Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E10, "The Case of Mr. Pelham"

“The Case of Mr. Pelham” is one of two episodes to net Alfred Hitchcock a best director Emmy nomination, for a change, and while I usually think the Emmys bungle things even more than the Oscars, it’s still nice to see good work recognized. The direction here isn’t as striking as it is in some of Hitch’s other episodes, almost as if he’s keeping his technique restrained to highlight the extremes of the situation, but it all still benefits from his expertise. “The Case of Mr. Pelham” needs to keep the tension high with a lower number of story developments and turns than usual, and it manages that beautifully.

Right from the start, the episode is marked by a strong casting move: Tom Ewell is the right pick for the benighted Albert Pelham. He wasn’t an unknown—he already had a solid career when this aired, and he’d just kicked off a particularly good run of it with the premiere of The Seven-Year Itch a few months earlier—but he looks more like the guy down the street than a celebrity. He’s solid; his features are well-defined but slightly battered by the natural wear-and-tear of time. He looks ordinary.

He doesn’t seem like a man who would have anything truly strange happen to him, in short.

But it happens all the same, and when we meet him, the stress of it is making him fall apart. When he corners a doctor at his club—ruining this poor man’s lunch, by the way—and begs him for an impromptu consultation, he’s so shaken that he can’t even go along with the usual fiction that this is all about “a friend.” No, he says, it’s him. In a way, that’s the whole problem.

Pelham is a moderately successful executive who lives a comfortable life. It sounds a bit tepid and lonely, but it’s a reliable, consistent, orderly existence, or at least it was until his problem started. Lately, people have been claiming they’ve seen him at places he knows he never was. They’ve seen him doing things he knows he never did. He has a double who’s so convincing that even Pelham’s valet, Peterson (Justice Watson), has apparently gotten the two mixed up. The double has a copy of Pelham’s house key, and he knows all of Pelham’s stories. He seems to think and write just as Pelham does.

What’s going on? It’s hard to know for sure—Pelham’s even starting to suspect “more than a purely human agency [is] involved in this”—but the doctor proposes two more grounded possibilities. The first, and possibly more dangerous, option is that Pelham is doing all these things, he’s just dissociating during them—blacking out and unconsciously editing his own memories later. Maybe if he sticks close to people who know him, he’ll find it easier to corroborate his own actions. The second possibility is the more Hitchcockian: the double is real, and he’s observed the habit-bound Pelham so closely that he’s able to imitate him quite well. Pelham should act unpredictably to throw off his plans.

Pelham does his best to listen to his doctor’s orders, and that decision leads us on into the climax.

I’ve done a lot of summarizing here because I prefer to talk about the episode’s details in light of the ending and because this is a simple story without too many moving pieces. Most of the episode is a flashback—coloring in Pelham’s story to the doctor—and it’s more fun to watch than to hear about, because it’s all about small events that are superficially mundane in description but eerie in execution. They’re eerie because they’re mundane: you can’t have the Unheimlich without the Heimlich. Really, Pelham’s narrative is the same event over and over again—it’s a body of proof he’s submitting that this is really happening—and that could easily feel repetitive, but as a confirmed fan of doppelganger tropes, I find it riveting to watch.

There are a lot of good choices made even before the knockout ending. I love how much of this is set in Pelham’s gentlemen’s club, the kind of cozily exclusive environment where the entire appeal, supposedly, is that this is a place only for those who are known, who are part of the elite “set,” but which has been as thoroughly infiltrated by the double as every other corner of Pelham’s life has. (More about that in a bit.) Making so much of the story a tale-within-a-tale, an in-universe narrative of something disturbing, also recalls some classic M.R. James-style horror in similar environments. The nested structure cushions the terror, distancing it from the reader; “The Case of Mr. Pelham” starts off that way, but then it lets Pelham’s conscious shaping of the story come to an end. He goes from narrator to character, fully putting the audience with his experiences in a more direct, less mediated way. As long as he was telling the story, we knew he would survive it. Once he’s simply living it, we have no guarantees whatsoever.

The Twist: The double exists without rational explanation. He takes over a crumbling Pelham’s life and lives it better and more successfully, and the real Pelham is committed to a mental hospital.

Only ten episodes in, we get one of the most destabilizing twists the show will ever serve up. And the twist is that this isn’t an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode at all, it’s a Twilight Zone episode.

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course, since The Twilight Zone didn’t exist when Alfred Hitchcock Presents got started. If anything, TZ‘s iconic doppelganger episode, the stellar “Mirror Image,” is influenced by “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” not the other way around. I highly recommend both: while the two stories have a similar core conceit, they explore that idea in different ways and reach for different effects; they’re among the best episodes of their respective series.

But you expect a Twilight Zone plot to go otherworldly, as there are very few that don’t. (Though “The Silence,” another one of my favorites, could have been an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode.) AHP usually leads its audience to expect realistic, if not always plausible, solutions. When it breaks from that pattern, the unease—the sense of violation, of overturned order—can be especially effective. This is one of the finest examples. The last few minutes of this episode are pure chiller, and moreover, they’re so sadistic in their finality that they leave me thinking of the last line of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”:

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Poor Albert Pelham. It’s cruel and well-plotted that the garish one-of-a-kind custom necktie that he buys so he can’t be imitated so easily—breaking his habits, per Dr. Harley’s recommendation—winds up “proving” that he’s the fake. The real Mr. Pelham would never wear a tie like that.

Part of Pelham’s tragedy is how little life he has to steal—“After six years, don’t you know?” he pleads with Peterson, who can’t tell the difference between the real Pelham and the false one, but no, Peterson doesn’t. Peterson knows Pelham’s habits—he lives cheek-and-jowl with him—but he doesn’t know Pelham. He’s an employee, not a friend. The intimacy simply isn’t there, and Pelham didn’t understand that until now.

In a touch of satire, even Pelham’s “real” friends don’t know the difference; this world is more genteel and gentlemanly than American Psycho, but there’s the same sense that of interchangeability in these elite, upper crust circles. They’ve all been to the same schools. They all belong to the same clubs. As I said, Dr. Harley tries advising Pelham to stick with the people who know him well, but who would that even be? It makes sense, in this light, that the new Pelham is a better businessman than the old one. This isn’t a world where humanity is an asset. It isn’t even a world where it’s recognized.

But if Pelham’s life is empty, and vulnerable in its emptiness, he’s not unique in that; he’s not an especially profound example of it. He doesn’t deserve this, not for the vague sin of not living his life more fully and not making truer and deeper connections with the people around him. His double never even tries to argue otherwise:

“Why? Why did this have to happen to me?”

“No reason. It just did, you see.”

Motiveless, causeless suffering is a recurring idea in horror, and–ironically–with good reason. (“Because you were home” is the signature line from The Strangers, for example.) If there’s nothing Pelham did, there’s nothing I can do to see that I don’t meet the same fate. Maybe I could deal with it better, or maybe you could, but we couldn’t stop it happening. If it’s going to, it just will.

This isn’t a well a series can go to too often, because stories thrive on cause-and-effect, and subversion only works when it’s not the norm. But here, it’s a bracing plunge into a darker, colder universe with fewer rules.

“Poor fellow,” the double says at the end. “He’s been put away ever since, you know. I don’t think he’ll ever be right again.”

It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Written by: Anthony Armstrong (story), Francis Cockrell (teleplay)

Up Next: “Guilty Witness”