Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E12, "Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid"

“Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid” hangs some holly on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents set. CBS aired this on December 18, which would have been a perfectly cromulent time for a Christmas episode if it hadn’t then aired the non-holiday-themed “The Cheney Vase” on Christmas Day. Network executives of 1955, explain yourselves. Or at least let me take a stab in the dark.

As the Criterion Channel has already acknowledged, Hitchcock and the holidays pair well together; a concise, clever crime tale looks as good under the tree as an English ghost story (a tradition Hitch would’ve certainly been familiar with). Showing “The Cheney Vase” on Christmas cuts the day’s richness and sticky sweetness. It’s black coffee at the end of a lavish dinner.

“Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid” is the lead-up, softer and sweeter. A bite of fudge. It’s nice, but, as the broadcast schedule implies, you don’t necessarily want whole weeks of it.

It’s well-made fudge, though. This episode is slight, and it’s tonally distinct even from lighter, cozier episodes like “Our Cook’s a Treasure,” but it has a winning pair of performances from Barry Fitzgerald and Virginia Gregg (last seen in “Don’t Come Back Alive”).

Fitzgerald plays Harold Sears, a craggy professional thief freshly out on parole: even before his need for employment forces him into a department store Santa suit, he’s seen better days. Gregg is the brightly officious Clementine, who runs the halfway house he’s placed in. It’s her job to push him into employment and clean living, which she pursues with the dogged determination of someone who’s already accepted she won’t be liked.

For all the episode’s name gestures to Sears’s interaction with the cynical, streetwise kid I’ll get to in a moment, the emotional core of the story is his relationship with Clementine. This is about how two people who tend to rub others the wrong way forge mutual respect.

Their characterizations are clear from the start. Clementine is so much of an overgrown Girl Scout that she has trouble even talking about Sears’s criminal record directly—she stammers around the issue like she’s trying to avoid repeating profanity—but she really does care about helping him back on his feet—finding him a job matters more to her than being strictly honest with his “respectable” employers. When she steels herself up for it, she can also be funnily frank: she almost sounds like a genuine career counselor when she urges him to change tracks not for moral reasons but because his line of burglary’s a young man’s work, and well, he always gets caught, doesn’t he? (Sears: “What do you mean ‘always’? I was only caught five times.”)

Sears, meanwhile, has aged into a kind of unsentimental philosophizing; he’s at his best navigating a world of honest give-and-take and annoyed when he’s expected to pretty it up. He nods along as the store manager (Justice Watson, the valet from “The Case of Mr. Pelham”) tells him to make special note—“for the convenience of the parents”—when items off a child’s Christmas list are actually in the store: “Sure, I’ve shilled before.” He has nothing tied up in his so-called rehabilitation, so suspicion and Amazon-like inspections when he clocks out don’t wound his pride (“I’m clean, Mac. Didn’t want anything I could reach”). What annoys him is sentimentality and the concealment it requires. All day long, he has to deal with a parade of “little monsters,” and he’s supposed to smile his way through it with “a twinkle in [his] eye.”

But sentimentality is a mixed force in “Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid.” Sears at first sees it as a kind of insipid lie, and complying with it—humoring obvious delusions—exhausts him. Actually, that exhaustion is one of the few things he and Clementine have in common. When she ambushes him at the end of his first day, keeping him away from a much-needed drink and “rehabilitating [him] to death,” they have a conversation that kicks a little loose soil off her own buried frustrations. He’s not the only one who has to put up with a lot on the job, and he’s not the only one who has to spend all day swallowing his true feelings. Clementine gets irritated and overwhelmed too, but she keeps putting herself out there, an open target for scorn from the people she’s trying to help. And she does it because she believes that if she tries hard enough, she can make the optimistic vision she’s forced to act out into a reality. She must see countless parolees wind up back in prison, but she forces herself to act like Sears won’t be one of them. She doesn’t let herself give up on selling him this future.

That’s the same force of sentimental imagination that Sears taps into with the Tenth Avenue kid (Bobby Clark). The Tenth Avenue Kid—the only child in the store with an NYC accent and, in a good costuming touch, an obviously homemade hat—is a budding Sears when it comes to his view of the world. “You don’t expect to get everything you want, do you?” Sears asks one child, but that’s a rich kid, and yes, he does. He has reason to. Sears is appealing to an honest view of the world that genuinely doesn’t apply to him; he can afford to live in a sentimental universe animated by a perpetual warm glow. The Tenth Avenue Kid lives in Sears’s world, and no, he doesn’t expect to get everything he wants, especially if he doesn’t take it. Asking this Santa for an enormous, expensive toy plane is his last-ditch effort to believe that there’s some leveling force out there, even though, in his heart of hearts, he knows better. But there’s still that hope.

And, possibly influenced by Clementine, Sears can … sort of see it, though he knows there’s no shortcut. Even if things go well, the Tenth Avenue Kid is in for years where, like Sears and Clementine, he’ll have to swallow down his feelings and pretend if he wants to get ahead. Sears tries getting him to act rationally, to guard his dreams of being a pilot: “You think they have airplanes in the pokey? You think they allow you to drive one of if you’ve even been inside?” But logic isn’t enough for most people, especially not kids. The boy needs a vision of a better world—access, however temporary, to the sentimental, gauzy, Christmas treats of a happier and wealthier life—and Sears decides to give it to him.

This doesn’t feel much like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but it’s a perfectly satisfactory little Christmas tale, and adding a pinch of grit and cynicism helps the happy ending to land. Some writers can make beautiful melodrama out of the holidays, where “grandly sappy” somehow doesn’t equal “bad,” but the show probably makes the right choice in keeping this one fairly low-key. It’s about participating in a push towards lovingkindness even when you aren’t in the mood and don’t know what, if anything, it will achieve, and that is, by necessity, a small, day-by-day kind of story.

The Twist: Sears wants to buy the $50 airplane for the Tenth Street Kid, even though that’s his whole paycheck, but Clementine—ever the well-intentioned busybody—wanted to stop him going on a bender, so she had his money deposited in a savings account before he could get to it. He steals the airplane instead, leaving it under the kid’s tree—and getting arrested about a block later. Clementine saves him by showing up and clarifying his good intentions so forcefully that his parole officer caves and lets him go.

This isn’t a twist at all, but I came up with this format for AHP reviews, and I’m sticking to it. This is an endearing ending and especially well-played by Virginia Gregg, who makes Clementine into a real force of nature in her effort to save Sears from the consequences of her interference. (Dorky characterization note: Sears is indignant at the idea that he’d be inexperienced enough to try to fence a “hot” Santa suit, and Clementine can only agree that yes, she’s sure it’s very warm.)

Honestly, you could have a much darker version of this episode where Clementine is an antagonist whose self-admitted “officiousness” inadvertently scuppers the chances of Sears and men like him, where her infringing upon his agency is treated with less immediate understanding, but it wouldn’t be all that Christmassy, and it would be a waste of all Gregg’s warmth and sincerity.¹

I know I don’t usually write up the intros and outros, but Hitchcock’s “Cask of Amontillado” trap for Santa charms me.

Directed by: Don Weis

Written by: Margaret Cousins (story), Marian Cockrell (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Cheney Vase”

1. Female reformers get painted in worse lights than this all the time; having a story that acknowledges a Clementine’s flaws but sees her virtues is maybe rarer, in the grand scheme of things. Besides, the connection the episode draws between the two of them as individuals feels surprising but true, and it works thematically. I’m happy to watch the two of them head out together for some brandied plum pudding. ↩︎