Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E11, "Guilty Witness"

This is a weaker episode that’s a bit like a lukewarm rehash of Rear Window.¹ It apes some of Hitchcock’s classic tropes, but it rarely captures his verve.

Grocer Stanley Crane (Joseph Mantell) and his wife, Dorothy (Kathleen Maguire), live directly below the constantly feuding Verbers, Ben (Ed Kemmer) and Amelia (Judith Evelyn).

Stanley is chatty when he’s on the clock, but as soon as he goes home, he minds his own business to the point of callousness. One of the episode’s few neat bits of characterization is establishing that Stanley’s bullheaded indifference to human suffering—his ability to eat scrapple as his neighbor beats his wife upstairs—stems from a bizarre commitment to professionalism and his own livelihood. His business, he tells Dorothy, “depends on the goodwill of the neighborhood,” and nobody likes a busybody, even in a life-or-death situation. He’s supposed to have a good line of patter and remember people’s orders, but he’s not supposed to take a real interest in their lives, even when those lives are unfolding right on top of him.

Dorothy doesn’t feel the same way. She’s invested in the Verber situation, following the philandering and the violence with such heated interest that it’s like the whole saga is a lurid soap opera written just for her. (It’s worth noting that she’s not focused on asking Stanley to intervene in all this, just in getting him to enter into her fascination and amateur detective work.) When one night’s violent argument is ended with a loud telltale thud² and Ben is suddenly nowhere to be found, Dorothy’s interest gets even more avid … but it’s her just-stay-out-of-it husband who winds up getting drawn into the official investigation.

That drawing happens courtesy of Detective Sergeant Halloran (Robert Simon), or, as I like to call him, Sergeant Come Back with a Fucking Warrant. I understand police procedure being streamlined for dramatic purposes, and I understand that it’s not always followed in real life anyway, but this is a particularly aggravating example of it that doesn’t even generate much drama or entertainment. Halloran just lies his way into multiple apartments under the cover that he’s inspecting them for the Board of Health, and no one objects to this at all; it would pass dramatic muster to have him get into Amelia’s place that way, but why does he need a cover story to peer in the apartment’s airshaft from the Cranes’ bathroom window? Your guess is as good as mine.

The story doesn’t need Halloran except to nudge Stanley into reluctant involvement—he’ll do it for a male authority figure (once Halloran comes clean) even if he won’t do it for his wife—and tweaking his characterization could have gotten that done anyway. In fact, some of the best “investigative” scenes happen without Halloran: there’s a sharp sense of observation to Stanley offering a sweet-toothed Amelia “the chocolate-covered cherries Mr. Verber always buys for you” and registering her pause, for example. Even better is a moment he shares with Dorothy, when he holds his hands out the indicate the span of the box Amelia Verber asked him to give her, and they both silently realize what else could fit into such a container. It’s all better deducting than we see from the so-called professional who couldn’t figure out to check behind a couch when searching an apartment, that’s for sure.

Halloran enlists Stanley to help him find the body, since this guy obviously couldn’t find it himself; Dorothy, much to her consternation, is strictly on the sidelines, left to eavesdrop or covertly slink towards them if she wants to share in the developments.

The episode never musters much of an emotional throughline for all this. There’s probably supposed to be some dramatic tension attached to Stanley being conscripted as a reluctant investigator, but the idea is never developed in an interesting way. The marital drama with the two couples is really the heart of the episode, but that’s given short shrift as well. What we’re left with is a lackluster bit of problem-solving, as Stanley works out what Amelia could have done with her husband’s corpse. The resolution isn’t bad, and some of the staging in that sequence is genuinely good, but like everything else here, it’s half-baked. The biggest saving grace is Judith Evelyn, and I’ll praise her more in just a moment.

I do, however, appreciate some of the Hitchcockian voyeurism here, even if it’s never done as well as Hitch himself could do it. The lack of privacy—and the complications that come with it—is threaded through the episode, from the lack of noise-proofing in the apartments to their shared airshaft, basement, and party line to the gossip to the way Amelia’s grocery orders are scrutinized and evaluated. This is a world where it’s hard to keep a secret.

The Twist: Amelia Verber hid the body in a baby carriage and used that to wheel her husband down into the apartment’s basement. She walks in on Stanley, Dorothy, and Halloran discovering the body and, knowing the jig is up, reveals that she killed her philandering husband not because he was cheating on her—that was old news—but because he was getting ready to leave her and run off with his latest flame … Dorothy Crane.

I won’t go so far as to say this twist makes no sense—it retroactively justifies Dorothy’s intense interest in the case and adds a new spin on her irritation at the rumor that Ben is sleeping with “that silly Glovetsky girl”—but it doesn’t make much sense. Why was Dorothy planning to run off with a man she kept saying was going to beat his wife so badly she’d wind up in the hospital? Why is she infatuated with him when she can hear proof of his violence almost every night?

I’m not saying this kind of disturbing, bad-idea attraction doesn’t happen or isn’t believable, but plenty of things that happen all the time in real life need to be better set-up and justified in fiction, where there are higher standards for plausibility. The twist is so close to the end that the episode has no time for even the briefest glimpse of what this self-destructive affair means for who Dorothy is, let alone for her understanding of the attraction and relationship. I suspect that’s because the script views her an appendage to Stanley. The twist here isn’t about our understanding of Dorothy’s character and her involvement with a murdered man she thought could have easily been a murderer himself; the twist is “Stanley’s wife was cheating on him!” This isn’t a dark psychological thriller so much as a murderous bedroom farce.

There are a few highlights to this ending, at least. The basement search is atmospheric, especially when the camera follows Halloran’s wobbly flashlight beam through the dark before Stanley turns on the lights; the baby carriage coming back into the story via Stanley bumping into it off-screen, just as he bumped into it earlier, is clever. (It’s certainly better set-up than the reveal the basement exists, which should’ve been planted earlier.) And while the acting in this episode is mostly lackluster despite a talented cast³, Judith Evelyn pulls out all the stops for her final speech, with Amelia going through some kaleidoscopic emotions—persecution, resignation, regret, and bittersweet love—before ramping up to fury and attack. It’s a role that makes the most of her gawky, lanky physicality, especially when she’s as de-glammed as she is here; there’s a great contrast between her looks and Dorothy’s candy-box prettiness.

Still, those are about all the pluses I can muster. We end with Stanley standing there as the two women brawl in front of him, and his expression looks less like shock and more like blank dumbness. That’s all the feeling this evokes for me too, Stanley.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Morris Hershman (story), Robert C. Dennis (teleplay)

Up Next: “Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid”

1. To drive the parallel home, lead actress Judith Evelyn had a small role in that film as Miss Lonelyhearts. ↩︎
2. Shades of Veronica Mars here, with Keith Mars asking, “Would you describe the sound as Hitchcockian?” when Veronica tells him about a similar incident in season 1’s “The Girl Next Door.” ↩︎
3. In particular, Mantell got an Oscar nod for Marty, and he puts on a compelling near-one-man show in The Twilight Zone’s “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room,” so this episode isn’t the best advertisement for his talents. ↩︎