Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E13, "The Cheney Vase"

When a story opens with someone getting fired—and stiffed on their severance pay, no less—I usually sympathize with them. Not so with Darren McGavin’s Lyle Endicott.

Lyle is loathsome. He starts off as a smarmy, unctuous user, a loser convinced of his own mental superiority, and he only gets worse from there as his evil grows along with his ambitions. McGavin, with the usual irony of screen performances, has to completely efface his own ego to play this kind of egotist, and he does great work; he can find notes of grotesque comedy in Lyle’s gladhanding “charm” and sweaty, whining failures, and he also knows how to convey quiet menace. One of the awful things about Lyle is that he doesn’t need to be clever or talented to destroy someone’s life, and one of the best things about McGavin’s performance is how he embraces both sides of that idea.

Lyle’s cushy museum job is toast, but his girlfriend, Pamela (Carolyn Jones), still works there, so he persuades to write her a reference letter under her boss’s name. He uses it to create an in with wealthy artistic dabbler Martha Cheney (Patricia Collinge).

The museum curator, Koether (George Macready, last seen in “Premonition”), likes Martha, but there’s a sense that he’s humoring her earnest but amateurish sculpting efforts so he can one day talk her into donating the famous “Cheney vase,” an artifact her beloved father discovered. Martha intends to hang on to it forever as a memento of him, but Lyle—now installed in her house—wants to steal and sell it. All he has to do is gaslight, isolate, and destabilize Martha until she agrees to tell him where it’s hidden.

It’s a simple, haunting premise, despite the unusual number of moving parts at the start. At its core, this is one young man—smugly sure of himself—pitting himself against one old woman—who is growing confused and desperate. The supporting cast does great work, but this is really the Collinge and McGovern show, and even within that, it’s the Collinge show. And what a show it is.

Martha is effervescent at the start of the episode, fully in control of her life and mind. She knows Lyle’s over-the-top flattery isn’t sincere, but she enjoys it all the same, and she’s insightful and funny about that enjoyment: “Everyone lies to me and spoils me. I’d be rather put out if they didn’t.” Later, near-constant exposure to him makes it harder for her to see his act for what it is. Later still—though this transition is muddier—she comes to understand just what those nice little lies were covering up.

A key turning point comes when she chooses him over her long-time maid, Bella (Kathryn Card), permanently damaging her relationship with Bella. Martha can sense what she’s done—Collinge does some subtle facial acting here, conveying both guilt and a kind of upper-class dear-me-this-is-awkward ruefulness at Bella’s open hurt—but she can’t fix it, and that means her only option is to retreat into the one connection she has left. When Lyle chooses the wrong moment to press her about the Cheney vase, it’s suddenly her turn to be openly wounded: “I thought you’d be different.”

Expressing hurt, as Bella could now tell her, only saves you if the person who’s hurt you is moved by it enough to do something about it. Lyle isn’t; as is his wont, he sees it as weakness, and weakness is opportunity. Martha’s worked-up enough that she has a physical attack of some kind, and Lyle then has an excuse to “compassionately” ignore her request for him to leave her to collect herself. It looks like concern, but it’s actually a way to further infringe on her privacy and autonomy. To drive that home, McGovern scrapes away at the wet clay of her still in-progress horse sculpture, disturbing her creation, treating her work as an extension of his mind instead of hers. It’s the kind of chilling, intimately invasive detail any artist, of any kind, can shudder at.

But it works. When we next see Martha, Lyle’s hold on her is more secure than ever. He’s shaping her like he shaped the clay, using her illness as an excuse to further confine her, which only keeps her more dazed. Whether she really forgot that Bella quit over the commercial break time-skip or whether Lyle is gaslighting her about it, the end result is exactly what Lyle wants it to be: a Martha who is now sure that her mind is going—“I know I get confused sometimes, but … this is different” and that Lyle is a saint for “[putting] up with a silly old woman.”

I have a hard time watching people take advantage of the elderly, and these scenes are grueling to sit through. I don’t think it’s just my own sensitivity making this so horrifying, though: details like Lyle tampering with Martha’s sculpture and Martha breaking down into tears as she thanks her abuser for “putting up with her” are effective all on their own. If the construction of the episode’s horror has a flaw, it’s in the way Martha defying Lyle isn’t as well set up as her being cowed by him. I’m not sure what exactly changes her from the woman desperate for scraps to the woman who is steely in her suspicions.

If I had to guess, though, I’d say it’s the illusion, however brief, of another option. Lyle brings in a new girlfriend, Ruta Lee’s Ruby, to replace Bella, and while Martha first reacts to her querulously, jealous of Lyle’s affection and attention, she responds to the first seemingly genuine gesture Ruby makes to her. (Lee is good in this scene, playing a kind of artless, natural warmth and not even hinting that it’s a lie.) If Ruby could be a friend and an ally, if Martha has someone else to cling to, than she can break with the toxic closeness of the house’s new ecosystem. Ruby—or the person Ruby is pretending to be—is a breath of fresh air, and maybe that’s enough to let Martha realize the ideas she’s going to now express for the first time. (The short version is that she’s in Who’s Afraid of Baby Jane?)

The conversation and chance at help—Ruby promises to send a letter to Martha’s attorney—energizes her, and Collinge lets little bit of the old Martha emerge when Lyle patronizingly asks why she didn’t ring for help. She does a faux-titter like she’s going to confess to being silly before showing how serious she is: “I don’t think I can get what I want in this house anymore.” She even tries to fire him … until he produces the letter she gave Ruby, revealing that she has no ally here after all. He’s contaminated everything. She wilts, breaking into tears, and the next time he comes by her studio, the Cheney vase is finally on display, as if she’s given up and is now almost willing him to take it, so long as he’ll leave her alone.

He will. He has a buyer lined up, and he’s already made arrangements to cut the conscience-stricken Pamela out of the deal. In typical tragic fashion, it’s that smaller decision that bites him first: Pamela knows he’s lying to her and planning on leaving her, so when Mr. Koether returns from his business trip, she seizes the chance to tell him to check on Martha at once. Lyle’s now in an unexpected beat-the-clock scenario, rushing to retrieve the vase so he can spirit it away to his buyer before Koether can come to Martha’s aid.

Most AHP episodes are energizing, but for much of its runtime, “The Cheney Vase” is agonizingly suspenseful almost to the point of being draining. Collinge’s performance has so much pathos, and her character is constructed with so much care, that it doesn’t matter if the story sometimes lurches a little in getting to the next scene: I’m completely invested in what will happen to Martha.

One of the masterstrokes here is keeping us mostly in Lyle’s POV even as Martha’s predicament generates all the tension. Even her attempt to get the letter out, which seemed like a rare scene away from his overbearing presence, wasn’t a real escape from him after all. What Lyle doesn’t know, the audience doesn’t know, and that makes certain developments, like Pamela’s final decision, feel surprising in the moment even as they feel right and inevitable in the grand scheme of things. It’s an intense, powerful episode, and the spoilers only make it better.

The Twist: Martha has used her artistic skills to forge several copies of the Cheney vase, and Lyle is too inexperienced to tell her reproductions from the real thing. He has nothing to sell.

This is one of my favorite AHP endings. Lyle spends the whole episode manipulating and bullying the women in his life, and then he’s undone by underestimating them. Better still, he’s so smug and self-absorbed that he underestimates the exact traits he’s using these women for. He thinks he’s a master hustler, but he doesn’t have a fraction of the nervy, wary intelligence we see in “The Long Shot.” Instead, he has a massive sense of entitlement, one that makes him believe that whatever he notices—Pamela’s professional connections and good reputation; Martha Cheney’s burgeoning art skills—is there to be used only to his advantage, never against him.

It’s a neatly plotted downfall, but it’s savagery, not symmetry, that makes this ending hit hard. The show sometimes chooses cleverness over emotional impact, but the best episodes, like this one, generate a real (and raw) sense of risk; there’s victory and defeat, not just solution and surprise. Here, the victory is all the more potent because it’s expressed—with vibrant, lip-smacking relish—by characters who are still marked by their earlier losses.

Pamela—sure she’s crushed Lyle’s scheme even when he’s knocked her to the floor—gets a small-scale version of this vicious triumph, but the showcase rightly goes to Martha. Patricia Collinge has done incredible work all episode, but she’s never better than in her final scene. What makes her transcendent in these last moments is that everything Lyle’s done to her is still embedded in her performance; she’s as maddened as he’s made her, and she knows it.¹ “I wouldn’t try to make you tell me which one [the original] is,” she says with a manic glee. “I’m a poor, deluded old woman. Probably mad, you know. I wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.” Now that her suffering finally works to her advantage, she can embrace it with a bitter joy.

What you’ve done to me let me do this to you. Classic dramatic ownage.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Robert Blees

Up Next: “A Bullet for Baldwin”

1. Unlike Lyle, she could see threats and opportunities at the same time. Lyle’s limited vision gets a kind of literal payoff in this final scene, too, as the audience has the chance to see the Cheney reproductions before he can: the camera, taking on his POV, focuses on Martha’s unhinged, victorious grin before he shakes her off and looks up. The shot of the new vases almost recalls the pan across the “courtroom” in M: there are eleven vases now, but the image hits like there might as well be a thousand. ↩︎