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.

Episode 192.5: Studio One – “The Scarlet Letter” (April 3, 1950)

What I watched: A second-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Mary Sinclair, John Baragrey and Richard Purdy. It was directed by Franlkin J. Schaeffner and written by Joseph Liss based off the novel by Nathaniel Hawhtorne. “The Scarlet Letter” aired on April 3, 1950 at 10 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We open with a visit from Worthington Miner himself, who is here to mark the special occasion. This episode is part of the Hawthorne Centennial celebrations marking 100 years since the publication of The Scarlet Letter. The scholar presents a plaque to Hawhtorne’s elderly granddaughter Hildegaard Hawthorne, who wonders what her famous ancestor would have made of “this barbarous thing” Miner is doing with his most famous work. It doesn’t really seem like a gag.

We open in Boston 300 years ago, with Hester Prynne (Sinclair) making her way through a crowd carrying a baby. They’re not very fond of her. She’s already wearing the eponymous letter A, which people think she made too fancy. Hester is placed in the stocks. The Minister and Governor come through as an old hag demands that Hester and the man she had a baby with be hanged. She’d probably be a Trump voter today. Minister Arthur Dimmesdale (Baragrey) is asked to make her repent, and seems pretty reluctant about it. Hmm. He asks Hester to reveal her lover, but she stays mum.

It tastes awful, but it works.

Two men are discussing the case, talking about how good it is that iniquity is punished in New England. Well, not on the football field. One man, a foreigner, wants to talk to her directly. Hester was married to a doctor from Amsterdam who has been two years lost at sea, hence the sin of bearing a baby. But whoops, the foreigner is actually said Dutch doctor. He gives the baby some medicine, which Hester is suspicious of. They have a big blow-out argument about how she never loved him. He tells her to promise not to tell anyone they were married, to avoid him looking like a cuck, and infiltrates the colony as Roger Chillingworth (Purdy).

Time passes, and the child is now a precocious young girl named Pearl, who is being interrogated by a town elder. He is aghast to discover that Hester has been embroidering clothes for the Governor, and that the daughter doesn’t go to school and doesn’t know of her mother’s shame. In the town square, one woman is willing to forgive Hester, but the rest shout her down. The Governor thinks Pearl is beautiful, which is just a bit creepy. He calls Hester and Pearl in and not-so-subtly suggests that she give up her child to the town to raise. The elder quizzes Pearl to see if she has appropriate teaching. Things go badly when Pearl says that she was not born but plucked from a bush of roses. Well, that’s true with sufficient euphemisms. Arthur interferes, agreeing that “God gave her the child.” Roger again swears to figure out who the real father is.

Things take an abrupt turn into an internal monologue, as Arthur reflects on the guilt and torment he feels, although he’s still vague about it. Come on Worthington, you’re not going to pull a plot twist. Roger is doing some alchemy stuff with beakers and chemicals. He discusses the nature of confession and guilt with Dimmesdale. Chillingworth gives him a draught of “medicine” to drink, and he promptly passes out, allowing Roger to search his person. When he wakes up, Arthur is struck by the nearness of death and the hypocrisy of his sermon, and begs for forgiveness at the stocks. Fortunately, it’s a rainy night, so nobody hears him.

When he gets done writhing in guilt, Arthur learns that the Governor has died, with Roger at his side. Hester and Pearl come across him, and he acts super-weird, holding their hands to their chest. Chillingworth looks on, which really freaks Dimmesdale out. Roger visits Hester, telling her that he’s received the magistrate’s permission for her to remove the letter. She’s not interested, instead castigating him for hounding Arthur and becoming a “fiend”, and promising to tell Arthur that Roger is her husband.

After the break, Arthur receives a letter from Hester. (Ah, that must be the letter in the title.) He reads it and promptly burns it. Later, Hester meets Arthur in the woods, and he once again collapses from guilt. She tells him Roger is her husband, and Arthur pleads for God to forgive them, but says that Roger is a worse sinner than him for violating the human heart. Sorry, that’s not how Puritanism goes. Hester pleads for him to leave town, but Arthur says that he is dying. Hester hugs him but calls him “Roger”, which I’m pretty sure is one of those live-TV flubs.

Later, Hester takes Pearl to a holiday, where everyone is waiting for a procession to board. Hester has booked passage for Arthur on a ship, but Roger has volunteered to come with him. Arthur gets up in front of the town and admits that he is Pearl’s father. He pulls open his shirt to reveal the letter “A” carved out in wounds on his chest, and collapses. And that’s the plot of The Scarlet Letter, all right.

What I thought: The Scarlet Letter was one of the first significant American novels, and has had pride of place in the American literary canon and high-school reading lists for at least a century. Despite this, it feels as though there’s no definitive on-screen version of the story. Wikipedia lists a dozen film versions, including one adapted by Wim Wenders and another starring Demi Moore, but all seem to have instantly faded into obscurity. Probably the best-remembered is the 2010 teen comedy Easy A, a loose adaptation at best. The Studio One rendition of the story is not that definitive version, although it is an interesting curiosity.

Unlike many other of the novel adaptations on Studio One, “The Scarlet Letter” gets almost all of the novel’s story in without seeming crammed or confusing. Outside of some clumsy exposition in the early scenes, the story more or less works as a one-hour teleplay. It was always a slim novel, and one more focused on introspection than plot. It does leave out the very end of the novel, where Hester dies in the wilderness and is buried in a pauper’s grave, but perhaps that was too depressing even for Worthington Miner.

One issue is the big letter A itself, which makes Hester look like an off-brand superhero and the blocking seems to be hiding as much as possible.

Mary Sinclair is first-billed for playing Hester Prynne, but she sometimes feels like a secondary character in Liss’s adaptation, which foregrounds Dimmesdale as a kind of tortured, Byronic hero. John Baragrey definitely has a kind of steely charisma which makes this interpretation work, but he seems altogether too masculine and fit to play Arthur, who comes across as fairly pathetic in Hawthorne’s original text. Richard Purdy as Chillworth and the uncredited young actress playing Pearl are easily the stand-outs of the cast.

Today, The Scarlet Letter is taught in large part as an account of just how oppressive and brutal Puritan society can be. Certainly American society in 1950 was far from the Puritans, and often more rough around the edges than the media would suggest. But there were probably still plenty of people in that time who would shun a woman who had a child as a result of adultery, as there are today. The Studio One version avoids the still-existent strains of moralism by making the story primarily about Arthur’s guilt, and how it destroys him.

“The Scarlet Letter” was clearly a prestige project for Studio One, with Miner himself making an appearance and connecting the story to the novel’s centenary celebrations. Schaffner does his best to add a sense of drama to the small set. But I’m not sure anyone who was skeptical of television’s ability to create great art would be persuaded by this competent but somewhat dry run-through of a century-old classic. Ultimately, The Scarlet Letter may just be too introspective a novel to make a great film or television program. But I have a feeling that people are going to keep trying anyway.

Coming up next: Suspense offers us 1000-to-1 odds. Never tell me the odds!

Episode 125: Studio One – Henry IV (December 5, 1949)

What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based off a play by Luigi Pirandelli and adapted by Maurice Valency. The Studio One adaptation stars Richard Purdy, Catherine Willard, Berry Kroeger, and Virginia McMahon. It was directed by Paul Nickell. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, December 5, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.

The shakily-shot castle, according to an Internet Archive commenter, is
the Cloisters at Ft. Tryon Park  

What happened: We open on a medieval castle, complete with porticullis and courtiers. One of the courtiers,a newcomer, is introduced to the other servants — but they all speak in American accents, and smoke cigarettes. It quickly emerges that all these men are playing the role of courtiers to Herny IV, the eleventh-century emperor of Germany. Their employer is a wealth Italian aristocrat who has gone mad and believes himself to be the medeival king. The new guy, foolishly, has spent the whole week researching the sixteenth-century Henry IV of France.

The “king’s” nephew Carlo comes in with a doctor, in his best Freudian get-up. The doc believes that the man’s delusion can be cured by shock therapy, counteracting the “shock” of a car accident which began the delusion. We learn through some exposition that Henry views the image of his wife as two women: his long-lost wife and the bride of his mortal enemy. We are then introduced to the real woman, his ex-wife Matilda (Willard). She and her new husband Tito (Kroeger) are skeptical of the treatment, while her daughter Frida (McMahon) doesn’t want to come at all. This is because she’s an ex-flame of Carlo, who doesn’t like her new aristocratic fiance. Such are the days of our lives.

Everyone gets into costume, and Matilda notes that the painting of her looks more like Frida these days. She describes the accident that caused his illness: being thrown from a horse during a re-enactment. In his psyche, she’s not his wife, but his mother-in-law. We finally get to meet the “Emperor”, a scenery-chewing Richard Purdy. (We never learn his real name, but I’ll call him Henry for the sake of convenience.) He ignores Tito’s costume and accuses him of being his enemy Peter of Gallione. He comforts Matilda over the supposed loss of her child, and imagines that he is still 26 years old. This is part of a long monologue about memory and identity. After threatening to disrobe in a moment of madness, he asks the “Contessa” to withdraw the “excommunication” that separates him from the rest of society.

Between the acts, a woman instructs the men in the audience how they can get a “thank-you kiss” by getting their wife a toaster or waffle iron for Christmas. Back in the play, Matilda interprets his monologue as a love letter to her. The doctor says that Henry is at least able to distinguish “between his make-believe and ours”, but that his fantasy is no longer holding together and he is beginning to see elements of reality. The shock, then, will be a mental one: seeing Frida to impersonate his young wife. Medicine!

Outside, Carlo confronts Frida, who says that she sees her mother’s indifference to love as her future. She intends to marry the Duke as a way to compensate for him paying off her family’s debts, but fears the actual love of Carlo more than a sham marriage In the king’s candle-lit hall, the “Contessa” makes her goodbyes. After she leaves, he curses her for parading her new lover in front of him, suggesting that he has an inkling of her true identity. But he forces his servants to grovel, so he’s still kinda nuts.

Henry says that he’s not mad, but uses the guise of the king to tell people what they truly are, and to resist the passage of time and age. He then berates the servants for not truly buying into his historical recreation. Henry then brings in an old man in the guise of the friar to take dictation of his memoirs — the memoirs, of course, of the historical German king.

As the third act begins, the doctor and the “sane” adults are still launching their plan, with Frida and Carlo forced into a live-action tableau of the diptych that Henry has kept in his castle. When Frida calls to him, he freaks out and collapses. The doctor thinks he’s cured, but Matilda realizes that he was already sane. Henry says that he was mad for the first ten years, but suddenly came back to his sanity and decided to keep up the illusion after being horrified by how much he had aged. He berates Matilda again for her infidelity. After everyone else leaves, she says she understands, but he denies her even that and stumbles to his throne. The final shot is of the phony king once again donning his crown and proclaiming that “We shall act it out to the end.”

What I thought: Like “Of Human Bondage” before it, “Henry IV” is another example of Studio One‘s bid for prestige. I mean, it has the same title as two Shakespeare plays! The drama in question here, however, is not from the Bard but rather a 1920s Italian psychodrama. Nevertheless, there is a Shakespearean feel to the whole production, complete with long monologues from supposedly mad people about the nature of existence. By transporting its action to the present day, Pirandelli recognizes that such drama is antiquated and nostalgic — how can we still use the trope of the mad king in the age of psychiatry?

The calling card of live TV drama: a boom mic dropping down into the frame.

The answer, apparently, is by shackling it to a 50s-Freudian conception of trauma. Here, the beginning and end of Henry’s trauma is a clear-cut response to external stimuli, and the nature of his self-delusion is similarly prosaic. Given this, the doctor’s attempt to cure him with a quick surprise almost makes sense. It’s only a little more sophisticated than giving a cartoon character a second bonk on the head to make them normal.

But ultimately I suspect Henry’s trauma has nothing to do with falling off a horse. Rather, his suffering is that physical assault we all suffer from: getting old. More than being a German Emperor, his fantasy is of being young again. In this case, the passage of age is linked to Oedipal (or Electral) theme. Henry’s juxtaposition of daughter-figure Frida with his wife is designed precisely to maintain the image of himself as a young man. Perhaps this is the temptation of patriarchal incest — the wife is resigned to the role of mother-in-law, with the youthful image of the feminine preserved forever. Ultimately, however, his problem is insoluble because aging is insoluble.

In Pirandelli’s script, or at least the Studio One version of it, Henry’s problems get a kind of resolution by recourse to misogyny. The problems of age and decay can be projected onto his no-longer beautiful wife. Henry, it turns out, just “wanted to be free” of her nagging and infidelity. This is a frustrating trend with Studio One — just about every episode we’ve looked at so far has featured a shrewish and impulsive woman who is ultimately the source of the protagonist’s problems (although in some of the scripts she receives at least a little redemption.) Even “Flowers from a Stranger”, which I thought was quasi-feminist, had that crazy lady. I’m not sure if this was a fixation of Worthington Miner or just a sadly representative survey of mid-century highbrow fiction.

As an hour of television, “Henry IV” offers some good performances, and a lot of strangeness. Nevertheless, condensing a two-act play down to one hour has its difficulties, and as a result the plot is sometimes hard to follow and the characters’ relationships obscure. The TV version appears to have worsened this problem by adding the character of Carlo, I suppose because we need a conventional romantic lead to balance out all the weird psychodrama. Nevertheless, the episode certainly gave me a lot to think about, and made me really want to see a full version of the play. After watching so many shows that try to stretch out a thin script, it’s nice to watch one that has to cram everything in.

Coming up next: After a brief holiday break, we’ll get back to the workaday world with The Life of Riley.

Episode 110: Studio One – “Two Sharp Knives” (November 14, 1949)

What I watched: The tenth episode of the second season of the anthology drama series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. “Two Sharp Knives” starred Stanley Ridges, Wynne Gibson, Theodore Newton, Peggy French (previously seen as a femme fatale in “Help Wanted”), Richard Purdy and Hildy Parks with a young Abe Vigoda among the supporting players. It was directed by Frank Schaffner, with the script adapted by Carl Bixby from a Dashiell Hammet story. This episode aired on CBS at 10:00 PM on Monday, November 14, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.

What happened: We start on a train, with the passengers including an old-timer coming back from his late-shift job (Vigoda) and a father and daughter visiting their mother. We learn that this is the first time little Mary will be seeing her mother in ten years. She talks to an overly-friendly woman, Doris (Parks) who happens to be stopping at Deerwood, the same town as them. The girl’s father, Lester Firman (Purdy), wonders to the same Doris about his wife having potential criminal behaviour, and asks her not to mention their meeting to anyone.

Meanwhile, in said small town’s police station, the chief is playing poker with some other eminent citizens. Apparently the DA is mad that Chief Anderson (Ridges) wants his son-in-law Wally (Newton) to succeed him. A new wanted poster has been put up, displaying the photo of Lester Firman. SUSP– wait, wrong show. It turns out that Doris is Anderson’s daughter, and Wally’s fiancee. Small town. Anderson immediately recognizes Firman, and tells him that he’s wanted for murder. Firman gives a very theatrical denial of this.

This is the closest you could get to showing a dead body in 1949.

They go to the hotel to check on his story about meeting his wife, while Miss Anderson puts Mariam up for the night. This check does not help Firman. At the station, he continues to deny even knowing the murdered man. He also says that the picture on the poster has been altered from an old picture of his wife. The suspect tells the story of how he met his wife when she was a waitress at a cafe in Philadelphia. She wanted his money, but he was now disinterested in material things. Oh, well isn’t that convenient, Mr. Sensitive Bougie Man. They all have to wait for the morning where the Philly police will get there. Sometime during the night, with Anderson at home in bed, Firman hangs himself, the dramatic image of his shadow leading us to the first act break (shilling Westinghouse laundry machines.)

The DA immediately accuses the police of negligence for allowing Firman to commit suicide. The coroner gets up on his high horse about DA Carroll playing politics. Anderson gets their and immediately gets on the phone with the Philadelphia police, who now say that no murder took place and the wanted poster naming Firman was a forgery. They send for Doris to bring Mariam so that they can question her. George, the Irish-stereotype policeman admits that he had a drink and fell asleep while on duty. The coroner relays a detail that he left out of his report: that Firman died from a blow to the back of the head, not from the hanging.

In the hotel room, an older blonde woman identified on IMDb as “Hotcha” (Gibson) is cackling over the execution of her evil plan, while an old man starts “making conversation” about neuroses and psychoses. Another woman, apparently Firman’s ex-wife Ethel (French), comes in and lets us all know that she was in on the plan. She’s nervous, and the bad guys helpfully reassure her. At the police station, Mariam is having a poorly-acted fit about the death of her father. Anderson gives Ethel the news, and he’s immediately suspicious of her story and her failure to meet his eyes. He brings Mariam in, and the two have a tearful reunion while the girl demands to know why her mother wasn’t there last night.

Seeing the kid apparently triggers Ethel’s maternal morality, and she immediately admits that she missed the train on purpose, and that the killer was a man named “Bill”, whose identity she won’t reveal. After another Westinghouse commercial, our evil couple worry about how long Ethel and “Bill” have been incommunicado. Bill comes in, and is revealed to be the prodigal son-in-law Wally. He decides that their only option is to kill Anderson.

Back in the station, we get an outline of the plan, with Anderson drawing the titular two knives on a piece of paper for no apparent reason. Apparently the scheme was to kill Firman so that Ethel could re-marry and would inherit $500, 000 from his will. Wally/Bill enters and heads over to the hotel with the chief, with the intent of killing him once he gets there. But Ethel gets to the hotel first, telling the two masterminds that she didn’t tell the cops anything and they had nothing on her. The crooks don’t buy this. Hotcha is holding a gun to her when Bill and Anderson come in.

Anderson is disarmed, but it turns out that he knew about Wally’s secret identity this whole time. On the outside, George and another cop are ready to barge in and arrest everyone. It turns out that small-town cop Wally was his original identity, but he thought their administration was politically finished and he got mixed up in a “policy gang.” It just goes to show: never discuss policy. And buy Westinghouse.

What I thought: It’s been a while since we checked in on Studio One, which was sort of a big-brother program to my beloved Suspense. As an hour-long series Studio One carried with it more prestige and seriousness than the half-hour, genre-based program, even if its stories didn’t really stand up to scrutiny much better. But if it the murder-mystery in “Two Sharp Knives” isn’t really more credible than that in, say, “Suspicion”, the sixty-minute running time at least allows for a more expansive universe than the skeletal scripts of Suspense or The Lone Ranger. A moment such as Anderson playing poker with other high-ranking members of the town, for instance, is narrative fat but perfectly creates an atmosphere of small-town chummines that can easily shade into corruption.

Later, a window cord hangs in the foreground in imitation of the noose.

“Two Sharp Knives” boasts of being an adaptation of a story by Dashiell Hammett, a crime writer with a great deal of clout in the 1930s and 40s. Today, Hammett is best remembered as one of the pioneers of hard-boiled crime fiction, along with Raymond Chandler. To be honest, I’ve often struggled to get into this genre (like its filmic companion noir), whose stylistic terseness is often at odds with its elaborate and convoluted plots. That can be seen in this narrative, whose storyline is replete with red herrings like the DA’s journalistic crusade and genuine conspiracies. Then again, “Two Sharp Knives” is one of Hammett’s most minor and obscure works, so maybe we should just look at this as another instance of early television desperately trying to claim the prestige of the literary.

Curiously, Studio One‘s adaptation of this Hammett story is directed not as noir but as a kind of Capra-esque small town drama. In this way, it resembles the previous Studio One episode we looked at, “June Moon.” Everything is very brightly lit,  and the friendly opening five minutes are the most convincing part of the hour. Crime and murder poke their heads in, but the gang of criminals hanging out in their hotel room like kids on vacation always seem like they’ve arrived from another planet. Indeed, it’s a flagrantly sentimental device — a mother’s immediate and instinctual love for her child — that leads to the successful resolution.

The result is a fairly odd hour of television, falling short for reasons that are hard to immediately recognize. It would be possible to alter this story just slightly and come out with a trenchant critique of the American system of punishment — after all, it is the bluntness and self-confidence of the police system which our criminals manipulate.  But ultimately I think that Miner’s instincts are too genial to really create a cutting noir.

Coming up next: Gleason returns to the domestic sphere in The Life of Riley for a birthday celebration.