Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E19, "The Derelicts"

This is an episode about annoying, awful people doing annoying, awful things. Think of it as an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: “The Gang Blackmails a Murderer.”

An “asshole plot” often lives or dies by its comedy, but “The Derelicts,” unlike past diversions like “Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid,” doesn’t try to wear its crime plot lightly. The story itself is front-and-center here; it’s just populated with obnoxious hams.

That description gives away my feelings about the characters here, but I’ll admit that while I was revisiting this episode, for the duration of the episode, the situation compelled me. Now that the credits have rolled, however, the seams are all too visible.

In a way, then, that makes “The Derelicts” a testament to the value of a good situation. A situation, to my mind, is distinct from a hook: the hook grabs the attention, but the situation is what has to sustain it. It’s the “sit” in “sitcom,” not only the basic conceit but the spatial or sociological or logistical trap the characters are in. Audiences get hooked; characters get—and often stay—situated.

I could imagine another screenwriter eking two or three seasons of broad but serviceable comedy out of this episode’s plot. All it would need is a catchy Gilligan’s Island-style intro explaining that Ralph (Philip Reed), desperate for money, murdered his silent partner only to get stuck with two live-in blackmailers. Tune in each week to see what difficult fix the fulsome Goodfellow (Robert Newton) and scrappy Fenton (Johnny Silver) will get him into this time! When will the materialistic Herta (Peggy Knudsen), perpetually raging at her weak husband’s “relatives” eating and pawning them out of house and home, realize the truth?  How will Ralph keep this wacky household afloat until the next episode? Will he ever find their leverage and free himself?

As an engine to power diverting scenes, it’s not half-bad, and “The Derelicts” does eventually get some good material out of it. First, though, I have to complain about the episode wasting the great Cyril Delevanti, who had one of the best faces ever for beautiful melancholy¹. In another episode, casting him as Sloane, the silent partner in Ralph’s business who chooses the wrong time to ask for his seed money back, could be an attempt to make the audience truly care about this murder. But although Delevanti does his best with the scant material he’s given, this is not a story that ever goes for any emotion beyond an embarrassed cringe. In this milieu, Delevanti’s inherent soulfulness stands out, but the episode declines to go anywhere with it.

Besides, everything about Sloane is determined, and sometimes too obviously so, by the needs of the plot. His “eccentricities” of creating a secret business contract that’s solely a personally held IOU and meeting his partner in a park at night are the eccentricities of a designated murder victim, plain and simple.

The other characters have a little more breathing room, but with the exception of our middling, lukewarm killer, they’re all a little garish. Herta is defined by her selfishness and her greed. Fenton is defined by his amiable scrouging. Goodfellow is probably the most complicated: Robert Guy Newton, who could do excess so well, earns his top billing here. He’s hammy and theatrical, and his grandiosity is comedic—but he’s no joke, not when he’s so consistently shrewd. He gets all the best lines, like the professional blackmailer’s “delicacy” of telling Ralph he saw Sloane’s murderer “as clearly as I see you now,” and most of its best moments, like when Herta tries to get Ralph to kill him in his sleep and he (awake after all) waltzes in, clearly completely aware of what they were discussing.

Herta never gets the kind of complication that lets her transcend her narrow character type, but Knudsen helps her feel remarkably consistent in her own peculiar, static way. She’s a cartoon gold-digger, frankly willing to walk out of her marriage as soon as it stops satisfying her champagne tastes: when two strangers invade her apartment for weeks on end and start selling her spoons and furs out from under her, she’s not scared or frantic, she’s pissed. The surprise of her characterization, as far is it goes, isn’t her instant embrace of her murderer husband killing his blackmailer—a certain pragmatic ruthlessness goes with her archetype—it’s the muted and reluctant but still real sense that she’s a little impressed to find out Ralph is a killer (“I never thought you had it in you”).

It’s her one gratuitous character detail and the one hint that there could be anything real—if twisted—between her and her husband; it leads to her one gratuitous act, when she pauses her moving-out packing to get Goodfellow drunk and hunt for the incriminating IOU herself. It doesn’t last long, but the event and its short duration both say something about her that feels specific.

In short, “The Derelicts” isn’t devoid of skill or clever touches, and “forced to play host to your blackmailers” is cruelly irresistible. The episode grabbed my attention while I was watching it. But it’s a little too loud for my taste, and parts of it—Sloane, the ending—were too obviously constructed to hit particular plot requirements. It may not be a bad episode, but I don’t like it much, and there’s nothing here the show wouldn’t do just as well or better elsewhere.

The Twist: Ralph finally finds the hidden IOU, enabling him to give Fenton and Goodfellow the boot. With Herta back at his side—wrapped in a new prize fur—things are looking up. But, as it turns out, Fenton also pawned Sloane’s cigarette case under Ralph’s name. Not knowing that, and in a rush to put all this behind him, Ralph verifies that he pawned all those items himself—and promptly gets arrested for Sloane’s murder.

This is a weak twist because resolving it would take a grand total of two seconds (“Oh, Sloane and I were friends, and he gave that to me”/”Oh, I found that on the street”). Ralph has connections and resources, and there’s no proof of his actual motive; he’s not going to be brought down by a pawned cigarette case. The episode tries to juice the state’s case a bit by having the cop claim that he knows the case was stolen from Sloane “at the time of his murder,” but can he really prove that? If this somehow goes to trial, the jury won’t even be out long enough to have a free lunch.

The only saving grace of the ending is Herta shrugging off her husband’s arrest to pose with her furs in front of the mirror: the pay-off of a character we know doing exactly the kind of thing we knew she would do. Funny or not, this is a comedy at heart, so it belongs not to Ralph’s arc but to the hangers-on—Herta, Goodfellow, and Fenton—who come out unscathed, because they always knew exactly who they were. They’re the situation.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Terence Maples (story), Robert C. Dennis (teleplay)

Up Next: “And So Died Riabouchinska”

1. The Twilight Zone uses this very well. ↩︎