Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E1: "Revenge"

Welcome to Anthologized, a column where I cover classic anthology TV series. We’re kicking off with the suspense series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran from 1955-1960 before coming back in 1962 to spend another three seasons as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Since so many of these episodes turn on twist endings and major reveals, I’ll do my best to recap and review each episode in a relatively spoiler-free fashion before discussing the clearly labelled Twist.

I’ll note upfront that one of the pleasures of the series is getting Hitchcock as your droll host, offering up a kind of genteel ghoulishness—and often ribbing his own sponsors in the process. I toyed with the idea of writing up the individual intros and outros for each episode, but ultimately I’d rather treat the stories as standing on their own.

But in brief: Hitchcock’s introductions are witty and entertaining, with some of them even front-loading the episode’s tension. The outros are more of a mixed bag, too often tasked with soothing 1950s network and sponsor sensibilities by providing hasty Hays Code-like wrap-ups to reassure you that no one has gotten away with anything. Fortunately, those are often pointedly outrageous or perfunctory, making it obvious that they’re not “real” … but the sudden swerve back to comedy can dispel the emotions the story itself has stirred up. The series does have a cheeky sensibility, though, so this style suits it overall even if there are plenty of particular instances that annoy me.

“Revenge” gives us the best summation of all this, with Hitchcock referring to himself as “something in the nature of an accessory before and after the fact: to give the title for those of you who can’t read, and to tidy up afterwards for those who don’t understand the endings.”

And now, on to “Revenge” itself.

Hitchcock would direct only a handful of AHP episodes—unsurprisingly, they’re among the best in the series—but the premiere, “Revenge,” is one of them. This is a kick in the teeth masquerading as a half-hour thriller.

“Revenge” stars Vera Miles—soon to achieve further Hitchcockian immortality in 1960’s Psycho—and Ralph Meeker—best known in my household for his roles in Kiss Me Deadly and Paths of Glory. The two play newlyweds Elsa and Carl Spann, and the episode deftly establishes the easy, playful love they feel for each other. They’re in their honeymoon phase, but their happiness limned by a delicate frisson of nerves: ex-ballerina Elsa is still recovering from a breakdown. She got overwhelmed, she explains to her kindly neighbor (Frances Bavier, a.k.a. Aunt Bee herself), when her wedding and her first starring role came all at the same time: “Too much happiness at once.”

Carl worries about how Elsa will fare during her first day alone, but she persuades everyone that she’ll sink down into her medically ordered contentment like it’s a featherbed, sunbathing outside their trailer and attempting her first cake.

It’s devastating when we follow Carl home that evening. The trailer billows with clouds of smoke: that cake never came out of that oven. Elsa’s in a state of total collapse, her curled-up fingers grasping a flower.

She tells Carl what happened, with a simple, devastating word-swap that technically pretties this up for 1955 network TV while also capturing the depth of her shock and horror. A man came by, she says, and he said he was a salesman:

“And then he grabbed me, and I screamed, and he choked me. And then he killed me. He killed me.”

Vera Miles is incredible in this episode, and she makes me feel the wrenching contrast between Elsa’s natural warmth and humor and her shocked, glassy-eyed post-assault state. It’s like Elsa is at the bottom of a deep well, with the distant outside world filtering down very slowly. If we adopt Elsa’s own framing of the rape, we can understand her trauma as a kind of haunting: she can’t escape the moment of her “murder,” and she has trouble perceiving and interacting with the world of the “living.”

Furious and heartbroken over what’s happened to his wife, Carl wants to find the man responsible, but as the cops point out, he has only the vaguest of descriptions to work with. Undaunted, he follows the letter of the doctor’s recommendation—though not the spirit of it—and takes Elsa on a drive. It’s a one-in-a-million shot, but maybe they’ll cruise past her attacker, and if Elsa recognizes him … Carl is prepared.

Meeker’s performance deserves as much praise as Miles’s, and it follows a similar arc: at the start of the episode, he’s expressive and open, but what happens to Elsa makes him shut down and close up.

But there’s a difference in how that goes, and one of the best distinctions between their two takes comes in how they deliver their dialogue in the back half of the episode. Miles says each line in a distracted, floaty way; an occasional bubble of intensity makes its way up to the surface, but overall, I get the feeling Elsa is forgetting everything she’s saying even as she’s saying it. She’s going through the motions, numbly agreeing that yes, a hotel would be nice, yes, a drive would be nice. Carl, on the other hand, is more focused, even if he’s clamped down so hard on one idea—get revenge for his wife—that he’s not any more awake to the world around him. Meeker talks in this section like each word is a separate pebble he has to select and spit out. He’s creating a plan, and each word is a carefully chosen building block.

“Revenge” gives the series a dark but powerful start. Hitchcock’s direction also shines—I really think this guy could go places!—especially in the overall tension, the staging of Carl’s return home, and the way the camera holds on a key character at the conclusion. If there’s a Kubrick stare, AHP episodes like “Revenge” and the later “One More Mile to Go” draw our attention to its Hitchcockian counterpart: the slow crumbling behind a superficial stillness, the stoic existential terror of realizing that there’s no way out. If you want to avoid stories featuring rape, I recommend skipping ahead to start the series with another Hitch-directed entry, the fantastic “Breakdown,” but otherwise, this is one show where it’s perfectly all right to begin at the beginning.

The Twist: Carl kills the man Elsa identifies as her attacker, brutally bludgeoning him to death in his hotel room—only to realize that her trauma has left her hyper-vigilant, and in her dazed panic, she’s “recognizing” any man even close to fitting her rapist’s description. “That’s him,” she says again, but this time, he can tell her eyes are tracking across emptiness, scanning a nightmarish landscape visible only to her.

It’s a good, brutal stinger, especially with the sirens making a haunted wail in the background. (By this time, Carl’s victim has been discovered back at the hotel.) Carl is about to go to prison, leaving a traumatized Elsa alone, and it was all for nothing.

I should add that the murder sequence is great as well, beautifully shot through the open hotel room door in a way that lets Carl pass from body to reflection to mere shadow and sound. It’s all swift, and jarring in its swiftness. It takes so little time to make an irreversible decision.

The reveal that Carl has (almost certainly) killed an innocent man is also a bleak payoff of an earlier conversation the couple had at their sunny breakfast table, before everything went wrong. Elsa—cheerfully, wittily—champions the idea that wherever you go, people are mostly good. The exceptions she acknowledges are “sourpusses,” as if the worst the world has to offer can still be shrugged off with a roll of the eyes. Carl says she’s naïve, though he admits to finding her optimism restful and says he likes to spend time in her vision of humanity.

To screenwriter Francis Cockrell’s credit, the script never suggests that Elsa provokes her attacker by any kind of “excessive” sexuality (actually, for 1955, it’s fairly frank about and appreciative of Elsa’s horniness within her marriage). When she sunbathes in a two-piece that prompts an uneasy, do-I-say-something-or-not second look from her neighbor, the scantily clad look is blissful relaxation, not flirtation or invitation. Still, “Revenge” is hard-edged, and it does think she’s naïve: a little too innocent, a little too unguarded, a little too sure of the kindness of strangers.

But the end shows us that Carl has been naïve too. Elsa trusted in a kind universe, and he trusted in a rational one. He’s an aircraft engineer, and he thought that this trauma could be solved mechanically: identify problem, apply wrench. If Elsa overlooked evil, he overlooked fragility and the slipperiness of perception.

So the episode concludes with the fade-out tightening in on his expression, darkness literally closing around him. It wasn’t fixable after all, and now it’s more broken than ever.

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Written by: Samuel Blas (story), Francis Cockrell (teleplay)

Up Next: “Premonition”