Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E2: "Premonition"

After four years away, composer Kim Stanger has returned home to Stangerford. He’s here because of a premonition, he tells us.¹

There’s an immediate claustrophobia to this particular homecoming: what’s it like to be the black sheep of your family in a town named for your family? He’s recognized within seconds of stepping out of his taxi.

His self-assigned welcoming committee? Doug Irwin (George MacReady), an old family friend—in fact, to make the family connections even tighter and even more suffocating, he’s also the father of Kim’s ex-girlfriend-turned-sister-in-law, Susan (Cloris Leachman). Doug is anxious to choreograph Kim’s return, to give everyone time to prepare for each other, but Kim refuses. In some sense, the problem here is of his own making: he wants to name-drop Paris, Rome, and the Sorbonne, proving his international credentials, but he needs home to be exactly the way he left it, and he wants to fit into it in the same old way. To him, four years abroad is no reason to knock, let alone call ahead.

But when he strolls into the family home and settles down at the piano, he’s interrupted not by his domineering, patrician father, Greg Stanger, but by the wide-eyed Susan—who is joined soon enough by her husband, Kim’s brother. These are the new reigning Stangers of Stangerford.

Susan and the reserved Perry make for an intriguing duo, with Susan trembling and soft when Kim is around—she even listens to him angst about his estranged father, who hasn’t answered any of his letters: “Why does he make me choose between him and my music?”—but demonstrating a core toughness when she and her husband are alone. It’s as if she reflexively matches Kim when she’s with Kim and Perry when she’s with Perry. As for which one is the real Susan? Well, we know which brother she chose.

Perry reveals that Greg died soon after Kim left. It was a heart attack, he says, on the tennis court—the same tennis court he just came from? Maybe. Kim is aghast: why didn’t they tell him?

He soon begins to poke around that question, and his outrage and resentment at his brother—“You got it all: Greg’s love, Greg’s money, and my girl!”—shifts to open suspicion. In a town that has your name on it, Kim sees at once, you can cover up anything you want. He chases the story of his father’s death, and the more loose ends he meets with, the more he himself unravels.

There’s the sense that Kim can’t function as a proper Stanger anymore—“I can’t cross your palm like my brother does,” he seethes at a coroner who hints at wanting a bribe—and he’s giving up on civility and subtlety along with money and manners. Haranguing turns into assault. Buck him, and he’ll threaten to fillet you with a baling hook. He’s presented himself as more sensitive than his small town fellows, but the flip-side of that sensitivity is the inability to control his own strong emotions. And he’ll chase them, even when it might be better not to.

The Twist: Kim unravels the mystery surrounding his father’s death only to discover that he was the one responsible for it. On that hunting trip four years ago, Kim and Greg argued, and Kim’s loaded rifle “accidentally” went off, killing Greg. The family—with Doug Irwin’s help—covered it all up to spare Kim and preserve a sense of decorum, and Kim, retreating into fantasy, was shuttled off to a hospital in Arizona, where he’s been ever since. His return home was actually an escape.

This reveal does illuminate the episode in a way that improves it on a rewatch. In particular, it’s interesting to pick up on the nuances of how the other characters respond to Kim. But before I get to that, I want to spare some annoyance for Kim’s final lines. He sinks in on himself after Susan reveals that he was responsible: “I thought so,” he says.

No, you didn’t, Kim! He’s been touchy and volatile all episode, eager to blame everyone but himself—and bully them into accepting it. No matter what he says here, he never seemed to think he was the problem.

I can see the argument that this is a defense mechanism, with Kim displacing the memory of his own guilt on to the people around him, but Forsythe’s performance isn’t nuanced enough to pull that off in the face of a weak script. Kim is bullish and self-pitying throughout, and the only sense of regret he offers, for most of the runtime, is the kind that’s flattering to him: oh, he would’ve mended things with Greg! Why didn’t anyone give him a chance?

It would be easy for a few tweaks to better sell both a more sympathetic Kim and a more traditional, if subverted, sense of premonition. Kim could return with the sense that he desperately needs to reconnect with his father before it’s too late. He had the feeling, in “Paris,” that some terrible fate was going to befall Greg, and he needs to get there in time. The family could try in vain to convince him that Greg is, uh, on vacation right now, and Kim’s restless sense of guilt—his subconscious understanding that that can’t possibly be true—could lead him to poke holes in their story. Maybe he starts finding evidence of the cover-up, but he’s reluctant to believe it—and on the surface, that’s because he’s a decent man who doesn’t want to think his brother could be capable of murder. He’s looking, ideally, for a way to believe, despite all the mounting evidence, that his father is still alive, still capable of being saved. That would provide a nice double fake-out, building off the anticipation of a coming twist: the audience is prepared for one reveal (Kim’s father is already dead, and maybe Kim is next), only to get another (Kim’s father is dead because Kim killed him).

As it is, Kim comes across as a man looking to achieve the impossible not by saving his already-dead father but by crafting a narrative in which he was never responsible, and the conspiracy was meant to rob him of love and money, not protect him. His quest for a story more flattering than the truth could make for a good episode, but the self-serving angle would need to come to the surface a little more, to be dramatic rather than interpretive.

Still, as I said, the reveal does recontextualize the episode and make a few details shine. My favorite scene on rewatch is Kim’s first run-in with Doug Irwin, where the great George MacReady puts exactly the right amount of blank confusion into his delivery as he repeats, “Paris?” and, “Working?” The first time through, it feels like a small town dismissal of Kim’s international life and artistic career—exactly the angle Kim would lean into, in fact. On repeat viewing, Doug’s struggle to connect these ideas with what he knows about Kim’s last few years is lot more obvious and meaningful. It also makes this exchange subtly hilarious:

Doug: “Kim, your father never hated you.”

Kim: “Then why doesn’t he answer my letters?”

Doug, with an awkward laugh: “…I don’t know exactly what to say.”

Kim’s buried-but-still-present resentment of his father also has more teeth on a rewatch, especially when standing beneath Greg’s portrait leads him to immediately go fiddle with a hunting rifle. Whatever made that gun go off four years ago, it’s still in him now. It adds new shades of darkness to his violent confrontations with the two coroners—what he would like to argue is an exception, happening only in exceptional circumstances, is actually more characteristic and habitual. Kim loses his temper, and he loses it thoroughly.

The darkest take on the ending could see Kim’s story repeating itself someday. He could come back to Stangerford again, trying out a different exculpatory fantasy. I can see him four years from now, standing in the town square, still wanting to be the hero.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Harold Swanton

Up Next: “Triggers in Leash”

1. It bothers me an inordinate amount that both Kim and the episode seem to be getting the meaning of “premonition” wrong. Mostly, while Kim has the vague sense that something is wrong, he’s prying into the past, not trying to avoid a worrying future: there’s nothing pre- about it. But it saves it a little when I think about him actually having a premonition about what he’s close to finding out, because it also makes the story an especially grim self-induced paradox: he has a premonition about the end of the episode, and in pursuing it, he makes it happen. I’m going to assume that’s the case and edit out the bits I had in this article that previously complained about it. ↩︎