ass score by John Williams.

You know, soap and water will take care of a lot of that.

Sadly, all 3 of the Indostanleys are killed by Boris’s thugs. ^[3] However, then the statue itself appears and takes back his ruby eye which was inexplicably left on the windowsill.  It then hypnotizes the men to go outside, where they are killed.  Maybe that should have been Plan A.  The last to be lured out is Boris.  He says, “This, I did not foresee” which is a pretty good callback to an earlier comment by him.  

This was tough going.  As mentioned, the English accents were overwrought and difficult to understand.  The poor transfer did not help.  There was not much story even though is it based on a play.  Boris Karloff just isn’t very interesting unless he has bolts in his neck.  Maybe the worst feature was the intrusive organ ^[4] that seemed omnipresent.  It really was a parody of horror movie scoring.

So, a very dull outing.  I rate it a Motel 6.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Clatter per the closed captioning.
• [2]  My guess is the writer didn’t know this was an actual word.  But it ain’t no country.
• [2]  Upon a, literally, more sober examination, it appears to not be a word.  I think the definition I found earlier was just a rogue lexicographer. It does, however, appear as a place in the parable about elephant and six blind dudes.
• [3]  Yes, I know.
• [4]  That’s what she said.
• [5]  Perry Como was yuge in 1949.  But the top song was Ghost Riders in the Sky by Vaughn Monroe.  Here is the version by Johnny Cash: