Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E14, "A Bullet for Baldwin"

“A Bullet for Baldwin” is an absurd, overcomplicated episode that exists for the sake of two twists. To the extent that the episode works, it’s because of the performances—and the script’s occasional dry humor—but really, nothing can save this from being contrived and gimmicky as hell.

This is another historical episode—San Francisco, 1909—but I’m not sure what the milieu adds. “Triggers in Leash” needed to build off the conventions of the Western, and “Into Thin Air” needed to avoid condemning any current governments; if “A Bullet for Baldwin” needs 1909, it’s only the way Shakespeare needed fair Verona. It creates a distance, and audiences reflexively accept implausibility better if it’s further away: the past is a foreign country, and they do crimes differently there. But that’s all I can come up with. Aside from name-checking bonanzas, this could be anywhere, anytime.

Whatever time and place he’s in, John Qualen’s Benjamin Stepp would be out of, well, step.¹ He’s a meek, mousy file clerk with a querulous, uncertain voice that always feels like it’s about to pitch into a whine; he’s been fired, but he worked out the rest of the day anyway. Partly, that’s so he can make one last appeal to his uncaring boss, investment banker Mr. Baldwin (Sebastian Cabot)—but I have the feeling he would have done it anyway. Stepp is about to crack, but maybe it would be more accurate to think of him having a hole worn down through his mind. He’s a doormat who’s had one too many feet roughly wiped on him.

The feet belong to Baldwin and Cabot is the right choice there, bringing a natural magnetism and authority to the role.² Cabot did a lot of voicework, and every line from him sounds rich and grand, contrasting well with Qualen’s thin, nebbish tones. It’s a shame these actors didn’t get a better two-hander.

Baldwin doesn’t care about loyalty or length of service, and he’s indifferent to Stepp’s plea that the mistake he’s being fired for was fixed right away and could have happened to anyone. He doesn’t go so far as to say so, but it feels like he’s firing Stepp for the same reason he’d squash a bug. Something so small and pesky shouldn’t be around him in the first place.

But Stepp’s been pushed too far. In the best-constructed scene of the episode, the camera stays with him as he begins packing up his things, stripping off his sleeve protectors, readying himself to go. Then he opens the desk drawer and sees his gun, and his breathing picks way up—somewhere between panting, sniffing, and hyperventilating. The way this usually inaudible process suddenly makes itself known, standing in for any awkward voiceover, is maybe the best sound design we’ve seen on the show since “Breakdown.” He’s desperate, panicky, despairing. He considers suicide—and then he walks into Baldwin’s office and shoots him instead.

It’s a good hook for an episode, and for a while, the script seems invested in a more naturalistic dilemma: what is it like for a habitually passive man to suddenly commit a terrible, game-changing crime? There are some small, perfect dialogue choices in this middle section of the episode, before the first twist fully hits home. I especially like Stepp censoring himself mid-question with his landlady—“Have they—?” is surely going to be “Have they found the body?”—and being baffled when he thinks the police have only called him about the murder.

I’m even okay-ish with Stepp being summoned back to the office only to find Baldwin seemingly alive and well. The explanation for all this is still forced—it’s back-engineered to make the plot happen—but if we were in Stepp’s shoes, it would go down better. It’d be easy to suspect Baldwin’s partner, Mr. King (Philip Reed), before Stepp does, especially when King goes to such lengths to soothe his murderous employee, but we wouldn’t have to sit through such torturous exposition. And the episode would have more of an emotional core to it.

Instead, it has not one twist but two, and it clearly considers that to be enough. I’ve hinted at the mid-episode one already, but I’ll stick the rest down below. But this is a frustratingly lightweight episode, one that squanders its potential just to get you to say, “Oh, that’s clever.” It always annoys me when thrillers come up with intriguing situations but not with solid human motivations and recognizable behavior for them, and while “A Bullet for Baldwin” is far from the worst offender in that area, it can’t handle the ridiculous as well as Hitchcock himself could.

The Twist: King was also in the office the night Stepp shot Baldwin, and since he needed the deal they were all working on to go through in a timely fashion—and he was sleeping with Baldwin’s wife, making him a suspect too—he decided to hire a Baldwin lookalike he’d once seen at a smoker in Los Angeles to come to San Francisco at once and give a convincing, in-depth portrayal of Baldwin all week. He and Baldwin’s wife plan to stage a fake accidental death for Baldwin in a cabin fire after all this is through. The actor is originally told Baldwin had a stroke, but he catches on fast and negotiates himself a larger payoff. King is okay with this blackmail but not with Stepp, the actual murderer who would probably quite like getting away with it, being a “loose end,” so he gaslights Stepp—acting as though Stepp greenlit his own raise and the hiring of his new assistant, as opposed to doing it with King’s approval—and fires him all over again. Stepp, devastated once more but also thinking (thanks to King) that his mind is prone to playing tricks on him, doesn’t hesitate to relive the “hallucinated” events of the first murder and—in what he seems to think is a mere daydream—kills King too.

I know that’s a long paragraph because I had to cover the whole back half of the episode in it, but I feel like it also shows what a stretch this is. A half-hour episode cannot handle all this, and it especially can’t handle all of it past the setup. If the episode is about Mr. Baldwin’s double, and it opens with the actor being recruited for an unusual week-long job, then I buy the exact resemblance. If it’s introduced halfway through, then I don’t, and throwing in a hand-wave about how it’s all down to the beard and the nuances of the performance doesn’t convince me.

The only high point in the back half is Cabot, who finds subtle gradations in his confidence and coolness to make Davidson-the-actor distinct from Baldwin-the-banker. Davidson is pragmatic, amoral, curious, and funny, and he’d be a terrific protagonist.

I don’t mean that as a slight to Qualen, who does good work here, but the story loses track of Stepp for a while as it moves the pieces around to explain how and why the ending is going to happen. Again, Stepp could have carried the episode if it had been willing to save its clunkiness for the end or—not to ask too much here—smooth out its explanation so it wouldn’t need a whole scene’s worth of dialogue to convey it. Honestly, even introducing and developing King earlier in the episode could have saved it, and a King’s-eye POV would’ve worked too. The only version that wouldn’t work is the hybrid one we actually have, where King hijacks the plot halfway through and kills off its natural momentum. That’s a much bigger crime than shooting Baldwin.

Directed by: Justus Addiss

Written by: Eustace and Francis Cockrell

Up Next: “The Big Switch”

1. Unlike Qualen himself, whose impressive screen credits include His Girl Friday, Casablanca, and a whole raft of TV episodes—we’ll even see him again in a few weeks. ↩︎
2. I’m usually required to mention Twilight Zone appearances, and Cabot steals the show in “A Nice Place to Visit.” ↩︎