Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E18, "Shopping for Death"

We’ve come to our first Ray Bradbury script! This story is collected in The October Country, which I reread this week. Alas, it’s better on the page than it is on the screen.

It’s a sweltering New York summer, and all across the city, things are going wrong. There’s a car crash. Then a fall from a high place. Then a fire. And two meek-looking men, former insurance salesmen, scurry about in their suits and ties, taking notes on it all.

My first problem with the episode is that we only need one of these guys, and that’s Clarence (Robert Harris). He’s the one who decided to stay busy in his retirement by investigating the free-floating carelessness that mushrooms up in weather like this; his friend, Elmer (John Qualen, last seen in “A Bullet for Baldwin”), is mostly along for the ride, which is to say that he’s there to receive heaps of exposition. This is a very talky episode.

Clarence believes that certain people are prone to a kind of self-destructive carelessness, especially in miserable weather like this. They take chances they shouldn’t. Years in the insurance field have let him recognize these ill-fated souls in advance, and he’s been dragging Elmer up and down the city in a quest to intervene.

His exact cause is specific and peculiar, but he fits handily into a familiar stereotype: the condescending do-gooder. While he has a starry-eyed vision of this self-appointed task—“While there’s time, we can help others”—and he’s not entirely ignorant of the realities of the poverty he’s facing—he clocks that “living in a tenement on a day like this is like being boiled alive”—he’s almost gleeful about today’s target, Mrs. Shrike (Jo Van Fleet). She’s aptly named, and he’s the one who points it out: “The butcher bird, shrike.” She’s a pushy, bellowing caricature, all disheveled housedress and limp, bedraggled hair; she’s unpleasant, picky, and accusatory. Clarence—born, to his dismay, too early for reality TV—can’t stop watching. “Isn’t she classic?” he asks Elmer. “Ever seen anything like her?”

I don’t like this episode, but to the extent that it works, it’s because of Jo Van Fleet’s outsized, fearlessly messy performance. Her husband—seen early on, storming out—hates her. Her neighbors hate her. She’ll yell at a baby. She’s relentless in her aggressive disdain. She’s even creative with it: when she buys beef brains from the butcher, she warns him against at least three ways of cheating her (passing off sheep brains for beef, giving her yesterday’s brains instead of fresh, and putting his “fat thumb” on the scale). It’s a bombardment of preemptive, enraged mistrust, and unsurprisingly, it leaves the butcher looking too long at the gleaming blade of his knife.

Clarence sees him do it, and it’s all the proof he needs that he’s right. Mrs. Shrike is indeed “shopping for death” and angering people out of a subconscious desire to die. In this “killing weather,” so close to 92 degrees Fahrenheit—an almost mystical transition point past which irritations blow up into murder—she may just get what she wants. (Lest we forget the weather, the episode is good at keeping it in the forefront: everyone in that butcher shop scene is glistening with sweat.)

Clarence sees a lot. When he and Elmer find their way into Mrs. Shrike’s apartment, he spies a light bulb dangling from a frayed cord, poised above a bathtub¹, and he notices the now-warm beef brains sitting out on an end-table, a case of botulism waiting to happen.

But he doesn’t notice that the only butcher shop Mrs. Shrike can afford is called CUT-RATE MEATS; maybe she’s not wrong to be wary of the goods. He doesn’t see that he’s intruding on this angry, desperate woman’s one window of relaxation—her chance to sit down with the comics and a soda or a beer.

The episode gives the audience the chance to pick up on it first. Van Fleet’s performance takes on new shades during this attempted intervention, revealing hints of curiosity and humor. Oh, the light cord above the bath could kill her? “So? So I’m dead. So you’re here for the funeral early.” The brush-off becomes a bristle when she thinks the two men might have come from the landlord—another reminder that she has this place, her only retreat, on sufferance—but it fades into something softer and more open when Clarence turns philosophical. When he talks about where her meanness comes from, when he seems to recognize the hurt it stems from, she looks almost hypnotized. No one, Van Fleet’s look implies, has ever talked to her like this. No one’s ever tried to understand.

But Clarence’s efforts are poisoned. “We turn so mean we make people want to hit us,” but when he says “we,” he just means her. Mrs. Shrike gets a few moments to mistake this for genuine human sympathy, but then she realizes he sees her only as a test subject, one of a larger class of “accident-prone” people. He’s been following her without her knowing it, and finding out that she’s been under a microscope sets her off.

Her big monologue is the one selling point in an otherwise wearying episode. While Van Fleet is good at the nails-on-a-chalkboard awfulness of Mrs. Shrike off on a tear, it’s one-note, and that one note is the emotional equivalent of a blaring air horn. This speech takes her rage and gives it more purpose and texture: it’s full of raw pain, and it’s coming from the heart of her:

“What are you doing, you having a ball or something? Crawling around the tenement district, seeing how everybody lives? … You don’t like nothing you see! You’re stupid! … ‘Open the window,’ you say. ‘Let in a little fresh air.’ You open the window, you let in the flies, and you’re dead, you stupid! ‘Turn down the radio,’ you say. Why? So I can hear them trucks outside and the kids yelling? ‘Fix the leaky gas,’ how? You want to lend me the money? I’ll fix it.”

She has no money, no time, no resources, and no hope. She’s hot. She can’t sleep—and when she starts talking about not sleeping all summer long, her anger dissolves into tears. She used to be “nice-looking,” she insists. “I could show you some people who knew me then.”

So go on, she challenges him. “Tell me something I don’t know about myself.”²

It’s unanswerable, and Clarence admits as much, saying, “I don’t know how to proceed.”

This scene is stagy but human, and it’s the best the episode has to offer. It builds on everything to that point—the open wound of Mrs. Shrike’s hatred, the smugness of Clarence’s approach to his cause—and brings it all together in a barn-burner of a speech. But it isn’t the end, and where the story goes from here feels comparatively shallow: it’s willing to talk more about Mrs. Shrike’s humanity, but it’s not willing to let it matter. It flattens her out to just another statistic after all.

The Twist: Mrs. Shrike, still in a fury, hurls the lukewarm beef brains at Clarence, who raises his cane to bash her brains out in return. Elmer hauls him out in time, but they all know what almost happened. Clarence realizes that he bungled his intervention because he saw Mrs. Shrike as “a fascinating kind of specimen,” not “a lost soul.” Right as Elmer’s consoling him that maybe they can get her husband to intervene, Mr. Shrike, drunk and boiling—the temperature’s just ticked up to 92 degrees—comes striding across the street with a longshoreman’s hook in his pants and murder in his eyes. The two former insurance salesman, out on the street, bear distant witness to Mrs. Shrike’s death and then leave.

This is an awful nothing of an ending.³ To make it worse, it’s easy to see the outline of a significantly better ending, like a shapely fossil beneath a film of sludge. Just let Clarence bludgeon Mrs. Shrike to death! “You caused what you sought to prevent” is a classic outcome: a bit trite, maybe, but satisfying. Also, it makes the consequences of his well-meant but high-handed interference part of the story; the script could embody it in action instead of spelling it out in his dialogue.

Alternately, it could—like Bradbury’s short story version, collected in The October Country as “Touched with Fire”—turn more fatalistic, handling its final murder, and the insurance salesmen’s reaction to it, with a a numb dread rather than with a portentous thud.

“Shopping for Death” loves Clarence too well: it rescues him from any consequences besides his own guilt, and it emphasizes his guilt (Elmer even seems to be shepherding him away at the end, like he’s too stricken to walk on his own) to the point of sentimentality. Without either an injection of impulsive human violence or a turn towards tragic detachment, Clarence’s plot fizzles out. The show doesn’t even get any dark comedy out of how, guilt or no guilt, he’s not risking his life once the longshoreman’s hook comes out. There’s nothing! He bothers a woman and then lets her get murdered! It’s story-shaped on the page, thanks to Bradbury’s prose and the tilt towards subtle horror, but not on the screen.

All that leaves Jo Van Fleet to carry the load, and she does her best. The brief, haunted vulnerability she shows in the emotional climax of the episode makes it gutting when she throws herself back into the role of shrieking harridan, letting her rage take the wheel and bawling, “Murder! Murder!” after a fleeing Clarence and Elmer. Again, it’s a broad performance, but it needs to be; it needs to be a whirlwind that can catch Mrs. Shrike up and keep her from thinking or feeling more than she has to. Maybe part of the problem is that nothing else here can be as big, or feel as significant, as she does; she’s a structural problem. And, as an unhappy and unpleasant woman, a societal problem. The episode’s solution, in both cases, is to murder her.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Ray Bradbury

Up Next: “The Derelicts”

1. As my wife put it, “He’s looking for Final Destination deaths.” ↩︎
2. Ending a verbal assault on a Clarence with that particular line makes this scene oddly reminiscent of 8 Mile, which is not a comparison I ever thought I would pull out for this show. ↩︎
3. And “woman killed by her husband” is the exact opposite of a shocking twist, and actuarial table experts should know that. This should have been the number one thing they were trying to avoid! Having Mrs. Shrike’s husband murder her also makes Clarence’s sententious lectures about her self-destructive urges more painful than ever. The trace of victim-blaming was always there, but when the episode could pretend it was about the butcher, there was some distance. Sure, yeah, you probably shouldn’t harangue people who work with sharp knives all day. In light of it foreshadowing her death by domestic violence, it’s more troubling. ↩︎