Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E24, "The Perfect Murder"

The Stacey Aumonier short story this episode is based on makes far more use of the title’s conceit, and it’s a spare, coolly haunting little work with a more ironic bite. It’s strange to see it turned into an exuberantly over-the-top family melodramedy that barely engages with the “perfect murder” idea at all, but such are the ways of adaptation.

Neurotic, careworn family man Henri (Philip Coolidge) and his brother, bitchy hedonist Paul (Hurd Hatfield) are heirs-in-waiting: their wealthy uncle died, and while his fortune first passes to his wife, Rosalie (Mildred Natwick), it will default to them upon Rosalie’s death.¹ All they have to do is wait. Since sour, shrewd Rosalie isn’t inclined to dole out gifts to the nephews impatiently awaiting her death, and since she’s in sturdy good health, the brothers bemoan her sturdy good health. Paul does manage to move in with Rosalie, who gets a renewed spark from his “rascal” ways, but he still chafes at the situation.

There are touches of comedic plotting in this episode, like the lawyer who breaks into a coughing fit right as he gets to a key part of the will-reading, but for the most part, “The Perfect Murder” aims for humor via campy exaggeration. Paul shoulders most of this, with Hurd Hatfield making him an acerbic, dramatic, queer-coded villain who practically drips with sugary malice. Hatfield is game enough—clearly he’ll agree to fake a dizzy spell swoon and tear away a wilted honeysuckle blossom while sneering, “I despise decaying things, don’t you”—but as good a ham as he is, his performance is arguably at its best and sharpest when he’s not going for the joke.

He’s an effective domestic horror villain, and the scenes where he twists the seemingly cozy domesticity of his new setup with Rosalie like a knife are the best ones of the episode. They’re so good, in fact, that the episode doesn’t seem to know what to do with one of them: the bit where Paul helps Rosalie out of her chair and then “pretends” he’s going to drop her before offering insincere-but-fulsome reassurances (and Rosalie, with fright still in her eyes, laughs in relief) never really goes anywhere.

Whether Hatfield is mugging for the back rows or hitting more precise minor-key notes, he’s a lively presence, which is way more than I can say about Coolidge—an otherwise strong, solid actor with a long career. In Coolidge’s defense, he gets much weaker material: Henri feels like a device, not a character. I find it hard to forgive him for one absolute clunker of a line delivery, though: “Paul. I’m frightened.”

Mildred Natwick gets the best showcase (more on this at the end). She’s playing a type—the no-bullshit older woman who nonetheless knowingly falls for a metric ton of bullshit when it’s delivered in a charming way, who thinks she can scrape the sugar off a poison pill but inevitably winds up, despite all her knowledge and good intentions, thinking the poison is pretty sweet too. It’s a mini-arc that we saw to some extent in “The Cheney Vase,” and here it’s handled with harder edges but less actual darkness.

Natwick does even more than Hatfield to make the episode’s minor cruelties hit, even if I don’t entirely believe her transformation into a warm-hearted giggler. A key element is how well she sells a small scene with Rosalie’s housekeeper, Ernestine, who gently teases her about her harmless infatuation with Paul. Rosalie, instinctively retreating to icy dignity, calls her a fool, but then softens. Admits it: “Perhaps I’m one too.” It gives her character a core of self-knowledge, so when she gets wine-drunk at lunch with Paul and cackles at his “joke” about “soufflé à la glace,” she’s pitiable but not pathetic. She knows what she’s doing, even if she doesn’t know what he’s doing or what he’s plotted with Henri.

Ground glass in a soufflé egg mix is a nicely diabolical murder plan: domestic, too, which suits the episode’s family focus. I always like whenever ground glass shows up as a murder weapon–apparently everyone’s taken a gentleman’s agreement of artistic liberty on it (because pieces small and fine enough for you to ingest without realizing it would be extremely unlikely to ever kill you), and this was the correct decision, because it’s such a naturally insidious idea. It even gives us the best bit of Henri, with him grinding up the wine glass with a giant mortar and pestle, committing exactly as much as he needs to, despite his supposed meekness.

One part of the ending, which I’ll get to below, does mar this for me a little, but in general, it’s a campy good time, with two strong performances that work in different modes but go together like chocolate and peanut butter. It may not be more than fun, but it’s still fun, and fun is one of the things this show does best.

The Twist: Rosalie, still miserable from a combination of drunkenness and hangover, insists that it’s a fish night, not a soufflé night, so Ernestine humors her—but makes use of the egg mixture for Paul’s breakfast omelet. A rattled Henri is now set to inherit everything … if the autopsy doesn’t incriminate him, anyway.

One of the best plot complications in crime fiction is the plan that goes sideways because even a simple situation has too many variables for the criminal to effectively control them all; it’s even better when the criminal is the one who unwittingly introduced the fatal variable. Does Paul get Rosalie drunk to make sure she won’t discover the ground glass in her dinner? To recklessly taunt her with his “soufflé à la glace” comments? To give her a good send-off as a warped kind of kindness? As a side-effect of his own celebratory debauchery? Either way, it turns out to be his undoing.

It’s a neat bit of biter-bit plotting, but the best part of the ending is how Rosalie tries to make an overture to Henri. It’s a sincere, human moment on her end, one that cracks the easily manipulated battle-axe archetype: Paul played on her feelings, which she knew, and (almost fatally) used them against her, which she didn’t, and her entire inner life was constructed as something he had to cheat his way into and then expertly twist around. Now we see a softened Rosalie taking the lead and making a choice, and that choices is generous and vulnerable. Natwick’s had a good episode giving the story different shades of stern and twinkling and charmed and pitiable, and in the last minute or so, she gets to play a new kind of woman. In a way, Rosalie’s doctor was right, Paul was good for her. He made her alive again. His death was good for her too—it kept her that way, and it set her free to use her new openness to her feelings for herself.

Of course, then Henri goes out of the house in a gibbering panic after being offered a potentially deadly omelet. It’s a purely comedic ending to an episode that tended to dance back and forth over the fine line between comedy and suspense, so it’s a bit deflating: falling like a badly done soufflé à la glace. Hitchcock would have known to end with the offer of the omelet.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Stacey Aumonier (story), Victor Wolfson (teleplay)

Up Next: “There Was an Old Woman”

1. This is the kind of will you make when you have too much faith in your family’s morality. It’s certainly the kind of will that makes me wonder if he ever even met Paul. ↩︎