Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E22, "A Place of Shadows"

It’s a cold, stormy night in the middle of nowhere, and the station attendant knows at once that Mark Damon’s character is an unlikely monk.

“A Place of Shadows” has a strong opening that makes the most of its specific setting. Director Robert Stevens doesn’t press the chilly, snowy atmosphere far enough to make me shiver in sympathy, but that’s because the physical effects of the cold are of only secondary importance here. This winter—its icy roads, its howling winds, its freezing temperatures—is of a piece with the isolation; the point is that the world is, or can be, lonely and treacherous.

It’s the world that Damon is carrying around with him, and he bears it through this middle-of-nowhere place and up to the monastery: “Anybody who gets off here, there’s only one place they’re going,” as the station attendant says. Damon’s playing Ray Clements, a knotted-up young man whose sad eyes burn like dark stars, but Ray Clements is playing Floyd Unser, best pal to the badly injured Dave Rocco, who’s laid up at the monastery. Father Vincente (our old friend Everett Sloane) wrote to Unser on Rocco’s behalf, but Ray has come instead.

I’ll admit that I tend to get frustrated when “too many” names get thrown at me at once, and no, I don’t seem to have a set number for what “too many” is. I’d remembered this as being a slightly muddled episode full of characters revealing they’re actually someone else, but in fact, that only happens the once: Ray Clements, as Vincente knows from the start, is not Floyd Unser. He’s no friend of Rocco’s. He’s here to kill him.

The theme here is not aliases or secret identities, it’s that Ray doesn’t know himself, even though everyone else can see who he is.

Ray is too distracted by his unwieldy grievance. He hates Rocco, because Rocco took everything from him, even his illusions—even his loved ones’ illusions—that he’s a good person. He stole—“borrowed,” he tries to insist—a huge sum of money from his office; he intended to return it, he really did. But Rocco swindled him out of it, and so the theft came to light. Ray stayed out of prison—but not out of debt, borrowing heavily (this time in reality, and on much worse terms) to repay his employer’s losses—but once again, everyone knew who he was. They didn’t like what they saw. He was fired, his girlfriend left him, and his father died of shame.

“They called it a heart attack. It was, all right. His heart was broken. Dave Rocco killed him, Father, just as sure as I’m going to kill him now.”

Father Vincente wants to persuade him otherwise. He tells Ray that Rocco’s accident changed him. He gives him back his money, saying it’s what Rocco wanted.

Ray will take the cash, but it’s not enough: “Will it bring my father back?”

It’s easy to see, though, that Father Vincente’s gentle but persistent strategy is working on him: he’s softhearted, and he’s never entirely shaken his one-time Catholicism, even though he’s moved away from it. He’s never used that gun he’s carrying, as decorated veteran Brother Gerard (Sean McClory)—like everyone else here—sees right away. Gerard gives his advice too, and it’s working on him as surely as Vincente’s is, and for more or less the same reason: they see Ray clearly, and they accept him. They believe he still has value. He’s in such a low, desolate place—the weather is his state of mind, this is all his state of mind—that of course this matters to him.

“Most of the things that you have lost, Mr. Clements—your job, your girl, your self-respect—can be replaced or recovered. But neither you nor I, Mr. Clements, can now or at any other time give back the breath of life.”

Suddenly, killing Rocco becomes less a necessity—a grim capper to a life that has become very grim—and more a choice that he’s aware he can make or not make. Damon’s performance isn’t showstopping, but it’s good, and it’s rooted in real, specific emotion: it is phenomenally hard to give up on hate. Uproot the weeds inside you, and you don’t know where the dirt will settle. You don’t know who you’ll be on the other side of it.

Ray chooses a half-measure, moving away from his vengeance but not from his hate, and there’s a nobility to that, too—when he insists that they take him back to the dark, lonely train station despite the horrible weather, there’s a kind of fraught heroism to it.¹ But that’s not enough for the more complete catharsis the episode is aiming for, so the night has a few more surprises in store for him.

This is an unusual episode for AHP. As gentle as the pace may appear, it’s not without momentum—each scene has a purpose—but it’s also a bit understuffed—each scene has only one purpose. And that purpose is low-key, philosophical, and emotional; it’s about theme, not story. Unbeknownst to Ray, his task is not to act but to understand. (Though he has to act in order to understand; he’s not an abstract kind of guy.)

I’ve come around on this quite a bit since my first viewing, because although its crime plot—the ostensible justification for its placement in the series—can be clunky and underbaked, parts of this are surprisingly moving for a show that’s often low on feeling. And again, Damon is good at those beats, especially when they’re wordless: his scene at Vespers, with the reflexive, stylized mannerisms of prayer giving way to that desperate look upwards, is particularly fine. It’s a tale of moral suspense, with a man’s character in jeopardy rather than his life, and that’s a nice way to shake things up.

The Twist: The real Floyd Unser is lying in wait at the train station, ready to ambush Ray for the money he knows a repentant Rocco returned to him. He shoots Ray, and Ray shoots back in self-defense. He stumbles back to the monastery, narrowly avoids some suspicious cops arresting him for Rocco’s murder, and admits to Father Vincente that killing Unser, even in clear self-defense, was horrific. He wants Rocco to know that he doesn’t hate him anymore—but Vincente reveals that Rocco died before Ray ever arrived. “The way you felt [at first], it would have done no good to tell you,” he says.

The ending halfway works. I believe that Vincente and Gerard would hide the truth, that they would think it was wrong to share it when it would only make Ray bitterly happy or—even likelier—take away an essentially suicidal man’s one dark purpose without giving him a brighter one or any inner peace to make up for it. But if I were them, I would have given up that secret after a sick or injured monk (presumably) almost took a bullet in Rocco’s name.

Also, the cops are one of the clunkiest elements here, creating a last-minute question about whether Ray will go to prison only to resolve it seconds later by having Ray recap what we’ve just seen. The one good part about their arrival at the monastery is that it resituates that earlier ongoing theme with Ray: now he sees himself clearly but is a mystery to (some) others, as if his new recognition affords his selfhood a new sense of privacy.

And though I have a lot of good things to say about Mark Damon’s performance, he gets a memorably awkward line reading here, saying, “I killed a man,” instead of, “I killed a man.” Paging Harry Caul ….

With all that, “A Place of Shadows” can’t help but be a weaker episode, but it’s still an interesting one. This is Dennis’s first fully original teleplay of the season, and it’s cool to see a more individualized approach from him.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Robert C. Dennis

Up Next: “Back for Christmas”

1. In Hugo’s Les Misérables, Javert kills himself because he knows that if he doesn’t, he’ll eventually try to recover his shattered sense of self by arresting Jean Valjean after all; he dies to get out ahead of his own weakness. Ray’s voluntary exile has (faint) shades of that. ↩︎