Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E4: "Don't Come Back Alive"

What if you had an idea for a crime, but not, like, a very good idea?

Well, our happy couple, Frank and Mildred Partridge, are in just that position. They’ve hit on a no-miss moneymaking scheme: Mildred (Virginia Gregg) will disappear, and in seven years, Frank (Sidney Blackmer) will have her declared dead and collect the $25,000 life insurance payout right in time for semi-early retirement and a blissful reunion. It’s foolproof!

Unsurprisingly, “Don’t Come Back Alive” is partly about how this is a very bad idea. But Frank, in particular, is committed to it, and showing how that mulish devotion to the prize slowly ruins his marriage and his life is one of the story’s strong points. Alas, the episode is hindered by its runtime: not only does it have to chop up seven years’ worth of waiting to fit into a half hour, it also has to rush the setup.

The first scene is a confused mishmash of narrative shorthand. It needs to convey that the Partridges are happily married, and it needs to create a sympathetic reason for this suburban everyman and everywoman to turn to crime. It does both, but in a way where the scene has no cohesion. It’s a shame, too, because the essential structure—with happiness and optimism suddenly peeling back to reveal stress, worry, and pervasive financial insecurity—is clever, and it taps into real (and still very present) American anxieties.

Frank’s come home with good news: though he’s been unemployed or a while, he’s now found work as a salesman. But Mildred can tell he’s not over the moon about it, and it turns out there’s a catch—a catch that becomes a series of catches, once Frank’s pessimism and the requirements of the plot take hold.

Really, the first catch is all you need to motivate sudden, dramatic action … but it’s also the one catch you absolutely cannot have, because it makes everything before and after this revelation make no sense:

The position doesn’t start until next month, and the Partridges owe back rent and are going to be evicted on Monday.

I’ve been privileged enough and lucky enough to have never been in their shoes, but I would think the imminent loss of your home would be a pretty pressing concern. Here, the idea is a soap bubble, contained unto itself and safely popping into nothingness. Any worry the Partridges might have about being out on the street can’t exist beforehand, because it would contaminate the flirty, affectionate interactions that have to establish them as a still-besotted couple. The episode wants their marriage to be as idyllic as possible so the loss of that idyll hurts more, but it gets what it wants at the cost of its characters feeling fully human. I promise you, AHP, Frank could come home to Mildred anxiously pleading with the landlord, and I’d still believe they love each other and their relationship has value.

The eviction idea also goes nowhere. No one suggests showing an offer letter to the landlord and praying he’ll give them another month; no one resigns themselves to looking for a smaller place or moving in with family. All it would take is a single line to make this more coherent, but there’s nothing. The plot even hinges on Mildred getting an apartment of her own in the city. How? With what money? You can’t afford one place, let alone two!

Frank himself moves on immediately—as if impending homelessness isn’t enough, there’s also the lack of job security to think about. If this job goes bust like the last one did, what then? It’s an endless grind, so much of it is out of his control, and in a few years, he’ll be sixty, and who will hire him then? I don’t know, in a few days, you won’t have a house, so where will you live, Frank? Priorities!

It’s a scene full of building blocks in clashing colors, so the faster we add to this foundation, the better, because it covers up the awkward construction. (Seriously, just have them be behind on the rent, not necessarily about to be out on the street!)

Frank hatches his scheme, and it only takes nanoseconds for him to talk himself into it. Mildred is more reluctant, but Frank knocks down each of her objections, especially the one that says it can’t possibly be that easy. Then he proceeds to bungle the plan almost as soon as it’s in motion.

He can’t not. He wants it too much, and it makes him sloppy. That sloppiness is very human—having him be a little bumbling and not the most practiced liar makes sense—but it also makes him a tantalizing prey for insurance investigator Kettle (Robert Emhardt). And once Kettle enters the episode, the plot really comes to a boil.

Emhardt turns in the performance of the episode, making Kettle a magnificent antagonist who’s a combination of bully and bloodhound and whose competent menace lives under a permanent veneer of calm amusement.  Kettle isn’t equipped to guess the real plan in the works here, because it’s a couple of degrees too bizarre, but he does think Frank killed his wife. And he knows that if he sticks close for the next seven years, then sooner or later he’ll prove it. Emhardt has a lot of masterful line deliveries here, calm bits of nastily bureaucratic ownage, but my favorite is one that sounds fine out-of-context: “We’ll help you. We’ll give you all the help we can, Mr. Partridge.”

Kettle becomes Frank’s dauntless persecutor, dogging his heels for all seven years and making it almost impossible for Frank and Mildred to see each other. (In one especially melancholy moment, he spoils their plans to meet up for Christmas.) He digs up Frank’s garden in a futile search for a corpse. He harasses Frank until Frank’s temper is frayed. Frank could push back, but he doesn’t, or at least not much. It’s a subtle, psychological point: Frank has an innocent man’s confidence that there’s nothing to find coupled with a guilty man’s smug thrill at getting away with it. He’s ground down under Kettle’s persecution, but he tolerates it all the same, because, like Kettle, he knows that time is on his side.

That similarity gives the two an odd rapport. Kettle is more perceptive, so he can feel it—and admit it—where Frank denies it. The best scene they have together is the one where Kettle emphasizes that there’s no animating revulsion on his part, no real disapproval of Frank’s supposed actions. He’s driven only by professionalism, curiosity, and mild sadism: “There’s nothing personal in this. I don’t take any moral stand. Maybe you had a good reason for killing her.” He has no sense of offense about behavior towards him, either. When an angry Frank brandishes a statuette, Kettle observes it dispassionately, interested rather than afraid: so, he says, you have a bad temper. Is that how it happened?

But the days and years mount up, represented by the heap of insurance payment check-stubs Frank gathers. Mildred’s letters to him have gotten briefer and more distant as the long separation has taken its toll, but the seven years are almost up. After all this time, Kettle has nothing. Will Frank and Mildred get away with it after all?

The inevitable answer is no, but the specifics are surprising and satisfying. “Don’t Come Back Alive” is too choppy, and it’s marred by a clumsy start and too many logistical quibbles, but between Emhardt and the strong, bitter ending, it still manages to be memorable for the right reasons.

The Twist: Right before the seven-year deadline is up, Mildred returns home with a bombshell: she wants out of the deal. After all these years apart, she’s fallen in love with someone else. She wants a divorce, but she’s saved up enough money to give Frank something to show for all the time he’s spent as a murder suspect: $1500. It feels like an insult after everything he’s taken from Kettle, so Frank loses his temper, bludgeons her to death, and buries her in the garden. But on the morning he goes to have her declared dead, a no-hard-feelings Kettle, now willing to admit he may have been wrong or at least outclassed, turns up to mend fences. Look, he sees the fresh dirt in the garden. He’ll help Frank with the spade-work. Really, he’ll have it done before Frank even gets back from court.

Like I said, this is a strong ending. Gregg has done good work all episode as Mildred, and her last scene shows off the full extent of her range: we’ve seen her starry-eyed and we’ve seen her despondent, but she was always alive with feeling. By the end, she’s much cooler and more closed-off. Her old house, the one she was afraid of losing, evokes not nostalgia but the distant feeling that she’s outgrown it (“It’s strange, I always thought of it as being larger”). The most emotion she shows is when she tenses up and moves away from Frank’s touch, and it’s a sea change from all her previous yearning.

In some ways, Frank’s had a worse seven years, because he was stuck dealing with Kettle’s persecution and a miasma of suspicion, but Mildred had a more estranging seven years. In a new city, she became a new person, with “new interests, new values, and a new love.” This is an episode founded on economic anxiety, and Mildred’s mink-stoled fate suggests a way out of it that the Partridges never could have taken before. She had to get a job in San Francisco, where she was masquerading as a single woman, and she’s done well for herself. (The new lover may have helped, of course.) She could have gotten a job back home, to offset Frank’s unemployment or give them a second income, but she didn’t … because middle-class, suburban, married white women didn’t work. If she’d had a job at the start of the episode, they would have been more financially secure, but their neighbors would have whispered about them. It was an invisible option until their separation (where she’s masquerading as single) nudges it into view, only after it’s all too late. In a cookie-cutter 1955 scenario, crime is easier and more conceivable than rocking the boat.

Maybe that’s also why Frank can’t be rude enough to tell Kettle to get the hell off his property. He allows Kettle’s trespasses, even when they’re dangerous and certain to doom him, because the alternative is breaking the social contract. You have to keep up appearances, even if it ruins you.

Directed by: Robert Stevenson

Written by: Robert Dennis

Up Next: “Into Thin Air,” a.k.a. “The Vanishing Lady”