Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E16, "You Got to Have Luck"

“You Got to Have Luck” has an opening that foreshadows its closing—men giving needless exposition—but then it gets going in an admirably tense fashion. If you shave off some of the clumsy place-setting, what we have is almost the opening of an urban legend: the radio warns a young couple that there’s an escaped prisoner in their area. Wonder who will show up later?

As soon as the story closes in on a dusty rural house, the sense of threat begins to build. In Hitchcockian terms, we have the couple chatting at the table—Mary (Marisa Pavan) and David (Lamont Johnson), effectively adorable in their tiny segment of shard screen-time—and the bomb beneath it—escaped convict Cobbett (John Cassavetes), prowling around their yard. Within minutes, he’s killed their dog, a still-rare bit of brutality for TV, even if it’s only rendered as a cut-off bark.

Cobbett, hiding out from a state-wide manhunt, holds Mary hostage in her own home for hours, terrorizing and draining her. He’s staying out of prison—holding onto the luck he seized in his escape (he has a speech about his philosophy, because of course he does: he’s that kind of guy)—and she’s going to help him or pay the price.

Pavan, who makes the most of her enormous eyes, is good, but an absolutely electric Cassavetes steals the show. (I mean, he’s John Cassavetes.) The series is stuffed to the gills with criminals, but he may be the most terrifying we’ve seen to date, all without ever tipping into showy, larger-than-life territory. Rather, he’s an all-too-human live wire, a creature of constantly bubbling emotion, a man on a knife’s edge of tension. Cassavetes—lean, taut, and handsome—brings an invaluable physicality to the role, like he’s hyper-aware of where he is within this confined space, and Mary’s space, and forces me to be aware of it too. He’s constantly finding indelible little bits of business to do with the kitchen knife he swipes early on: brandishing it is cheap, but wiping pie dough off it and using it to cut a slice of bread, demonstrating casual ownership of it, is sublime. This may be your kitchen, but I’ve got the knife.

And if there’s a line we’ve heard so far that’s more chilling than Cobbett laying out his 396-year sentence and how little he has not lose—“So anything I could do to you would be for absolutely free”—I don’t know it.

Cobbett is a convincing threat even with a minimum of on-screen violence—between this and “The Cheney Vase,” I think that if you wanted to make a hard slap more shocking than a burst of gunfire, you hired Robert Stevens to direct—but he’s even more disconcerting when he’s friendly.

Rape is on the table here, even if the word’s as unspoken as it was in “Revenge.” And, as in “Revenge,” the episode finds meaning in that elision: Cobbett doesn’t say it because he enjoys presenting it all as consensual. To him, it may as well be: as he sees it, his will, his yes, is the only one that matters.

“What do you want?” Mary asks him as soon as he breaks in.

Cobbett: “Well, that’s an easy question. But I’m in a little bit of a hurry. Little bit of a rush.”

When an angry scuffle with her turns into a kind of intimate wrestling, his horniness overcomes his anger, and he begins pawing at her, talking about how long she’s been in prison and how overwhelming she is—but he’s the one who overwhelms, the one making his body into a cage so she can’t break away. He’s the one giving the orders. And subconsciously, he may even know it, because what saves Mary in that moment is a news update on the radio that lets Cobbett know the search is looking in the wrong direction. I’ve seen so many scenes where giddy relief means a kiss. Here, it means an escape for one: Cobbett was more aroused when he was angry than he is when he’s pleased. For now, with his false trail paying off, he’ll let Mary off the hook as long as she cooks him some eggs.

A parody of intimacy develops between them, despite Mary’s obvious terror. There’s no Stockholm syndrome here, but there’s a pinch of the reverse, as little as it matters. It wouldn’t save her—if anything, Cobbett gets more violent with her as they go on, as they settle into a “relationship” where she bears the brunt of his emotions, not just his schemes—but Cassavetes lends it all a warped sincerity. He becomes indulgent with her, like her fear of him is irrational and can be coddled away; he even acts like she’s a child too young to have any sense of object permanence and she’ll forget about the knife as long as he slides it in his pocket. He’s still in control of her, even scripting her answers on a phone call with her mother, but his control of himself is slipping, and—at least in part—it’s slipping because of her. He’s beginning to care how she perceives him, and the confident self-aggrandizing of Act I becomes more frantic self-justification by Act II. He sheds his prison uniform for her husband’s clothes, but he wants her to recognize him as himself, not an approximation or echo of the man she loves.

It’s a one-sided “relationship” arc leading up to Cobbett’s decision to finally flee … and take her with him. Part of his rationale is practical—the search isn’t looking for a couple, and he can have her do all the talking whenever they’re stopped—but it is, he says, more than that: “I want you to come. I like you.”

They’re no Bonnie and Clyde, though. He calls her “chick,” skipping over her name and who she is to herself—she’s the woman to his man, and that’s all that matters to him—and when a sound outside rattles him, silencing her frightened cries with a smack to the face takes precedence over calming her down. Again, his perceptions are all that matters. His sensory reality—his hunger, his lust, his nervous sweat—over her inner world.

While I have a quibble about the twist, Cassavetes and Pavan make this a memorable, agonizing episode, with a raw, dangerous quality that feels ahead of its time. I talked a lot about Cassavetes already because he is the highlight, but I don’t want to undersell Pavan, whose delicacy and desperation never fully camouflages a core strength of will. When she gets a scene like the one where she has to bully her neighbors away to save them and herself, she shines.

Between those performances and a mostly sharp script—like I said, I still hold a grudge about some exposition-heavy sections that take us out of the pressure cooker and stick us with a questing warden (Bonanza’s Ray Teal) instead—this is a compelling episode.

The Twist: The police are waiting to nab Cobbett the second he steps out of the house. It turns out that while Mary is an excellent lip-reader, she’s been deaf since she was a child. When Cobbett forced her through that phone call and told her to say that her husband wasn’t at home, her mother knew something was wrong. Bad luck, Cobbett.

This is a decent twist that does lend itself to a few rewatch bonuses. One (“What’s the matter, you deaf?”) is too on-the-nose, but Mary “not noticing” the ring pattern on the phone and occasionally missing a question when Cobbett has his back to her are more subtle details. You can even pick out a precise bit of staging that lets her see Cobbett’s reflection as he’s changing, which avoids giving the game away too soon. It’s clever enough, but Mary’s a compelling enough character that I wish she had a more active role in saving herself. As it is, while she gets to show off her resilience and her foresight in playing all this close to her chest, it still falls a little short of satisfying, especially with the warden’s faux-consolation rubbing Cobbett’s nose in his “tough luck.” Even the small tweak of having Mary explain the situation herself would elevate it, and having that final “luck” line be a call-back and reversal of her earlier terrified helplessness in having to listen to Cobbett’s philosophizing, would hit harder and feel more deliberate.

The very close, at least, lets Mary reclaim the story—and her space. Ending on the policemen filing out and Mary quietly going back in alone, restoring her sense of control and her feeling of home in the process, is a strong final shot: quiet and deliberate, like a private victory processional.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: S. R. Ross (story), Eustace & Francis Cockrell (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Older Sister”