What I watched: The thirteenth episode of the second season of Suspense, an anthology drama series. “Man in the House” starred Alan Baxter, Kim Hunter, Ruth McDervitt and Boyd Crawford. It was directed by series creator Robert Stevens, and written by Joseph Liss, based off a radio play by Leslie Edgely.. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, November 29, 1949, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: A husband and wife embrace, but they aren’t feeling very intimate. The wife, Emily (Hunter) is living with her sickly mother, and husband Ted (Crawford) is upset about it. She returns home, only to be jumped by an unknown man (Baxter.) He takes Emily to see her mother (McDervitt), gagged and tied to her rocking chair. He draws a gun and berates the now-ungagged mother for talking too much. Apparently he’s killed the dog too.
The invader insists on staying here, and we learn that he’s escaped from a mental hospital that is using the kind of brutal measures we associate with 1950s mental health treatment. He refuses to let either woman leave the house. The man insists on putting the mother to sleep, complete with her usual regimen of sleeping pills.
The intruder then begins creeping on Emily. His plan is to allow her to leave for work in the morning, while he holds her mother hostage. After the usual animated AutoLite commercial, our protagonist is kicking two chatty teens out of the library, thus making her instantly sympathetic in my eyes. A voice-over tells us that she’s stressed out about the whole hostage situation unfolding at her house. Yeah, I think we could have assumed that.
Her husband Ted drops by for lunch, but mostly just to bug her about her mother again. He begs her to come back to their apartment, and says that he sent her a letter last night that she should read. She doesn’t tell him about the whole maniac situation, of course. Back at the house, the crazy man opens the letter, which suggests separation. The letter compares Mom to “acid eating into our lives”, which rather offends the old woman.
Emily comes home, and the intruder continues to berate the mother, He clutches his head, so you know he’s crazy.. Later that night, he’s in full-on depressive mode, complaining that his stomach hurts and that he hasn’t slept in three days. He tells her that he killed his wife because she was just too annoying. Then, realizing he needs sleep, he forces Emily to take her mother’s tablets and go to bed. This apparently works, as we cut to the man seeing her off to work in the morning.
She finally decides to tell Ted about it, and he sends her back to say she’s sent for a doctor for her mother. His plan doesn’t go much past that. She goes home, and gets slapped by an angry lunatic. He hides behind the curtain, preparing to shoot if Emily does anything suspicious. Ted comes in and makes his medical examination, which true to TV form only involves a stethoscope. Ted finally confronts the man, shooting him while he shoots the mother. He tells her that the mother was already dead, having taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. He pleads to Emily that “she did it for you”, and leads her out the door as the curtain falls.
What I thought: The mother-in-law has long been a staple target of hack comedy. Even though my parents had no such relationship with each others’ mothers, I knew from the funny pages and TV cartoons that mothers-in-law were creatures to be dreaded. The mother-in-law commits the primary sin of being a woman who is not sexually desirable, and the secondary one of complicating the transfer of feminine property from father to husband.
“Man in the House” is aware of these stereotypes, and cleverly uses them to build a domestic horror narrative. Before we ever hear a word from Emily’s mother, we’ve heard two different male characters tell us how unbearable she is. When she finally does get to talk, she seems upset, but that’s understandable considering that she’s being held hostage by a violent maniac.
In this way, the comic stereotype of the mother-in-law is rendered tragic. “Man in the House” is especially bold in drawing a comparison between the insane villain and our putative hero Ted. Both hate the old woman due to their attraction for her daughter. Both are obsessed with their own problems to the neglect of others’. And both, ultimately, could be responsible for the mother’s death.
It’s possible to watch this episode and take Ted’s word for it that the mother was already dead when he found her. The script certainly doesn’t preclude that possibility. But it’s also easy to imagine her still being alive, and Ted seeing an opportunity to take an obstacle to his marriage out of the way while having the bullet come from someone else’s gun.
When I first thought of this reading, it seemed like it was one that ran distinctly against the grain. After all, Suspense is not typically a subtle show. But the more I consider it, the more I think that the scenario in which Ted effectively kills the mother — or at least a scenario in which we consider that possibility — is the only one that makes sense for this script. Why else would we have so much dialogue about his hatred for the mother, and so many plot comparisons b etween the seemingly normal man and the violent criminal? In its final moments, “Man in the House” both presents a critique of its masculine hero (as well as the attitudes he embodies) and gives itself plausible deniability.
This is not to say that this is a stellar half-hour of television. The script was adapted from a radio play, and it shows: there’s a lot.of repetitive dialogue, and not much of visual interest. And let’s just say the portrayal of mental illness is, uh, not great. But the ambiguous ending is a nice reminder of how Suspense frequently presented a surprisingly subversive portrayal of gender roles.
Coming up next: ALone Ranger episode which probably won’t have any old women in it.
The Eternal Couch Potato 