Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E20, "And So Died Riabouchinska"

Claude Rains’s genteel melancholy elevates almost any material; Charles Bronson has a visceral, gritty force of personality. Ray Bradbury wrote some classics. Robert Stevenson was a strong journeyman director with a gift for quirky material.

I don’t know how they all added up to “And So Died Riabouchinska.” This probably isn’t weaker than “Shopping for Death” or “The Derelicts”—we are not in a good stretch here—but the middling use of all this talent makes it more of a disappointment.

Rains stars as John Fabian, a highly successful ventriloquist with years of top billing at a thriving theater.¹ His dummy is the elegant Riabouchinska (voiced by a returning Virginia Gregg). Usually, ventriloquists are comedians, but while we only see the close of Fabian’s act, it’s a sickly sweet, self-aggrandizing bit where Riabouchinska coos—at his request—that he’s the best ventriloquist in the world and she loves him. People pay for this? Are they simply impressed that he’s able to throw a feminine, Russian-accented voice?

A dead juggler in the theater’s basement brings in Charles Bronson as Detective Krovitch, a man willing to do hours of research to chase down the smallest and most meaningless of details, almost all of which seem, at times, peripheral to the murder he’s trying to solve.² The juggler, Ockham, used to hang around asking after Fabian, who never wanted to see him, and following this legitimate lead punts Krovitch down the rabbit hole.

There may be normal ventriloquists in real life, but I’m not sure I’ve ever met one in fiction. “And So Died Riabouchinska” quickly and ably establishes that I certainly won’t find one here: one of the best, most casually human scenes is the opening, where Iris Adrian’s Macey and Harry Tyler’s Dan Silver chat about gambling and confession magazines before deciding to flip Iris’s new “lucky” coin. The coin lands on the corpse, but even before that, the relaxed working theater vibe of the scene is disrupted, at least for a moment, by Fabian’s arrival. He’s the story here, and he carries with him the sense of some inevitable ending.

He doesn’t fit in. Rains is not an everyman, and directors and scripts always found various ways to use that; here, his separateness marks him as (literally, in a way) carrying a secret. His characterization is textured in a way that’s almost queer-coded: he’s the gentlemanly fellow who keeps himself a little bit apart, who has a sad and secret love that he doesn’t want revealed.

But in Fabian’s case, the love is for his dummy. It takes an actor of Rains’s caliber to lend Fabian enough tattered grandeur that he seems tragic and deluded but not ridiculous.

Riabouchinska insists on inserting herself into Krovitch’s investigation, calling out from inside her box until Fabian produces her. (It’s a nice detail that you can sometimes see Rains’s lips twitching minutely on Riabouchinska’s lines.)  She reveals an affair between Fabian’s wife, Alice (an underutilized Claire Carleton) and his manager, Mel Douglas (Lowell Gilmore)—but it’s not relevant to the plot, which sets up a pattern of similar anticlimactic turns. There’s almost an aristocratic world-weariness to Fabian’s domestic setup, where affairs are not embraced—this is no happily open marriage, certainly—but tolerated in a jaded, emotionally empty fashion; everyone minds, but they’ve stopped caring enough to object. It’s all too tepid to be good blackmail material, so if Fabian killed Ockham, Krovitch must look elsewhere for a motive.

That prompts him, unsurprisingly, to dig into Riabouchinska, the true love of Fabian’s life.³ (Alice’s jealousy about this drove her into Mel’s arms.) It turns out that she’s modeled after Ilyana, Fabian’s former assistant and lover. It would be too polite and too kind to Fabian to call their romance tempestuous: it was an emotionally (and sometimes physically) abusive hell. “Once I even burned her entire wardrobe in a fit of jealousy,” he tells Krovitch. “She took that quite quietly.” Finally, he fired her for being disloyal: “I shouted at her and slapped her and pushed her out.” But he couldn’t stand that she actually left, disappearing too thoroughly for him to ever find her again, no matter how hard he tried. He hand-carved her in the form of Riabouchinska just to bring her back again. He may love her even more now that she’s an object, though she’s a peculiarly independent one.

Until this scene, Fabian has done his best to maintain a veil of plausible deniability over his obvious sexual and romantic fixation on his dummy, but Rains lets it all loose here as he fondles Riabouchinska and strokes her face: he’s excellent at conveying a disturbing obsession that he experiences as all-encompassing rapture (“And the wooden body became soft and pliable and warm”).

Bronson is no slouch in this scene either, registering tamped-down shock and horror but also, crucially, impatience. Krovitch needs this to lead somewhere. He’s here for a mystery, not a horror story.

Krovitch gets his answers, but they fall into an odd, fuzzy middle-ground: not what he expected, but not a surprise, either. I’ll get into this more in the Twist section, but this episode’s fondness for anticlimax and deflating misdirection weakens it; it’s fine to subvert expectations, but you have to bring freshness or power to replace that sense of narrative satisfaction, and “Riabouchinska” doesn’t. It has good actors, but Bronson is often trapped in provoking exposition, usually with a glower, so only Rains gets a chance to shine—and the script gives him good speeches and moments, but nothing that ever adds up to the narrative arc his talent deserves. This isn’t outright bad, but it’s all too much for too little purpose.

The Twist: Fabian killed Ockham after Ockham attempted to blackmail him over his unnatural relationship with Riabouchinska. Unfortunately for Fabian, Riabouchinska then “decides” that she “cannot live with something that kills,” and effectively shuts down; whatever inspiration or creative impulse made Fabian feel like she was distinct from him disappears, and he’s left crying out for her, looking for her as he looked for the lost Ilyana, as Krovitch leads him away.

This ending falls into the peculiar category of the anti-twist, where the shape of the story leads the audience to expect revelations that never come. In a more conventional tale, Riabouchinska would reveal that Fabian murdered Ilyana, and there would be at least a hint of the supernatural, of a real ghostly spirit animating her. Instead, while the episode encourages a viewer to pick up on the parallels—Riabouchinska “runs away,” just like Ilyana—this all feels grounded in Fabian’s delusions.

“Unconventional” can be a compliment. I’m not sure it is here. This is a talky episode where the talk never leads to much: all the time spent on Ilyana only serves to provide a red herring and an overcomplicated, overcooked backstory for Fabian’s passion for Riabouchinska; all the time spent establishing Ockham’s history with Fabian is wasted too, because almost anyone who meets Fabian can suss out within seconds that he and his dummy have been a bit too intimate. This episode has no respect for my time.

A more internal, psychological perspective—one TV can’t easily offer—could better capture Fabian’s artistic experience, which is the most interesting idea here. This is not quite an unnerving dummy story like Magic, Dead of Night, or The Twilight Zone’s “The Dummy”; notably, the dummy is not the problem here. Riabouchinska never kills, even as an extension of Fabian’s subconscious will. This is about romantic obsession as a drive for art, and the murder matters to the plot only because Fabian instinctively knows the character he’s created would not put up with him after it. He’s been experiencing a free flow of inspiration, like he’s channeling something real, but now he comes to a point where he would have to be conscious that he’s forcing her into existence and making her act out-of-character. That she’s a fiction—less kindly, a lie. On some level, no matter how much he grieves her, it’s better to let her “leave,” to be art that is wild and outside of her artist’s control. A “dead” wooden body is somehow more bearable than one that was never alive to begin with.

But while those ideas are present, the episode doesn’t do much with them. It’s not interested in Fabian’s process. Honestly, it’s not interested in much—its focus boils down to titillating the audience with unsettling human-dummy action and producing a pat “second verse, same as the first” denouement where Ilyana’s wooden successor also leaves Fabian. The first part isn’t creepy enough, and the second part isn’t satisfying enough. If there’s meant to be some moral closure to Fabian’s past victim escaping him yet again, even in her most seemingly controllable form, it doesn’t quite hit home. The script never makes the unseen Ilyana vivid enough for that.

Credit where credit is due, though: Claude Rains plays the hell out of the big confession scene, especially when Fabian finally speaks for himself. Few actors were ever as good at lending even their worst characters a tragic, tarnished dignity, and when Rains says, “He was trying to spoil the only beautiful thing that was left in my life,” it is, against all odds, moving. I may have complaints about the episode as a whole, but I certainly have none about him. He transcends the somewhat weak material and makes all this memorable through sheer, mesmerizing force.

Directed by: Robert Stevenson

Written by: Ray Bradbury (story), Mel Dinelli (teleplay)

Up Next: “Safe Conduct”

1. Thank God there would soon be a television in (almost) every home, freeing people from the obligation to enjoy ventriloquists. ↩︎
2. He gets one terrific characterization detail, though: when Mel dismisses Ockham as “an ugly little man,” Krovitch flies off the handle and snaps, “We’re not here to discuss his physical appearance!” He’s willing to comb through so much nonsense in this episode that not tolerating it in this instance is funny, but it also says something about his priorities: he’s chasing down all these leads, as tangled as they are, on Ockham’s behalf. His sense of duty makes him genuinely loyal to the idea of the dead man. ↩︎
3. The route he takes to get there is nuts, though: at one point he goes off on an investigating tear because he discovers Fabian used to have a boy dummy. ↩︎