Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E15, "The Big Switch"

“The Big Switch” is a hardboiled black comedy told with energy and enthusiasm; I’m amazed I’d remembered it as a weaker episode. What else am I wrong about?

It’s another historical piece—Chicago, 1920: “In the Days of Bullets, Bootleggers, and Beautiful Dames”¹—but this is a breath of fresh air after last week’s example. For starters, “The Big Switch” has a clear sense of purpose: it even knows why it’s historical. It wants to riff off specific gangster tropes that were fading out relevance by the ’50s, and—most of all—it wants to have fun with the language. The dialogue here is as sharp as it’s ever been on the show, and the actors are clearly having the time of their lives chewing into it.

George Matthews has a picture-perfect gangster’s mug, but the episode lets his Sam Dunleavy overflow the edges of the snarling, hot-tempered gangster archetype. He becomes specific. He becomes funny. I won’t say it makes him more real—at all times, the story strives to entertain rather than convince; this is as playful as “Our Cook’s a Treasure”—but it does make him feel volatile, not just intimidating. This endearing guy consoling his pet bird on being “in stir” and giving his cat a loving-but-firm talking-to about eating his housemate can build up one hell of a head of steam and hold one hell of a grudge. He’s driven by his emotions, and while that means people can appeal to them, it also means he can change on a dime.

And it means that it’s useless for Lieutenant Al Hawkshaw (the prolific Joe Downing), his old classmate, to come at him with logic. Al’s blunt, straightforward, and professional; if he shares a pinch of Sam’s obsessiveness, his outlet for it is professional, not personal, and he manages it better. He knows when to stop.

Al lays out his view: Sam probably killed two people in Miami not so long ago, but that’s not his business. It is his business that Sam’s in town to kill Goldie, his one-time flame who took up with another guy when Sam got in a jam. Al doesn’t want Sam putting a bullet in Goldie on his watch. He’d like Sam to leave town, but if Sam won’t, well, Al will have to get nice and cozy sticking to him like glue.

The dialogue in this scene is especially good. As sheer writing, my favorite bit is where Al starts off talking about their long-ago teacher taking a switch to Sam and then says, “I’d like to take the switch to you. … Guess it’s a little late for that, though. The only switch big enough for you now is the one that throws the juice into the chair.” Perfect. The wordplay isn’t so obvious that you can see it coming from the first use of “switch,” and the succinctness of the last line gives it such an impeccable rhythm. Imagine how much weaker it would be if it were “the electric chair.”

The best line deliveries, though, come when Sam works himself up to a boil even as he’s trying to pretend that aw shucks, that stuff with Goldie’s no big deal. He doesn’t care about her. Besides, he broke up with her, not the other way around. “Nobody runs out on me,” he says, but the words come out too hot, too desperate, for him to sound suave and untouched by heartbreak. Al has no trouble at all seeing past the attempted meaning, and he finishes Sam’s real thought, canting the words just right: “–And lives.”

But what’s most interesting about Sam and Al’s conversation is how Al casts a different light on it in his next scene. He’s willing to plant himself in a speakeasy all night to keep track of Sam, but he sees a distinction between this and his visit the other night: “From now on I’m just a cop.” His sentimentality, such as it was, was so guarded that it was hard to recognize it until he says he’s done with it, but I like that there’s an internal moral distinction he’s making. Protecting Goldie, a woman he’s probably never met, is an impersonal responsibility; protecting Sam from being arrested for her murder—protecting himself from having to arrest an old school chum, no matter how he feels about him—is closer to home. It’s over now, though. Al can recognize what he’s felt, however ambivalent it was, and put a period to it. His “switch” speech was better dialogue, but this is the better character moment that makes him feel like a specific character with his own internal drives.

And this is such a fun episode that I still haven’t even gotten to the main crux of the plot yet. Let’s finally do that:

Sam is indeed intent on killing Goldie, but he wants an ironclad alibi for it. Luckily, local club owner Barney is the man for the job … once he boosts Sam’s initial offer of $500 all the way to $2500.² He’ll have Sam come to the back room for a card game. Everyone, including Al, will see him go in, but no one will see him go out through the secret door in Barney’s phonebooth. Barney will even keep up some lively patter, with a pinch of shouting, to make it clear to any listening ears that Sam is still there (and likely still losing).

Again, what makes this so great is the snap of the dialogue (“But I didn’t crack, did I? And you didn’t burn, did you?” Barney says, emphasizing how well he held up under pressure during a previous alibi scheme) and the performances that slide just a degree or two away from pure convention. The best example of the last quality is when Barney reacts with dismay to learning Sam’s target is “a dame.” It’s a bit aw-darn, I-thought-we-were-on-the-same-page-about-stuff, like he’s found out Sam roots for the wrong sports team, but what really makes it work is when he essentially shrugs his way into acceptance: “Well, I guess they gotta go like the rest of us. We all gotta go sometime.” Sometimes the speed of a moral journey shows how shallowly the conviction was held in the first place, but it’s rarely this funny.

There’s a moment when the humor stops, though, and it’s when Sam tracks Goldie down. Beverly Michaels—one of the screen’s favorite good-time bad girls—does particularly good work here: Goldie has been an abstraction, a photo, a goal, and now she’s real. Michaels, with help from a strong script, makes her a compelling character in her own right almost instantly. Her fear and panic hit—Sam’s mercurial temper is at its most dangerous here—but she’s not here just to cower. She quickly proves brave and quick-thinking, leaning hard on appealing to Sam’s sentimental side. Outraged possessiveness and perverted sentimentality brought him here, so that’s what she’ll use to get him to leave.

First, she tries to get him to see her as an innocent, loving wife, not a scheming cheat. Sure, things between them didn’t work out, but she’s sweetly loyal to Morg, her new man, and doesn’t that count for something? She was so scared when Sam was in trouble, and Morg helped. No dice—until Goldie pulls out a letter from an out-of-town Morg that mentions “taking good care of Baby.”

Barney didn’t like the idea of being party to killing a woman; Sam has a much deeper problem killing a mother. Vacillation becomes complete, starry-eyed commitment to Goldie’s new life when Goldie—now “saying goodbye” to Morg over the phone—fervently asks after the baby, “little Dunleavy.” Hey, that’s Sam’s name! She named the baby after him!

Sam is besotted with the idea of being a kind of stealth godfather—“Boxing gloves, roller skates? He need anything?”—and provider. Matthews is particularly good in this final turn towards exuberant paternalism, and the humor has just a hint of teeth: the absurd contrast between Sam the hardened killer and Sam the adoring, gosh-wow surrogate dad is funny in itself, but it also feels like a parodic exaggeration of gangster culture. Sam’s not Mafia, so he doesn’t need to sell (and twist) the concept of family in the same way, but he’s still all about following this image of himself as a man who gives loyalty and deserves it in return; his sweetness comes from the same place as his rage. He doesn’t have the coolness or the common sense to separate himself from his emotions or make choices about them, to ask why on earth Goldie would name her baby after him or realize she doesn’t want to go shopping for baby booties with the man who almost killed her. He even gives her a tender forehead kiss as he goes.

Al and Barney would both know better.

It’s such a delight when Goldie’s phone call lets the episode cut to Morg, stroking the gun he and Goldie have nicknamed “Baby.” No little Dunleavy in the picture here, just two up-and-coming criminals who are going to have to get out of town for a while.

Most of noir’s strong women are femme fatales, with their independent will expressed through duplicity and corruption; I’m fine with that—love a good femme fatale—but it’s always nice to see twists on the theme.³ Goldie is a good one, and the twist is all down to humor and perspective. Sam would think of her as a schemer if he knew the truth, but the framing of the episode shows that her lie was necessary to keep her alive, and letting the camera stay with her after Sam leaves makes her, however briefly, a POV character in her own right. She’s a crook, but so is Sam, and the episode has no outrage about it. Her romance with Morg (who calls back, worried) also seems to be real, mercenary streak or no. Goldie is her own protagonist, and this is the story of how she outwitted her jealous but slow-on-the-uptake ex and saved her life.

That kind of sparky energy and interest in characterization—even the bartender at Barney’s gets good enough lines to imbue him with the sense that he exists outside of a supporting role—makes “The Big Switch” a charmer. Weaker episodes of AHP can sometimes feel like they’re biding their time for the twist, waiting for the one plot development that actually matters, but this is such a lively episode with such a strong sense of dramatic incident that it never has that problem. The twist is just the neat bow tying it all up at the end.

The Twist: Sam, flush with the joy of being Baby Dunleavy’s namesake, heads back to Barney’s—just in time for Barney to accidentally shoot himself cleaning one of the guns he’s been polishing all episode. Al rushes in and catches a concerned Sam hovering over the dead Barney. That’s it for him: thanks to his fake alibi, everyone “knows” he was in here all night.

This is a good ironic twist—in his opening, Hitch referred to original author Cornell Woolrich as building not mousetraps but “people-traps,” and yeah, that works—even if it feels a little more consciously designed than the rest of the episode. Before, I could sense writing making people funnier, smarter, and more interesting than they might be in real life; now I can sense it doling out fates. I like the first version of authorial interference much more than the second, but I’m more than willing to let the episode slide on that front. It puts a good button on things—we know, though Sam does not, that even if he’s desperate enough to admit his original plan and call on Goldie as an alibi, she’s no longer there to be called—and it lets the episode end with Sam expressing every side of himself all at once, both his toughness and his softness brought to the surface by the fix he’s in.

I always think of AHP as a suspense show first and foremost, but there’s a way in which many of these episodes can functions as mini-mysteries: once we fully understand who everyone is, the story’s over. The twist isn’t a way to make Sam pay but a way to get him at his most Sam, all at once, and then we’re out.

Directed by: Don Weis

Written by: Cornell Woolrich (story), Richard Carr (teleplay)

Up Next: “You Got to Have Luck”

1. I’m sad to learn there was such a beautiful dame shortage in 1956. Thank God more were discovered. ↩︎
2. Almost $30k today. Should I get into the alibi-granting business? I feel like the answer is yes. ↩︎
3. Pitfall has a lovely example of a well-intentioned woman (the great Lizabeth Scott) who has to pay the price for being the object of two men’s desire. ↩︎