Episode 303: Studio One – Wuthering Heights (October 30, 1950)

What I watched: An episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This week’s episode was an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, starring Charlton Heston, Mary Sinclair, Richard Waring, June Dayton, Lloyd Bochner and Una O’Connor. The adaptation was written by Fletcher Markle and Lois Jacoby and directed by Paul Nickel. This episode first aired on CBS at 10:00 PM on October 30, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We open amidst a windy winter scene, with a man in a top hat knocking at the door. The stranger asks if he can stay over, but the two people within tell him to leave, saying that the house is worse than the blizzard and that “the master” won’t be happy to find another person here. The friendly maid Nelly (O’Connor) takes the man to a guest bedroom, where he finds an inscription on the windowsill. When he tries to close the window, he’s interrupted by Charlton Heston, who keeps the window open for “Cathy.”

We then flash back to many years ago, where Catherine and Master Hindley are young siblings fighting with each other and appealing to their jovial father. Their father brings in a dirty young boy, who was apparently starving on the streets of Liverpool. Hindley is a real asshole to the new kid, while Cathy settles on teaching him how to speak proper English. Without a real name for himself, the family dubs him Heathcliff. He does look a little bit like a young Charlton Heston.

Three months later, Cathy and Heathcliff are fast friends, frequently spending time on the moors, thus thoroughly pissing off Hindley. We cut to this romantic scene, with young Heathcliff wearing what looks a lot like a leather jacket, and quickly segue into a later scene, with the grown-up actors (Heston and Sinclair) brooding on the same moor. Heston chomps down on the line “It’s getting darker Cathy. Not with the sun going down, but… in our hearts.” Hindley (Waring) has become the master of the house, and is further tormenting them. He shows up to personally banish Heathcliff to the stables.

Who wouldn’t throw their life away for this man?

Cathy falls and hurts her leg, and Heathcliff brings her to their neighbours, Edgar (Bochner) and his sister Isabella (Dayton). Heathcliff and Edgar are both very dramatic about a sprained ankle, but Edgar takes the opportunity to put the rizz on. Back at the Heights, Hindley complains about Heathcliff to their maid Nelly. He discusses a potential match between Cathy and Edgar, which makes an eavesdropping Heathcliff angry.

Hindley plays on Heathcliff’s poor status to tell him he has no choice. Cathy returns, and is evidently smitten with Edgar, but refuses to give up the moors. Heathcliff smashes his hands through the glass after overhearing this. She confesses to Nelly that she belongs to Heathcliff. After overhearing part of the conversation, Hindley comes in, shouting that Heathcliff has stolen his horse and fled.

After a Westinghouse spot advertising the ability to watch big college football games (like Harvard vs. Yale!), we return to find that Wuthering Heights has fallen upon poverty, with a drunken Hindley taking out his rage on his servants. Hey, at least you still have servants, bro. He is visited by Heathcliff, wearing a cool cloak, who now apparently has some money to support the house. Meanwhile, Cathy is living in luxury, creating art alongside Isabella.

Heathcliff visits Catherine, and says he should have married her. He doesn’t seem like he’s going to take “no” for an answer this time, but does eventually leave. Heathcliff plays dice with Hindley, who has wagered away all his money and lesser property. He finally puts Wuthering Heights on the table, and loses it. He then tries to strangle Heathcliff, but gets punched out. This guy is really kind of a jobber.

I love anime food.

Catherine and Heathcliff get back to their old habit of fooling around on the moors. Things turn less playful when Catherine mentions that she is, you know, married. Heathcliff tries to get her to do a “blood brothers” thing. He heads to a dinner party at the Grange, but not before we see Hindley has a gun and is trying to work up the nerve to shoot him.

At the dance, Heathcliff puts the rizz on Isabella. Cathy takes her aside and tries to warn her that Heathcliff is only interested in her fortune, but she thinks Cathy is insulting her. Heathcliff tells Isabella that Cathy repels him, but that “I’d only destroy you.” I have to use that line some time. Scandalized by Heathcliff’s behaviour, Edgar says he should never visit again, but Cathy objects. They receive a letter from Isabella, saying she’s eloped with Heathcliff. Catherine freaks out.

The second ad break pitches us on a new Westinghouse refrigerator with a special defrosting system. We return to a sick Cathy seeing Heathcliff in the mirror. She begs Nelly to take her to the Heights again. Nelly tells a drunk and depressed Hindley that Cathy is dying, and he threatens to kill Heathcliff again, but shrinks when the man actually appears with Isabella in toe. He’s constantly berating her, saying that he’s trying to get her to hate him, and it seems to be working. Nice fellow.

Cathy is still dying of sadness, confessing to Nelly that there’s evil in her heart. She hears Heathcliff shouting for her outside the window, and obsessively lurches towards it. She runs into him and begs for them to be together, and he pleads for her to haunt him. Well, I have some good news about what genre of story you’re in. This takes us back to the “present”, with Hindley and Isabella as two of the wretched figures drinking together. Heathcliff is found on the moor, digging up Cathy’s grave amidst howling winds, and this is our (somewhat abbreviated) conclusion.

What I thought: I only recently read Wuthering Heights for the first time. As I’ve mentioned previously, I loved Jane Eyre, but I’ve had difficulty with the Brontës’ other works. Maybe it’s just my diminished attention span since my grad school days, but I found Wuthering Heights to be something of a slog, hundreds of pages of brooding without a really strong propulsive plot. Obviously it was a hugely influential book in the history of gothic literature, but as I get older I’ve become more willing to just admit it when I don’t enjoy reading a Great Book.

The Studio One version of Wuthering Heights was a bit more my speed. The novel is a difficult one to adapt due in large park to its baroque plot structure, which involves multiple time frames, a story-within-the-story frame narrative, and two different characters called Cathy. Studio One trims away the next-generation storyline which takes up much of the book’s last portion, and creates a more focused narrative based on the Catherine and Heathcliff relationship that everyone remembers.

One of the Westinghouse ads this week features a housewife proclaiming “Finally, I’m free!” about a new refrigerator, showing how modern appliances were pitched as liberatory for women.

The visual format also helps to make this narrative more memorable to me. Even with the relatively cheap sets of 1950 television, the visual image of Cathy and Heathcliff on the moor helps to sell this as a romance the characters are desperate to return to much more than the abbreviated script would do on its own. The sets also do a good job contrasting the atmosphere of the two estates – the doomed Wuthering Heights and the proper and innocent Grange.

None of the characters have a great deal of psychological depth, especially villainous Hindley, but the talented cast do their best to make them memorable. Charlton Heston is not a great fit for a Byronic hero, as in Jane Eyre – he’s not a man you can imagine society looking down on. But his raw charisma and masculine presence make up for that, and if nothing else it makes it immediately clear why Catherine and Isabella can’t resist him despite all logic.

Whatever my gripes about Emily Brontë’s prose, Wuthering Heights is still a vital story, and one that set the template for many romance narratives today, pairing a noble woman with a primal, less civilized but undeniably magnetic men. The tropes introduced by Bronte are still present in contemporary shows like Outlander. Studio One leaves out a lot of the book’s wrinkles, but is effective at conveying its core appeal, which is all you can really ask a one-hour adaptation to do.

Coming up next: It’s finally time for Halloween on Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

Episode 302: Lights Out – “Martian Eyes” (October 30, 1950)

What I watched: An episode of the horror anthology series “Lights Out”, created by Fred Coe and hosted by Frank Gallop. The episode starred Burgess Meredith, John Baragrey, and David Lewis, was written by Henry Kuttner and George Lefferts, and was directed by Laurence Schwab Jr. “The Martian Eyes” is available to watch on YouTube and aired at 9:00 PM on NBC on October 30, 1950.

What happened: We open with the too-close gaze of Frank Gallop, who welcomes us to this story of suspense. It sounds like it’s the same organ guy as Suspense, come to think of it. Our story proper begins in a New York bar, where bartender Frank is welcoming regular Mr. Lyman (Meredith). Lyman has a kind of fey attitude and apparently is in the habit of saying he’s talking to Martians. Lyman tells another man at the bar, Sorrel (Lewis) that he’s being followed by a Martian disguised as a man (Baragrey).

Lyman has apparently been following Sorrel for a while, saying that he noticed the new man as “sensitive.” The man, a photographer, is skeptical, citing the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. Lyman says that Martians have infiltrated the world, and even married humans, but are scared of some human things, such as bathtubs. He attributes all irrationality in the world to Martian hypnosis, from wars to his wife’s habits. Lyman also claims to have special infrared glasses that allow him to see the Martians’ telltale third eyes.

This bar conversation continues even after the act break. Lyman claims “my Martian knows you have a Martian”, claiming that every human has an alien following them around. Sorrel has started to believe, saying that he saw photographed someone with a third eye looking in his window with an infrared camera. He even has the photo. The man invites Lyman to come to his studio as soon as possible.

After another act break, we’re in the studio. Lyman calls, saying that he’s managed to shake the Martian that was following him as well as the suspicions of his wife. But the knock on Mr. Sorrel’s door isn’t from Lyman, but from the man who was following him. The unnamed stranger wants to see the infrared photography, and says he’s working for Lyman’s wife, who wants the evidence to have him be committed to an institution. He threatens Sorrel with his gloved hands.

The first half of the episode is basically just two men in a bar talking, which really puts a lot of faith in these two actors.

Sorrel calls the cops, but finds his phone line disconnected. He brings the man the negative, and shows him the technique used. But Lyman has snuck in, and stabs the other man in the head. The police do arrive, leading to the strange duo having to hide the body. Sorrel understandably freaks out about the situation.

He tries to give the cop the brush-off, but he insists on inspecting the apartment, apparently a fan of photography as well. Wracked with doubt, Sorrel decides to take a picture of the corpse with the infra-red lens. Lyman has retreated to the basement, and is working on a way to dispose of the bodies. When Sorrel examines the photograph, he finds there’s no third eye. Lyman has dug not just one but two graves, and emerges from the basement wearing a prop third eye on his forehead. DUN DUN! Frank Gallop is also wearing a third eye in the farewell intro. Very popular accessory these days.

What I thought: Lights Out was one of the first horror series on radio, created by NBC writer Wyllis Cooper in 1933. Willing to be openly gruesome as well as spooky, the series found an audience and aired in various incarnations for 13 years. It came to television very early, as a series of specials in 1946, as well as a regular series from 1949-50. This is the first episode we’re watching (although there may be earlier ones I’ll have to go in and full in later), but Lights Out was well in its stride by the time of “Martian Eyes.”

We can also see the emergence of the horror host through this series. Suspense was hosted by Rex Marshall, but he wasn’t a horror character – he just wanted you to get new spark plugs. Frank Gallop doesn’t have a particularly spooky name, but he introduces and concludes our tale as a spectral figure, a head without a body lit by a candle (an effect apparently achieved by simply wearing a black turtleneck). Gallop apparently struggled with the role, including running out of candles, but on screen he comes off as a natural, setting the stage for the Cryptkeepers and Elviras that were to come.

Horror hosts thrive on gimmicks like this.

As for the episode itself, “Martian Eyes” uses the familiar but always fun trope of a seemingly crazy person who might just turn out to be right about everything (the best-known example of this might be They Live.) In this case, the madness that Sorell is drawn into turns out to be insane after all, so I guess it’s more of a Bug. Still, this is a horror show, so the viewer can’t entirely dismiss the possibility that something alien or supernatural is possible up until the very end.

The story also reads distinctly as a queer allegory. Lyman says he’s been following Sorell based on his gait, approaches him in a bar saying that he’s “special”, and convinces him to take him back to his apartment, where he lives alone, and do something disgusting in the basement. Lyman has a wife, but she’s always off-screen, making her both a phantasm as well as a threat to the relationship between him and Sorell. Of course, in the end it turns out Lyman’s the real threat, so maybe this is a lavender scare narrative.

Part of why Lyman comes off so queer and unusual is his performance by Burgess Meredith, who invests a fey antsiness in the paranoid man. Meredith was already a veteran actor by the time of Lights Out, appearing in a number of films and theatrical productions, including the 1939 Of Mice and Men. However, he was blacklisted from film during the Red Scare for alleged communist ties. For television, however, Meredith was enough of a big name that would lend some prestige to a schlocky show like Lights Out, and he continued to have a long career in TV and theatre. He’s great here, and I look forward to seeing him again.

What else is on?: Against Lights Out, CBS offered up The Horace Heidt Show, with guest Georgeann Garner, and CBS featured game show The College Bowl, featuring Chico Marx. In New York, viewers could watch two different local wrestling shows on Dumont and WPIX. Lights Out would generally win the timeslot, finishing 19th in the year-end ratings, and lead into the even higher-rated Robert Montgomery Presents.

Coming up next: A longer and somewhat more prestigious anthology series, as Studio One makes its return.

Episode 272: Studio One – “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff” (October 9, 1950)

What I watched: A third-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Joan Chandler, Murvyn Vye, Leslie Nielsen, and Rock Rogers. It was directed by Carl Frank and written by Miner based off the novel by Gaito Gazdanov. “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff” aired on October 9, 1950 at 9 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We open in Marseille in 1944. Lovely city, not a great year to visit. A man is sneaking through an alleyway with a gun in his hand, and surreptitiously knocks on a woman’s door. She lets him into her apartment, which is pretty nice, all things considered. The man introduces himself as Paul (Nielson), and he’s here to visit a balding Frenchman, who we will eventually learn is the titular Alexander Wolff (Vye). Paul has a wound on his shoulder, which Wolff patches up, seeming much more relaxed. Paul is upset when the woman, Helene (Chandler), shows up again, shoots the man, and runs.

In 1950, Paul is working at a magazine. His editor wants him to do a piece on the French resistance, but fashion reporter Joan says he won’t do it. Paul comes in and wants to take everyone out for dinner, kissing Joan on the forehead. He knocks over the files as a dramatic gesture, but then notices that one is related to Alexander Wolff. The manuscript is apparently written by Wolff, describing a dramatic night during the War. Paul assumes that this was a sign his editor knows his true identity, and interrogates him. Paul confesses that he’s the man who shot Wolff, and assumed he killed him. Paul swears to meet him.

Out of all the gin joints in Marseille, you had to walk into mine multiple times.

Paul returns to Marseille to track down the man who sent the manuscript, Marcel Verignac (Rogers). He claims to work with the police, saying he’s investigating Wolff’s ties to the Gestapo. This leads him to the familiar-looking apartment of Helene in her dressing gown. He greets her in French and then they talk in a weirdly accented English for the rest of the conversation. She says that she though Wolff was dead too, and asks Paul why he missed.

Marcel harasses Helene in a cafe, saying that Wolff is on the move, and doesn’t like to travel alone. Paul arrives, and says he cabled home to quit his job. He’s conflicted about his romantic feelings for the woman, saying that it feels as though he’s betraying Wolff. She says that she loved him, but that he was a “twisted person” who manipulated her. She refuses to answer Paul’s questions about whether Wolff had called the Gestapo about him. Paul stuns her by saying that Wolff is still in Marseille. Helene calls up Alex and asks them to meet. Wait, could she have done that the whole time?

Marcel evicts a happy couple from the one table that’s in the middle of the set. He tells Paul to wait outside. Paul, saying that he’s also waiting for Wolff. The two men recall their days in the Resistance. Marcel says that Wolff has been involved in criminal business from Algiers to la Rochelle. Just as his tongue starts wagging, Wolff shows up to yank him away, saying he’s heading to Algiers in the morning. He seems in good spirits about the whole shooting thing, pouring Paul a glass of wine and explaining that the incident took away his idealism. Paul still isn’t able to get a clear answer, and takes off.

Wolff goes to Helene’s apartment, and references their past while lightly mocking her musical ability. He offers her a trip to Algiers with him, but she refuses. Wolff tells her to break it off with Paul, and refers to Raul, an old friend of Paul who he accuses Helene of betraying to the Gestapo. Helene says that she thought Raoul was a traitor. Paul starts knocking at the door, and Wolff beats a sarcastic retreat. Paul begs with Helene to come to Paris with him, but she refuses, saying that their romantic moment was “just an incident.” After he storms off, Wolff returns for a cup of coffee.

The Westinghouse commercial shows us a new model of washer, which uses its door as a scale to tell how much soap you need. That one never caught on, I guess. Marcel hassles a dispirited Paul back at the only bar in Marseille, until the cops show up. Marcel tells him that Wolff and Helene used to be an item, and Paul gets mad, He storms back to the apartment, to find Helene packing her suitcases to go with Wolff. Paul thinks he’s “holding something over her head”, and Wolff is all too happy to volunteer the story about Raoul.

But Wolff lets slip one detail too many, and Paul realizes that it was actually him who killed Raoul, and that he was working for the Gestapo after all. Wolff holds them both at gunpoint, but Paul is able to shoot him first by gently walking around a pillar. Elaine comforts Paul by saying that Wolff had “been dead since the beginning of the war.” Wow, a zombie story! And that’s the end of our program, except for a weird Westinghouse ad about the value of the electric motor.

What I thought: “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff” is another Studio One episode strongly influenced by the experience of America in World War II, and the ambiguity of the postwar world, like “Away from It All” and “Passenger to Bali.” The war was not a conflict in which one could easily claim that it was unclear who was in the wrong, but nonetheless a lot of Americans probably felt some degree of ambivalence over their participation in the war, which was often a lot uglier than the idealized and patriotic narrative. So we end up with plots like this, where there’s a little corner of ambiguity as to who was good or evil within the larger war.

The resulting episode isn’t quite as good as “Away from It All” but is nevertheless a fairly enjoyable episode of noir-ish international intrigue. Think of it as a shrunken Casablanca. _’s performance as the central figure of Alexander Wolff isn’t quite magnetic enough to justify the intrigue that the script builds up around the character. Not everyone can be Harry Lime, I guess.

There’s a lot of close-ups in this one.

The stakes of the story, more so than most TV dramas of this era, are essentially emotional. Paul already made the decision to shoot Wolff years ago. What he tries to work out over the course of the hour is how he should feel about it. He has to determine whether or not Wolff is bad not in order to stop his future crimes so much as to resolve the trauma he still feels over his experiences in the war.

There’s also a sub-drama here related to Helene, who is at least nominally the femme fatale of this story. She is continually pulled between Paul and his Americanized virtue and the continental sleazebaggery of Wolff. This is rendered in a very literal geographic (and colonialist) morality: north to Paris and salvation, or south to Algiers and sin. Unfortunately, this part of the episode isn’t as successful, with Helene never really seeming like a character as much as a plot device.

The episode is a loose adaptation of Gaito Gazdanov’s novel of the same name. Gazdanov,a Russian crime author, uses the Russian Civil War in his protagonist’s backstory instead of World War II, and has the narrator discover that Wolff is alive by reading a book of short stories that he wrote (a rather more elegant device than the TV version.) I haven’t read the original book, but it’s interesting to see how what seems to be a novel at least partly in the tradition of nihilist Russian fiction is translated into the Hollywood argot.

And hey, it’s Leslie Nielsen! Like most people, I know Nielsen basically entirely as an older guy who was in 1980s comedies, but he was an actor for decades before that. 1950 was actually his first year on-screen, in which he appeared in 46 different TV productions. The 25-year-old Nielsen doesn’t really stand out here, but does a capable job as a leading man. Most of the cheaply-made TV dramas from this era aren’t preserved, but hopefully we will be able to see some more of his work before he heads to Hollywood.

Coming up next: Ollie blows something up.

Episode 252: Studio One – “Away from it All” (September 25, 1950)

What I watched: A third-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Kevin McCarthy, Catherine McLeod, Haila Stoddard, Faith Brook, and Miner himself. It was directed by John Peyser and written by Miner based off a radio play by Val Gielgud. “Away from it All” aired on September 25, 1950 at 9 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We begin in the clouds, and a totally realistic-looking airplane cockpit. Aboard are Air Force man and woman John Quayle (McCarthy) and Shirley March (McLeod) The plane crashes, very gently, and the man and woman onboard crash onto a deserted island. After briefly moving through some palm fronds, they find a large mansion. The pilot finds a photo of a famous aviator who went missing over the Pacific ocean. There are also a bunch of magazines dating from 1939, when the accident happened. Is this product promotion for Newsweek?

The pilot himself, Hugo Basten (Miner), is here to greet them. They inform him that World War II is ended, but now there’s trouble in the Pacific. Hugo has been hiding out on his island of tranquility with eight other people, including his personal chef. Shirley immediately says she doesn’t like him. Hugo goes on to explain that he doesn’t care for the modern age, and wishes he was back in 1850, where everything was handmade. To follow his feelings, he and his companions plotted to fake their deaths in the plane crash. He welcomes John and Shirley as guests, but says that they can never leave.

The next morning, a group of European aristocratic people are dining, other residents of the island. A British woman, Edith (Brook), is one to deliver the news. Two more people enter, including Gloria (Stoddard), who is desperate for a new man. Edith mentions that three of the four men on the island have already been reserved exclusively for her. Things are getting kinky. Stepan, a heavily accented man with a goatee, worries that the Americans will reintroduce all the world’s conflicts to the island.

Shirley comes back down, and Edith gives her a fairly cheerful greeting. They talk about the possibility of her marrying John on the island. Heinrich, another eccentric European scientist, wants to test his cure for the common cold on Shirley. John comes down, having checked the plane and found that it is in fine condition but out of gas. Hugo also enters, introducing Edith as his wife. He’s very genial, but still says he will stop John from leaving the island. John castigates them for living it up when so many other were suffering, but Hugo no-sells it. Gloria seductively introduces herself as the act ends, and Betty Furness shows us how we can change the channel with just one hand on the new Westinghouse set, with a mammoth 17-inch screen.

Still looks better than Money Plane.

When we come back, we find Shirley trying to fix the radio to send out a message. Dan, another American man who used to work for Hugo, tells her to cut it out. He’s resigned to living out the rest of his life as a barfly on the island. Edith gives a similarly cordial warning to John. This doesn’t stop the newcomers from trying to figure out where they are, and speculating about who else on the island might want to leave

Gloria continues trying to seduce John, telling her about her relationships with the other men on the island, including Hugo, who she once had a one-sided affection for. Stepan plays some music on the piano and talks about how sad it is. John tries to get them on his side by talking about how much they’ve missed in the outside world, including playing “Oklahoma” on the piano. Yeah, that might make me want to stay on the island instead. Hugo interrupts in the name of politeness.

Later that night, Gloria meets up with John in the cockpit of his old plane. (This is not a euphemism.) She suggests that she wants to get away, but it might just be more flirtation. She lays one on his lips. Meanwhile, Edith is chatting with Shirley. John comes in and tells Shirley that they’ll be escaping tomorrow, as he’s discovered a source of gasoline on the island. But Hugo is just listening in. We take another break so Betty can clear us up on self-defrosting refrigerators.

The whole group gathers for breakfast the next morning, even the Asian servant. (How much does that guy’s life have to suck?) Hugo makes an announcement that he knows John plans to leave, and that other residents of the island are aware of it. Dan admits to it, and interrogates Hugo about why he wants to keep them there. Hugo says he came here not so much to avoid war but as to avoid the ugly negotiations and deprivations of peace, and that he cannot risk word of the island reaching the public. Dan says that Hugo’s real motivation was psychological sadism, of watching the people he surrounded himself with become more dependent and more pathetic.

Was this Time/Life product placement?

As Hugo finishes his speechifying, there’s a huge explosion, or at least some flashing lights. He says that he planted explosives in the gas supply for just this eventuality. Later, Hugo meets with the unhappy Edith, who tells him that she also longs for civilization. John and Shirley meet and again discuss marriage. But Gloria shows up and says that the Marines have landed, although she’s very giggly about it. Hugo assumes that John somehow got a message out, but he denies it. An officer shows up and says that they came to investigate the large column of smoke from the explosion. Hugo refuses to leave, but the officer says that the island is the target for missile tests. He finally admits that “there’s not any room anymore for the 18th-century.”

What I watched: Whenever I go to the New York Times archive to find the TV schedules for one of these days in fall 1950, I’m confronted with a front-page story about the Korean War: territory won, territory lost, people dying in great number. The conflict had begun the past June, with North Korean forces taking over almost the entire peninsula, before a UN counteroffensive in this very month began turning the tide towards a bloody stalemate. The war was one of the most brutal in modern history, with roughly 3 million fatalities, but it’s been just about invisible in the television we’ve looked at. In part this is because most of what’s available from this era is children’s programs, but it also seems like this conflict, in stark contrast to World War II before and the Vietnam War to come, left little impression on popular culture. In contrast with today’s relevance-chasing productions, 1950s TV as a whole offered an escape from news of war and struggle, and island where the bloodshed and tragedy of the escalating Cold War might as well have not existed.

“Away from It All” is an episode about that kind of separation. It’s the first episode in our series to touch on Korea, and even then it does so obliquely, mentioning a “new war” that is “complicated and ugly.” Hugo wants to remove himself from the endless, grueling march of history, and goes to great extents to do so. He creates a world that is an endless dinner party, a simulation of pleasure without any pain to contrast it with. It’s an alluring choice, if one doesn’t look too deeply at it.

The strength of “Away from It All” is how it conjures a complex social ecosystem within a short amount of time. We get at least a decent sense of who all of Hugo’s guests are, and how they relate to each other. It becomes clear that all of these people are sick of each other, their worlds having been intertwined for so long that every relationship has become overburdened. If anything, I would have liked to see this story expanded a bit, just because there are so many moving parts that could use further development. This was obviously a story that was important to Studio One showrunner Worthington Miner, as he not only adapted it but starred as Hugo, and probably gave the most interesting performance.

11 years with only piano playing for entertainment would drive me nuts.

This is not to say that the episode is perfect. The plot raises a lot of logistical questions that are hard to answer — How have they not run out of sherry? Why does the servant keep working? John and Shirley are also fairly dull, square-jawed protagonists, and it could have helped to have them be a little bit tempted by what the island has to offer. But I found it very refreshing to watch a complex, big-idea adult drama, and ended up enjoying this hour quite a bit.

As I write this, we are in the early stages of another war, with Russia invading the Ukraine, and it’s complicated and ugly. In comparison to the 1950s, this war seems to be hypermediated, with every brand and sphere of society feeling the need to weigh in. But we still live on our little islands. On the day of the invasion, I was writing an article about Pam & Tommy, a series about a celebrity sex tape that felt impossibly trivial compared to the news. We compartmentalize, build our own little endless dinner parties, where the darkness of the world can’t intrude.

But such isolation can never last forever. Hugo finds that out in “Away from it All.” The ending strongly implies that, had the military not been alerted to human presence on the island, they would have used it for nuclear testing. No matter how much we isolate ourselves, the world intrudes.

What else is on?: Unusually, NBC started the hour-long Robert Montgomery Presents at 9:30, with the second half-hour running up against Studio One. This week’s episode was an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled classic The Big Sleep starring Zachary Scott and Patricia Gaye. I’m not a big film noir buff, but I would probably go with the Bogie and Bacall version instead. In the remaining half-hour, NBC aired Talent Search with Skitch Henderson.

Elsewhere on the one-handed dial, DuMont had a second hour of Wrestling from Columbia Park. In the New York area, the ABC affiliate aired the 1942 film The Adventures of Martin Eden, rounding it out with some short films, while WPIX aired The Art Ford Show and WATV aired stock car racing from New Jersey. The Montgomery show ended up being the highest-rated program in this time slot, although Studio One also finished in the top 25 of the season.

Coming up next: We return to somewhat cheerier matter, as Kukla, Fran, and Ollie get around to fixing those floorboards.

Episode 243: Suspense – “Dark Shadows” (September 19, 1950)

What I watched: A third-season episode of anthology drama series Suspense. “Dark Shadows” stars William Redfield, Robert Harris, Gene Lyons, Robert Allen, and Ruth McDevitt. It was written by Halsted Wells based on a short story by Robert Mulligan, and directed by series creator Robert Stevens. This episode aired at 9:30 PM on September 19, 1950 on CBS and can be watched on YouTube.

What happened: A man, whose name we will learn is I. B. Trane (Redfield), exits a church and puts on a pair of darkened glasses. Acting blind, he asks for directions to the FBI. At the office, he says that he was afraid of an “apprehension” that a blind man’s enemies might direct him wrongly. This dispatched with, he says that he has encountered a Japanese racketeer named Takama, but that he may be being followed. The agent, Tom Peyser (Lyons), gives Trane the brush-off, obviously pegging him as a crackpot.

Outside, a nun (the ever-present Ruth McDevitt, making her 7th Suspense appearance) is panhandling in front of a sign for a boxing match. Trane walks in and loses his lighter, only to have it returned to him by a shady figure (Allen). Peyser agent calls his boss, who tells him that Trane was a GI in Japan and had his eyes put out by Takama. Trane goes back to his regular job as a phonograph repairman, and the mysterious man continues following him.

The nun has moved on to going into people’s businesses to ask for money. The operator of a Chinese restaurant doesn’t want anything to do with her, but Allen’s shadowy character (whose name I really should have caught by now)does. He talks to the hoarse-voiced man in the back, who is Takama (Harris). The other guy says that Trane knows he’s here, which Takama doubts. Once his henchman provides him with the note, he eats it in the most sinister way one can eat paper.

After the ad break, we’re on the front side of the restaurant. Trane is having dinner alone, one of my signature moves. He calls the FBI again, and they say that Takama died a year and a half ago. Trane gives a speech to the whole restaurant saying that there’s a murderer in the room. He points to an empty table, which doesn’t exactly help his case. He gets taken in to the cops. The officer says that Takama was a high-profile gangster in the 1930s who paid everyone off, but would never dare return to New York.

There’s an interesting effect where Trane’s face is faded into another scene to depict him on the phone.

Trane wants to get out of town to avoid being targeted, maybe to Vermont. The police take him to a church, but Takama’s man is watching. Trane prays. Trane calls the FBI agent again from Grand Central Station.. He says that he must be mistaken, if so many people think he’s wrong. Takama smashes a phonograph to set a trap for Trane. The two Japanese men laugh evilly.

Trane comes in to repair the phonograph. Takama’s assistant shows him to the machine, and he immediately senses that something is wrong. The gangster throws him to the ground and puts a knife to his throat. The confrontation is interrupted by a dog barking. The dog, which we have never seen before and don’t see now, belongs to Trane. The nun comes in, looking for donations again, which stalls the bad guys long enough for the cops to show up and arrest Takama.

What I thought: When I lived in Ottawa, there was a woman I encountered a couple of times, at least once on the bus and once at a pharmacy. She obviously had some sort of mental illness, and would loudly complain about various conspiracies, coming back around to someone stealing $80, 000 from her. People with minor positions of authority reacted differently to her — the pharmacy manager threatened to call the police on her, while the bus driver was loudly protective. What struck me was the specificity of the paranoia, the details of the crimes against her which she became stuck on, the amount of the money, the ways she was being spied on. I don’t know what became of her. Ottawa is a difficult place to be mentally ill, cold and dark for much of the year and with social services that are constantly being clawed away, but I hope she’s doing better these days.

At no point did I ever stop to wonder if someone had really stolen $80, 000 from her. Certainly theft and scams aren’t hard to believe, but our cultural image of the crazy homeless person, as well as the real experience of living in a city, leads one to dismiss out of hand the things obviously mentally ill people say. But the premise of “What if the crazy person is right?” has always been a popular one, a classic reversal of expectations. This trope has been used in everything from horror movies to, in a sense, The X-Files, and highlights the lure of paranoia. There’s something appealing about living in a world where everyone really is out to get you.

Cool guys don’t look at cops

Ultimately, the story that Trane tells isn’t so unbelievable, at least not by the standards of Suspense episodes. All it involves is a criminal well-known to the authorities sneaking back into the country. But of course, the hardest thing for governments to believe is their own failure. Redfield , a Broadway actor who it looks like we’ll see a lot of in the future, does a good job portraying Trane as a man you would distrust even if he was talking sense. Still, the episode has a few too many moving parts (what’s up with the nun?), and its depiction of the underworld is never truly believable.

There’s also the matter of the Japanese villains, Takama (whose fearsomeness we are told about more than we see) and his lackey. Both are played by white men in yellowface. Thankfully, they don’t really try to do Japanese accents, with Harris’s Takama sounding more like he’s auditioning for a role in the 1990s Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s kind of an ugly artifact of a time when Asian actors couldn’t even play one-dimensional Asian villains. However, I’m a little surprised that we haven’t seen more Japanese villains in these TV shows, given the proximity of World War II and the fervent, frequently racist propaganda America used to support its war in the Pacific. Maybe nobody could be bothered putting on the face paint.

Ultimately, “Dark Shadows” is as middling as its title, starting out with an unnerving performance and an interesting premise but eventually coming to another rushed conclusion like many previous Suspense episodes. Still, I’d be interested in watching Redfield’s Trane, so different from the bland protagonists that are often involved in these crime stories, follow more of his obsessions. There’s something of an early Dale Cooper in him, insane in a way that cuts through the madness of society.

What else is on: NBC’s rival half-hour drama, Armstrong Circle Theatre, aired an episode called “The Other Woman”, starring Louise Albritton and Glen Langan. Armstrong Circle Theatre generally got higher ratings than Suspense, in large part due to having the #1 and #2 programs in the country as its lead-in.DuMont’s Cavalcade of Bands featured the Shep Fields Orchestra, Wally Cox, Neal Stanley, Hot Shots, and the Kanazawa Trio. ABC normally aired panel show Can You Top This in this slot, but at least their New York affiliate WJZ aired film of motorboat racing instead. Also available over the air in New York were two different wrestling shows and recorded stock car racing.

Coming up next: I fiddle with my dial and tune into one of the earliest syndicated programs, The Cisco Kid.

Episode 233: Suspense – “Edge of Panic” (September 12, 1950)

What I watched: A third-season episode of anthology drama series Suspense. “Pocketful of Murder” starred Louisa Horton, Patrick McVey, and Haila Stoddard. It was written by Halsted Wells based on a novel by Henry Kane, and directed by series creator Robert Stevens. This episode aired on September 12, 1950 on CBS and can be watched on YouTube.

What happened: After the usual parade of AutoLite products, we have a pair of upstanding-looking fellows delivering $10, 000 in an envelope to insurance salesman Harry Martin (McVey). He has the day off, and is spending it with his wife Alice (Horton), although being a busybody he’s still going into work to pick up his mail. He arrives at the office to find Joyce Anderson (Stoddard), a rich widow, waiting for him. She does a classic film noir seduction routine, showing lots of gam. When she mentions wanting a half-million dollar policy, he decides he can work a little more.

Alice is in a phone booth, calling people to ask about his disappearance. He’s having a bender with George. They start doing the rumba to some suitably tropical-sounding music. He finds a hammer in her classy flat and starts pounding on her piano, then shockingly starts feeling groggy. She kisses him and starts getting mad at him for trying to make a quick buck. After some scuffling, he grabs the hammer and threatens to beat her brains out. A switchboard operator reports a murder with a hammer. Seems pretty open and shut to me.

The second act begins with Alice still trying to track down her husband. He shows up drunk to her door, and the cops are there to arrest him for murder shortly thereafter. Alice begs the police chief to let her take a look at the crime scene to see if they’ve missed anything. Despite assuring her that they’ve gone over everything with “telescopes, microscopes, and kaleidoscopes”, none of which would seem to be very useful, the cops eventually let her survey the place.

Well, he sure looks innocent to me.

A police officer tells her that they suspect the husband because they find a diary suggesting he carried on a six-month affair with Joyce. Alice fixates on a bottle of cough medicine on the kitchen table. Joyce’s stern-faced brother comes in to glower at them. She checks with Joyce’s doctor, pretending to be a friend, and he accuses her of trying to ‘”start a poison plot.”

Alice uses a payphone to continue to try to get in touch with her husband, who is presumably still drunk. She receives a threatening note on her door, and reports it to the cops. Harry has sobered up and denies everything. Alice calls the doctor, whose first name also turns out to be Harry, and pretends to be Joyce. She learns that Joyce was also having an affair with the doctor, explaining the diary.

Alice reports it to the cops again, and gets them to question the brother’s girlfriend Jean Mulligan. They all believe Jean’s story that she was in the beauty parlour the whole time and continue to think Harry is guilty. Alice freaks out, and lays out another theory: that Jean posed as Joyce, drugged Harry, killed Joyce to collect the insurance money and framed Harry. She collapses, which is taken as an admission of guilt, and the Martins celebrate their freedom.

What I thought: “Edge of Panic” is essentially a love triangle. The husband is tempted by a woman who has seemingly every vice on her side: sex, money, andl iquor. His faithful, unfortunate wife has reason to believe he has penetrated the other woman, but retains faith in him. In the end, it’s all revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by a sleazy woman, and the couple can return to matrimonial bliss. What does it matter if the penetration in question is with a hammer to the skull?

In fairness, who could say no to this face?

With that said, the husband Harry here is not very sympathetic. He willingly abandons his wife to score a big contract in what was supposed to be their day together, without even calling her. I know that this is a pre-cell-phone time and it wasn’t that unusual for people to be out of touch all day, but you think he could have at least called her at home. Harry spends most of the rest of the episode in a drunken stupor, which does kind of hamper my ability to care about his wife’s quest to clear his name.

“Edge of Panic” is adapted from a novel by Henry Kane, a pulp crime writer who published dozens of books with titles like Armchair in Hell, A Corpse For Christmas, and Kiss! Kiss! Kill! Kill! (The link between sex and death doesn’t always have to be subtle.) The novel was also published in 1950, so this story was a quick turnaround. The pulp flavour is perfect for Suspense, and the novelistic breadth of the story gives us a larger cast and more complex plot than we’re used to seeing in this series.

However, having a full novel’s worth of material to adapt in half an hour does lead to a rushed and sometimes bewildering episode. I had to watch the final scene a couple times to figure out the scheme, and even then I’m not quite sure I got it right. Alice doesn’t really doanything to prove Jean is guilty, just lays out a theory and she breaks down. It’s also not the first time in these half-hour dramas that we’ve seen a John Avilsden-esque ten-second denouement with people shouting in a big crowd scene.

I’d also like to take a little time to shout out Hank Silvern’s distinctive music. The organ-driven score helps give Suspense its unique feel, complementing the melodramatic and campy nature of the stories. Suspense doesn’t have any “we’re not taking this seriously” winking and mugging, thankfully, so the music helps to let the audience know what to expect. “Edge of Panic” adds some lighter notes to the score, including a positively tropical ditty that plays during Harry’s drunken bender. It’s like when the baseball organist is feeling himself and starts launching into pop songs.This kind of flair helps a fairly ropey murder-mystery go down a lot easier.

Coming up next: Kukla, Fran and Ollie take us to the county fair.

Episode 228: Suspense – “A Pocketful of Murder” (September 5, 1950)

What I watched: A third-season episode of anthology drama series Suspense. “Pocketful of Murder” starred Barry Nelson, Don Hanmer and Cara Williams. It was written by Alvin Sapinsley based on a story by Algernon Blackwood, and directed by series creator Robert Stevens. This episode aired on September 5, 1950 on CBS and can be watched on YouTube.

He’s a hunk of burning love.

What happened: It’s a new season of Suspense, but we’re still brought to you by AutoLite spark plugs and Stay-Full batteries. The actual story opens with a man accused of murdering his wife being followed by a gaggle of reporters. He said that he didn’t do it, because the method is too obvious. Classic defense. One journalist named Wilson (Nelson), a man with a very aggressive haircut, senses that something is going on, and manages to interrogate the murderer, Max (Hammer), one on one.

Max gets mad about what the man is saying about him, and in the process we learn that he’s a druggist suspected of poisoning his wife with arsenic for insurance. He says that he has more subtle ways he could kill someone, like breeding a super-disease and injecting it into someone with a pen. (Have we just cracked the COVID case?) Wilson says he’ll write about what they’ve discussed, which further makes Max angry.

At the verdict, Max is found innocent, and taunts Wilson about it, but the reporter says that he still thinks he’s guilty. Max intimates that he’ll soon be reading a story about Wilson’s death. After the intermission, Wilson sees other reporters gathering around a fire, but decides to go to the bar instead. He gives a friend, some sort of Senator, his coat, only for the man to get pricked with a pen. Wilson remembers what Max said and tries to convince his skeptical friend to go to the hospital.

Later, Wilson has heard that the Senator has come down with the flu. He tells his suspicions to his wife (Wilson), and starts getting paranoid. He gets another call saying that the Senator has passed away. He gets a written warning in the mail, saying that the disease could strike in anyway, but his friends still laugh off his suspicions. Later, his wife comes home with a scratch on her wrist, and he demands she goes to the hospital. As she leaves, Max slips into his apartment.

When Wilson comes back, Max is still there, and holds him at gunpoint. Wilson still shit-talks him, and ends up grabbing his gun. He orders Maxto write a confession, which would definitely be admissible. After a bit further scuffling, he agrees to do it. Whatever, I’m just here for the Auto-Lite cartoon.

What I thought: Suspense has been one of my favourite shows to watch as part of this project, and I’m happy to see it back in the rotation. With that said, I can’t really say that I liked this episode. The whole “I knew he was guilty all along” plot arc ties into the kind of carceral thinking I try to avoid. Moreover, this episode doesn’t really have a twist or a subversion of expectations like so many Suspense episodes do — Max reveals his plan to Wilson early on, and that turns out to be exactly what he does. This makes for a very straightforward, almost hardheaded episode.

The middle part of the episode, where Wilson is desperately trying to convince his colleagues that the illness is serious, was also uncomfortable for different reasons. How many times over the past year have I panicked about someone taking a deadly illness lightly? How many times have we heard “it’s just the flu?” The raw experience of the coronavirus pandemic gave this episode an unexpected and unearned poignancy, with its protagonist the only man able to see the seriousness of the situation.

Still, the more one thinks about it, the more the script falls apart, particularly its climax. With his plan going flawlessly, why would Max confront Wilson at his apartment with a gun? Why not with a syringe? Did we ever really get evidence that he killed his wife? The conclusion basically allows the hero to brute-force his way through an insoluble problem, which could be well-done in the right hands, but here just feels lazy.

Max perpetually looks like he’s about to pass out, which I enjoy.

“A Pocketful of Murder” is not without its charms. Don Hammer is great as the sinister Max, playing him up as a campy mad scientist in a way the script is never able to support. The depiction of the press circus around a murder trial was also an interesting, if under-developed, element. But Suspense has shown that it can be so much more than this, and hopefully it will get back to being that in the season to come.

What else was on?: In the 1950-51 season, Suspense went up against ABC’s Can You Top This, a short-lived television incarnation of the long-running radio show that challenged comedians to one-up jokes submitted by listeners; DuMont’s Cavalcade of Bands, a musical spin-off of Cavalcade of Stars; and fellow anthology drama Armstrong Circle Theatre on NBC. Armstrong was the more popular program over the course of the season, building off the lead-in of Texaco Star Theatre and Fireside Theatre (the two most-watched shows in the country this season), and ended up running for 14 years. But far more episodes of Suspense are available now, so I guess Bob Stevens got the last laugh.

Coming up next: The Lone Ranger concludes its first season, sort of.

Episode 215: Suspense – “Wisteria Cottage” (June 27, 1950)

What I watched: A second- season episode of Suspense, an anthology drama series created by Robert Stevens. “Wisteria Cottage” starred Conrad Janis, Marjorie Gateson, Joan Copeland and Carlotta Sherwood. The episode was directed by series creator Robert Stevens and written by Charles Robinson, based off a novel by Robert M. Coates. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, June 27, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We open with a frightening sight: a book shop closing for the summer. The book store looks a lot like the record store from that earlier episode. Jenny, the owner, catches her cashier Richard (Janis) seeing from the till and calls the cops on him. What a narc. Richard grabs a conveniently-located letter opener and kills her in a bloodless but still kind of frightening way.

Later, we see Richard plying his way with Florence (Gateson), another old lady who he runs into at the pharmacist. He gives her the same line: that he’s a poet and a homeless orphan with no one to support him. This relationship develops quickly, with the woman’s two daughters Lousia (Copeland) and Elinor (Sherwood) soon needling her about how Richard is always coming over for dinner. She also wants to go into the country for summer, and Richard has “found” the perfect place, the titular Wisteria Cottage.

We’re just 7 minutes into the episode, and they’re already on vacation together. Richard quickly gets jealous of Ned, the suitor of Louisa, and Jeff, who brings the family clams. Well, that does seem very symbolic. Eleanor finds Richard brooding over a book from Jenny’s and starts making out with him. He gets upset when she won’t marry him. What a peach. While everyone else goes to the beach shore, Richard trashes the house and the dramatic organ music kicks in again.

Later, he’s doing something even more frightening: playing acoustic guitar. He gets in a fight with Ned, and Florence decides this is the last straw and throws him out. She also threatens to call the police. What a bunch of narcs. Richard stares at his knife to lead into the interstitial Auto-Lite ad. After an extensive and very technical description of why Auto-Lite Spark Plugs are superior, we return to the cottage after Richard has allegedly left. But Eleanor isn’t so sure.

Our innocent heroine lights up a cig.

Wandering around, Eleanor finds a poem written to her by Richard and freaks out. She calls Louisa, who has apparently gone back to the city with Ned, and gets her to agree to come back. When Mom decides to finally call the cops, she fines the phone lines dead. Richard shows up to interrogate the older woman, accusing her of persecuting him. She tries to calm him down, but Jack the clam guy comes in and he freaks out.

Meanwhile, Louisa and Ned have been delayed by a spare tire. Richard continues to rant and ramble, calling the women weak and soft. He goes Shakesperean, talking about ending the heartache of life, and pulls a knife on Eleanor. Just then Jack shows up, armed with a golf club, and Richard seemingly trips (?) and stabs himself while trying to go after him. Well, all’s well that ends well! Rex Marshall signs off for the season, before telling us to tune back in after 8 weeks.

What I thought: The term “serial killer” was not in wide use in 1950 — the high-profile cases that would popularize the concept were still a few decades off. The villain in “Wisteria Cottage”, the seemingly clean-cut boy named Richard, may not technically fit the moniker. We only see him kill once, although it can be inferred that Jenny was not his first parasitic relationship with an older woman. And yet the script is very close to the modern conception of the serial killer, as embodied in countless TV shows and movies.

Like so many other killers, fictive and real, Richard ‘s rage stems from his fixation on women and desire to control them. Even though he is in a relationship with Eleanor, he wants to possess and control all three women in the family, becoming immediately paranoid around other male interest. He preys on his victims’ sentimentality, adopting the pose of a sympathetic orphan straight out of a Dickens novel. We even see the grandiloquent taunting that would later be associated with serial killers in Richard’s love poetry and destruction of the household.

The battle of the generations.

It is precisely his apparent normalcy that makes him such a threat. Conrad Janis, who we’ve seen before playing an innocent everyman, does a great job of turning that generic charm to sinister ends. This is, it could be said, the horror that lurks beneath the bright demeanor of your typical Suspense protagonist. Interestingly, the script sets up the equally clean-cut Ned to be his foil, and I was fully expecting him to sweep in at the last minute and save the day. But Ned doesn’t arrive in time. Instead, the hero is the older Jack, distinctly not from central casting.

For most of its runtime, “Wisteria Cottage” is a quite good little thriller, Hitchockian in both its use of tension and its sexual fascination with maternal women. We know from the beginning that Richard is a threat, but the women he’s staying with don’t, creating escalating dramatic tension as we wonder when he’ll finally grab a knife again. Unfortunately, things get a little muddled again in the confusingly shot, anticlimactic ending. It’s a nice capsule of both the strengths and weaknesses of Suspense‘s more grounded second season: an intriguing grasp of psychology, but so often coming apart in the final minutes.

The above is probably what I would write in normal times, perhaps with a little more information on the source material or the performers involved. But I am writing these in distinctly abnormal times, roughly a month into the coronavirus–induced shutdown of much of Western society (I say “Western” only because it started earlier in the East.) This naturally affects how I view everything.

Watching this episode, even as the tension kept mounting, I kept feeling a strange sense of nostalgia and envy. The ordinary backdrop, the stuff of life that the episode takes for granted, now seems so poignant to me: cozy little bookstores, a family going down to the lake for vacation, dropping in on your neighbours. The story of “Wisteria Cottage” is all about the dangers of social relationships, about letting the wrong people into your trusted circle. But as I watched it, all I could think about was the dangers of not having those relationships at all.

Coming up next: Kukla, Fran and Ollie should be better at alleviating my loneliness

Episode 212: Suspense – “I’m No Hero” (June 20, 1950)

What I watched: A second- season episode of Suspense, an anthology drama series created by Robert Stevens. “I’m No Hero” starred Hume Cronyn, Cara Williams and Mark Roberts. It was directed by Stevens and written by Charles Robinson. This episode aired on CBS at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, June 20, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: A young doctor named Joe wakes up during a thunderstorm. His room is fully lit, which may be the issue. His wife Ellen tells him that he needs to be at the hospital early to see to patients, and he sits down on her single bed, which is indecent. He had a disturbing dream about a home invader. Their daughter Cathy also had a bad dream. Ellen tells her to “dream about the Sandman”, although it’s not clear whether she’s talking about the supervillain, the alternative comic book, or the wrestler.

Just as Joe’s settling down to sleep, the doorbell buzzes. The man at the door is Sig (Cronyn), a full head or two shorter, says there’s an emergency — and pulls a gun on him. Our doc says he’ll co-operate, uttering the title line. A flashy dame (Williams, identified in the credits only as “Babe”) then pulls in an injured man. He obviously has a gut wound, and Sig insists that Joe operate right in his home. Ellen comes down, and it turns out that she’s a nurse, and gets pulled into the impromptu surgery.

“I’m sorry. He has an acute case of chest hair.”

It turns out that the injured man is Sig’s little brother. The woman blames him for the brother turning to a life of crime. Just to add to the moral stakes a little, Cathy comes down. Sig declares that he’s going to “look after her” while Joe treats his brother Vince. Fortunately, they have an examining room in their house, which provides a place to do the surgery.

The presumably gory surgery takes place during the break. Joe and Ellen both re-iterate that the surgery has a 1 in 100 chance of succeeding. Sig admits that he’s having fun holding hostages, and Joe responds by calling him short. He says that he’s the brain to Vince’s muscle. Sig starts getting impatient, and wants to leave with Vince now. Joe explains the concept of a hemorrhage to him, but Sig just thinks he’s trying to pull a fast one.

The doorbell rings again. Busy night. It turns out to be the friendly neighbourhood policeman Grady. He inadvertently fills Joe in on the crime: a hold-up in which a night watchmen was killed. Sig acts suspicious as hell, then kills the cop when he turns around.

Around this time Vince dies on the operating table, marking perhaps the first time in television that a 1-in-100 shot doesn’t happen. Babe sees and starts freaking out, blaming Joe. Sig goes to check on him. He decides to leave with Cathy so that the couple won’t call. Joe reacts by throwing the corpse at him. Babe shoots Sig and leaves. Our family, all alive but traumatized, huddle together as they call the police. A happy ending? Conrad Janis gives us a brief preview of next week’s episode, “Wisteria Cottage.”

What I thought: Perhaps one of the most central fears of crime TV is that the world of crime might unexpectedly swallow middle-class professionals, the medium’s main audience. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad both sold themselves on this dynamic from different directions. More common, however, is stories like “I’m No Hero”, where the professional is the hapless victim of the criminal underworld.

The title doesn’t lie: while Joe has his moments of resistance, he ultimately goes along with what Sig wants. If there is a hero in this story, it’s “Babe”, who spends the whole episode gradually working up her courage and eventually strikes back against the man who’s caused her so much grief. Indeed, about halfway through the doctor and his family fade to the background and the drama becomes one of moral accusation and defense between Sig and Babe.

Stevens again uses shadow effectively to create mood.

The episode’s saving grace is that this conflict is actually well-drawn. A large part of the credit goes to Hume Cronyn, who Suspense deservedly gives top billing. Cronyn, who previously appeared in “Dr. Violet”, manages to menace here despite his short stature. He had appeared in some of Hitchcock’s early movies, and brings that kind of suspicious mania to this performance.

Robinson’s script helps too, developing Sig as an actual three-dimensional character with internal psychology. “I’m No Hero” is almost at pains to detail how Sig’s inferiority complex drives his psychopathic aggression, and how tortured his relationship with his dying brother must have been. The result is an episode where the nominal protagonists seem like stock characters, even with an endangered child hanging over proceedings, while the villains come from a rich and detailed world.

The end result is an odd but enjoyable half-hour of television. There’s a strange realism to it: the hero isn’t able to pull off the medical miracle, and ultimately isn’t even much of a hero. It’s far from gritty realism — the world of crime still seems somewhat costume-driven — but even the pat ending can’t dispel the atmosphere of quiet despair and failure.

Coming up next: Our wrestling journey introduces us to a man synonymous with technical greatness.

Episode 211: Studio One – “There Was A Crooked Man” (June 19, 1950)

What I watched: A second-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Robert Sterling, Charles Korvin, Virginia Gilmore, Richard Purdy and Marion Scanlon. It was directed by Paul Nickell and written by Charles Monroe based off a story by Kelly Roos. “There Was A Crooked Man” aired on June 19, 1950 at 9 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: The episode opens with a kid playing, wearing a stupid hat, and generally being annoying. He tells a nearby woman, who will turn out to be our heroine Haila (Gilmore) that his long-gone father has returned. His mother Lucia runs a boarding house, and is renting to Mr. Collins (Korvin), who kicks a cat on the way in, so you know he’s a nice guy. It turns out that all the women in the neighbourhood are seemingly waiting for their husband to come home, including the two women also rooming in the house, Haila and her friend Kay (Scanlon).

Otis is introduced with a loving close-up of him eating cheese.

We meet yet another lodger, a cheery bedridden crackpot eating cheese. His name is Otis, of course. Haila asks him about Collins, who he’s friends of sorts with. Her friend Kay is afraid of Collins. There’s also another daffy professor named Simons (Purdy), who’s working on a twelve-volume complete history of education. These guys are my goals. Later on, Collins catches Haila in a state of undress, by which I mean she’s basically wearing a vest. The landlord, of course, blames her for entertaining men in her room. She goes to check on Otis, but finds him dead, with a knife in his heart. Kay is hiding behind the mirror, but protests her innocence. She tells Haila to hold off on calling the police, which is definitely non-suspicious behaviour.

Lucia’s husband Gerard finally comes home, and in turns out that he’s the one who’s stolen everyone’s clothes. Kayla’s husband Jeff (Sterling) returns, just as the body is discovered. When we get back from the break, they’re making out, so I guess it was a big turn-on. A gravelly-voiced detective, Captain Henry, has arrived, and points out that no one has a witness as to where they were.

Suspicions start flying, and settle on the new arrival, then Professor Simons. Academics are known to kill their own. There’s a long sequence where everyone stares at each other, with the cameras moving around following everyone’s gaze. The detective holds everyone as “material witnesses”, forbidding them from leaving the house, which totally sounds legal.

In the privacy of her room, Haila tells her husband that she’s sure it’s Collins. Kay says that she was in Otis’s room looking for a rare letter she gave him. She says that Otis was blackmailing her over it. Simons fears that the killer is trying to frame him. Kayla and her husband interrogate him. They leave, but then he gets a VOICE-OVER saying “Now then Mr. Collins, what’s your next move.” Wild stuff.

They move on to Gerard, who swears he was at his “club” at the time of the murder. The couple still seems to find this all very sexy, kissing on Gerard’s bed. Haila then finds a business card for Samuel Dunbar on the floor, the same thing she found next to Block’s body. The husband leaves to see Dunbar, and tells his wife that she doesn’t have to worry about being murdered. Well, that’s nice.

Haila then overhears Collins talking to Kay, and wanders out onto the fire escape to listen to them. She’s quickly discovered. It turns out that the two of them are married, which explains why Kay was so afraid of him. Cat-kicking really turns her on. Later, we see Simons putting on a hat as ominous music plays. He unscrews a light bulb and slips out. Things are getting WILD. Kayla hears someone coming into her room, and thinks it’s her husband, but it’s actually a guy who looks like Simons. She screams and says that the murderer came back. There’s something spooky on the stairs, but it’s just the kid in a mask, and things have suddenly gotten very Goosebumps.

After another ad break, dawn of the next day has arrived, and Jeff has finally gotten back from what is presumably an all-night bender. He tells Kayla what he’s learned from Dunbar: that Block had a racket hitting up Ivy League alumni for phony donations. Tom also encourages the Professor of being in on the racket, and he reluctantly admits to it — but not to the murder. When he hears about the letter, the Prof thinks that it was actually Kay and Collins who killed Block over the letter.

The cops are still interrogating Gerard, revealing that he hasn’t actually been away for the past six years — he’s just been at another apartment in Manhattan. The key turns out to be the chalk drawing that young Walter made on the Prof’s jacket. It turns out that he’s been replaced by a clean-jacketed impostor.

It’s nice that she doesn’t have to be rescued, I guess.

Of course, our heroine is in immediate danger, having gone down to the library and gotten into an elevator with the murderer. She jars some kind of tape recorder while she’s in there, revealing his identity. He briefly tries strangling her, but in the end he’s just an old man and she overpowers him. She reunites with her husband, and the cop goes to arrest the fake Simons. And with that, it’s more cheery couplehood. The ad for next week promises something called “My Granny Van”, which sounds grody.

What I thought: “There Was A Crooked Man”, apparently named after a now-out-of-favour nursery rhyme, is a relatively routine murder mystery in a mildly interesting setting. The story swaps the upper-class manors of much mystery fiction for a boarding house full of young women and local eccentrics. It seems more like an hour-long episode of Suspense than what Studio One had been up to, but hey, it’s June and they have to fill the schedule any way they can.

The characters are well-drawn, but the script is a little too over-encumbered for a one-hour drama, packed with too many twists and red herrings. (I probably screwed up the plot description somewhere along the way, although that could be because I was watching on headphones in a Starbucks.) Some aspects of the plot, like the two amateur academics’ not-particularly-nefarious shakedown, could definitely be better developed.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is its heroes, the couple of Jeff and Haila. At the beginning of the story, all of the women are waiting for their husbands to return — from the war, presumably, although this is never stated. They are independent and even industrious on their own, but their lives are in a kind of stasis, stuck in a waiting period before the next phase (marriage, children, a home in the suburbs) can begin.

There’s a long history of married couples as sleuths, with the most famous and influential being Dashiell Hammett’s Nick & Nora. “Crooked Man” goes further than most in linking the grisly violence of the murder with the erotics of the couple: the two are constantly making out, even as death and danger surround them. Freud’s two drives, eros and thanatos, are often linked in the crime genre. Here, as there’s nothing very erotic about the crimes, it’s the protagonists — particularly the occasionally-unclothed Kayla — who have to bear the burden of seducing the audience.

Nickell uses extreme close-up to build the viewer’s suspicion.

If the couple form is sanctified, then the alternative has to be vilified, and it is. Unmarried, introverted men — social outsiders — are under suspicion in this story, and for the most part this suspicion turns out to be justified. Otis and the Professor are undesirable men who have chosen to place their meaning in learning instead of romance, and they are ultimately revealed to be frauds and criminals. Collins, who initially appears cruel and violent, has his innocence confirmed at about the same time the audience learns he is actually married. Those who remain permanently outside heteronormative bonds are a threat to them.

The crime genre is often read as merely reactionary, restoring social norms at the conclusion of every case. At the same time, these stories are often able to represent the socially abject in a way that other genres aren’t. So, as an intellectually pretentious man who lives in a cheap apartment and has little hopes of attaining heteronormative success, I felt a kind of connection with Otis and the Professor. When they were ultimately shown to be villains, that pang of connection became a little more painful, but didn’t go away.

Coming up next: Suspense protests that it’s no hero, but meets the challenge of Studio One head on.