Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E21, "Safe Conduct"

There is nothing wrong with this episode. It’s a serviceable little Cold War story with a decent and rather Hitchcockian hook: Mary Prescott, an American reporter on her way home from a high-profile tour of an unnamed Soviet country is, seemingly inexplicably, entrapped and denounced to the secret police. Lead actress Claire Trevor—billed not only above the title but on a separate card—had an Academy Award and two more nominations under her belt. She was Dallas in Stagecoach, for crying out loud. While she’s not at her charismatic best here—if you encountered this in a void, you wouldn’t necessarily guess she was a bona fide movie star—she’s not phoning it in. Her performance is low-key but effective. She’s fine, in short.

The whole episode is fine. It’s never more than fine, though. It has occasional moments of interest, but no real highs. It has no real lows, either, so it’s not even bad in an interesting way. It’s there, that’s all. It will take you from 8:00 to 8:30 without incurring your wrath, but it will also leave you wondering, “Is that it?”

“Safe Conduct” is at its best when Mary—a tough, intelligent woman—runs up against facets of this society that, despite all her preparation, she doesn’t understand. Trevor gives her enough pugnacity and cynicism to make it clear that she’s no dupe: she knows her authorized tour means she’s only seen the authorized sights. Her newspaper is being used as an instrument of propaganda, and while her gimlet-eyed perspective can undermine that somewhat, perspective only goes so far without evidence. But it’s a living, and this was a good assignment, and she accepts that. She’s morally solid without being a crusader. Some of that comes out through dialogue, but mostly it’s there in Trevor’s bedrock performance.

What is in the writing is that Mary still underestimates the situation. She’s skeptical but not suspicious, and while she can ask journalistic questions when she’s in interview mode, she’s not always “on.” She accepts bureaucracy as bureaucracy, and reflexively, she expects civilized limits to it. Her world is an orderly one. In a totalitarian country, she understands that it’s good that she has a letter of safe conduct from that country’s president, but she hasn’t thought deeply enough about what that means or about what kind of country would demand it.

There’s a good small instance of this early on, when Mary, organized and ready to prove that organization, asks the officials on the train if they’re sure they don’t want to examine her letter from President Stoska. She doesn’t say it, but she thinks she’s perceiving a weakness. This is carelessness. It’s complacence. They’re too willing to accept what they’re told.

In fact, they already know everything. “I have a copy of the letter here,” one of the officials says.

Mary doesn’t have time to register that she’s assumed too much, because soon they’re pre-stamping her luggage for an easy pass through the next checkpoint (gotta give her the VIP treatment to win a favorable write-up), and she’s meeting soccer star Jan Gubak (Jacques Bergerac).

If there’s a major flaw in this episode, as opposed to just a whole lot of unremarkable and faintly dull virtues, it’s Bergerac’s performance as Jan. AHP must have seen something in him, since he’ll be back for two more episodes; Ginger Rogers must have seen even more, since she married him. But while Trevor’s charisma feels restrained, Bergerac’s feels nonexistent. It’s an entirely adequate portrayal—there are no inexplicable choices, and in every scene, he’s conveying what he should be conveying. But I’d be getting as much or more out of Trevor acting across from giant cue cards with his lines on them.

Jan and Mary chat. (This episode throws in a fair amount of Cold War seasoning, adding bits of Soviet worldbuilding that don’t affect the plot but are there to inform the realistically fucked-up atmosphere: Jan explaining that he’s forbidden to take any significant sum of money out of the country is a nice detail on that front.) They’re interrupted by the obnoxious Professor Klopka (Werner Klemperer), who briefly sets off Mary’s reporting instincts by claiming his country has a cure for polio it simply hasn’t decided to share yet, but never mind debunking that, back to her private compartment and the promise of a date in Munich.

Then—surprisingly late in the episode—comes the inciting incident. Jan says he desperately needs to smuggle a diamond-studded watch into Germany to pay for his sister’s operation, and Mary, cautious but unable to resist such a sympathetic case of desperation, agrees to wear it out of the country alongside her other jewelry. Right as the plot prompts the viewer to wonder if she’ll be caught, she is … because Jan instantly denounces her, claiming she showed him the watch and bragged about how she could get it through customs.

It’s a decent shock, and Mary is too busy being hurt and appalled at Jan’s viciousness—and too busy being shuttled away to a prison-adjacent waiting area, where she can think about what kind of future lies ahead of her here—to spend much time wondering why he’s done this. It feels like an almost motiveless burst of sadism—or, perhaps, the audience gets to think, a strange move in an immensely complicated geopolitical game played by a country where such strange moves seem routine. Mary can’t fully understand it—she never gets the information we do—but she was already a target: Klopka is actually Captain Kriza, a member of the secret police who is covertly taking the lead in her interrogation and detention without her even realizing it.

Klemperer, who had an impressive and long-running career on the small screen in particular—he was Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes, but for decades, he appeared on an incredible number of major TV shows—is arguably the highlight of the episode, even though he doesn’t get too much to do. As a villain, he’s a little too ineffectual to generate much terror—he’s a satirical figure, ultimately motivated as much by the desire to save face (and his own skin) as by the drive to power—but as a force to shake up a slightly sleepy episode, he’s quite nice. He switches from Klopka to Kriza via a well-composed transition sequence where “prisoner” Klopka is escorted out of the room with Mary and confident Captain Kriza strides into an office where he’s so in charge that he gets his coat remove and his cigarette lit for him. It brings in a nice briskness and a sense of energy, and that’s a shot in the arm this episode needs.

Even after writing all this up, though, I’m still not sure why it needs that so badly. Every individual element, with the exception of Bergerac’s plodding performance, works well enough. But it all lacks something. The story needs more incidents. The actors need more chemistry. The suspense needs more time to build. If it were a meal, I’d be adding salt.

The Twist: The diamonds on the watch are actually rhinestones, and Kriza decides Mary was trying to trick them into making an arrest that would be a publicity nightmare. They let her go, congratulating her on the “joke.” Jan then reveals to her that he’s working for the anti-communist underground. He denounced her (knowing all along that the “diamonds” would quickly be discovered as fakes, so she’d be safe) to create a distraction so his own smuggling—of the last writings of an imprisoned, tortured, and murdered bishop—would fly under the radar. The two reconcile as Mary promises to publicize the document, but despite one kiss “for the road,” it will be too dangerous to see each other again until the Soviet Union falls.

Eh. Like the rest of the episode, this conclusion has its bright spots. Mary gets a tart, quick-thinking rejoinder to the guard praising the presumed prank and the American sense of humor it sprang from: “Well, you know, we’re just little devils at heart.” She doesn’t understand at this point, but she knows to keep up any pretense that’s allowing her to go on her way. Now she gets who she’s dealing with. And I like how what initially seems like a despicable act actually stems from a peculiar chivalry: Jan explains that if he had asked her to smuggle out the tube with the documents, and her luggage had been searched despite the guard’s promises, there would have been no way to save her. He had to give her a fake risk to slightly improve the odds that he could successfully shoulder the deadly one.

But in the last minute or so, this becomes romantic suspense, and these two simply don’t have any spark. They’re a weak, tepid cup of tea. Maybe another pair of actors could have sold the flirtation and camaraderie and made the apparent betrayal come as a sharper shock; maybe they could have created a real sense of longing and wistfulness at the necessary farewell. Maybe then audiences of the time would have clamored to bring down the Berlin Wall just so Mary and Jan could be together again.

This is what we have, though, and all I can say, again, is that it’s fine. It’s inoffensive. It really puts the taupe in black and white.

Directed by: Justus Aldiss

Written by: Andrew Solt¹

Up Next: “Place of Shadows”

1. This man wrote the screenplay for In a Lonely Place, one of the best romantic drama-noir hybrids of all time. Apparently we all have our off days. And sometimes you get Bogart, and sometimes you get Jacques Bergerac. ↩︎