Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E25, "There Was an Old Woman"

Note: Because the next two Thursdays are Christmas and New Year’s, the review of our next episode, “Whodunit,” will go up on January 8, 2026.

It’s wild that this episode doesn’t have a bunch of dolls in it, right? Did Alfred Hitchcock Presents not have a doll budget? Did it blow it all on the dummy in “Thus Died Riabouchinska”?

This is a feather-light episode. Like last week’s “The Perfect Murder,” you can see it dancing up to the edge of some of the darker old-woman-in-jeopardy territory “The Cheney Vase” explored so well—but it backs down even more obviously, deliberately using certain scene transitions to lessen the tension and sense of threat. I suppose this does suggest an impressive control of tone, but it also annoys me; it’s hard to get invested in the story when its own construction keeps reminding me that nothing is really at stake here.

The acting makes this watchable, though, even if most of the humor doesn’t click for me. Still, it’s nice to see Charles Bronson again—playing a heavy this time, more conventionally—and Estelle Winwood is an excellent addition to the show’s roster of female leads. She stars as elderly eccentric Monica Laughton, a kind of good-natured but dotty Miss Havisham who spends her days entertaining a houseful of invisible guests and hosting regular funerals for them when they expire under her roof. It’s a very specific kind of (plot-convenient) delusion for an actor to tackle, and Winwood makes it work through a combination of commitment and twinkle. There are times when it seems like Moncia is in on her own joke—that she chooses the delusion because it makes things livelier—and other times when she seems all too vulnerable. That’s where the tension in the episode ultimately lies: does Monica have enough control here to protect herself, or will Bronson’s knife-wielding thief win out?

Bronson plays low-level crook Frank, who, along with his wife, the daffy Lorna (Norma Crane, and we’ll see her again), lives off whatever he can get by twisting someone’s arm. He spent a long time soaking various family members, but once he hears the town he’s blown into is home to an isolated old woman supposedly sitting on a fortune … well, he knows where he’s headed next.

The main comedic beat in this episode that does work for me is how Frank’s planned cover story for infiltrating Monica Laughton’s home—they’re with the historical society!—instantly becomes irrelevant as it’s swallowed up by the cover story Monica maintains at all times as a way to paper over her own loneliness: why, they must be poor dead Oscar’s family from out of town, here for the funeral. It scores them an invitation to stay overnight, but right as Lorna’s fretting that the real family will catch them out, they’re getting introduced to a parlor full of imaginary guests. If anything, this worries Lorna even more, but Frank sees nothing but opportunity. If Monica has a few screws loose, it’ll be even easier to carry off his plan.

He’s not entirely wrong, since he does turn her delusion to his advantage at one point, holding her “guests” hostage when Monica herself proves more or less indifferent to his threats against her. But that’s the only flash of cleverness he gets; otherwise, he’s a brute, but not one we’re seriously worried about. Again, the episode doesn’t want us to be; it literally skips over an intimidation scene, going from a blustery Frank storming out to work her over to a beleaguered, irritated Monica opening her private safe. It’s a little bit of a waste of all Bronson’s physical and emotional power, but he’s still good here: a guy who’s blundered his way into a strange situation but who thinks he can get through on sheer bullish power. It’s a nice touch that he doesn’t even quite get how cruel he is when he sends all the remnants of Monica’s life and romance—the “fans, dance programs, [and] valentines” he dismisses as “moldy junk” tumbling to the floor. Even when she’s on her knees gathering them up and sobbing, “Oh, how could you?”, there’s no sense that he’s taking pleasure in humiliating her. He’s an entirely greed-driven animal.

So is Lorna, in a way, only her greed is simpler and her expression of it is more childish: she’s hungry. I will again qualify my general shrugging-off of this episode’s humor to note that Crane is a strong physical comedienne, and when she overturns the empty bowl at the banquet for the invisible guests as if in forlorn hope that something will spill out after all, it’s at least worth a chuckle. Overall, though, Lorna is more of a problem for the episode than it seems to realize, because she’s just sympathetic enough that it’s hard to feel good about her going down with her man. She’s not a great person, but she tries multiple times to advocate for leaving Monica alone, and in an episode this perversely sunny, that small amount of conscience and compassion should be worth something.

All in all, there’s enough here that doesn’t work to make my disappointment have more sticking power than my enjoyment, but that doesn’t mean this is devoid of fun. And in addition to the vivid performances and funny bits mentioned above, “There Was an Old Woman” also features a very handsome cat. He may be a bad hunter, but he makes a fine centerpiece for Monica’s dining room table.

The Twist: No one will know what happened with Frank and Lorna: the whole town is used to Monica’s mock funerals, and no one checks the coffins anymore. Also, Monica’s vast wealth was in the oversized handbag she was hauling around the whole time, which we find out when she has to use a thousand-dollar bill to pay the milkman.

This is more of a shrug than a major bit of payoff. AHP can do clever hidden-in-plain-sight reveals, but they matter more when I’m invested in the search in the first place; making this the substance of the ending is answering a question I wasn’t asking in the first place. Monica Laughton cared about keeping these “fortune-hunters” away from her money because she didn’t like being threatened—who would?—but the episode never created any sense that it mattered to her beyond that. To her, it’s incidental to what she’s really trying to protect—her life and her way of life, as odd as it is—and so it feels like the true threat is resolved by Frank and Lorna gobbling down the poison-laced cupcakes Monica made to kill her resident mice. This is just a bonus stinger, which makes it way too lightweight to be a classic ending.

The best part of this ending is the embedded mini-reveal that when Monica was digging around in her purse earlier to give the unwelcome Frank and Lorna a little money to tide them over, she would’ve come up with more than enough to make all this worth their while. They almost had an easy, consequence-free scam on their hands.

Directed by: Robert Stevenson

Written by: Jerry Hackady & Harold Hackady (story), Marian Cockrell (teleplay)

Up Next: “Whodunit”