Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E26, "Whodunit"

The first time I saw this, I couldn’t stand the hackneyed angel wings and heavenly clouds, even with the dry tongue-in-cheek line about how some of this set dressing is only there because “so many expect it.” AHP has sometimes gone broad, but it’s rarely gotten this corny. From there, the episode segues into a Golden Age-style mystery plot that, despite its unusual framing, is fairly by the numbers. The actual murder story here is handled so perfunctorily that its resolution is almost a footnote.

But talking about the first time I saw it implies I changed my mind on this rewatch, and I did. A bit, anyway. Going in with lower expectations helped me spot a few glimmers of light here.

The great John Williams is back once again as Arlington, a wealthy mystery writer–his pen name is Slade Saunders, which I have to admit is pretty cool–whose own murder lands him in heaven with one burning question familiar to those in his trade: “Whodunit?” (I usually spell it with two t’s, so this episode title is harshing my groove.) Recording angel Wilfrid (Alan Napier, last seen in “Into Thin Air”) tries to shrug it all off, recommending an eternal perspective: “Don’t worry, we’ll find out. It’ll be in your murderer’s record later on.” But Arlington can’t rest until he does, and his self-proclaimed restless misery is, as Wilfrid points out, “contrary to the spirit of the whole occasion.”

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” as Robert Browning put it, and “Whodunit” is a featherlight confirmation of that: for this to be heaven, Arlington has to be able to grasp what he’s after. So Wilfrid agrees to send Arlington back to his last day on earth. He can’t change his fate, but he can poke around to his heart’s content.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a time travel story without an embedded contradiction that would break your brain if you thought about it long enough, but this is still a doozy. “Whodunit” blithely shrugs off any attempt at science fictional thinking because, well, of course it’ll all come out the way it needs to, it’s heaven.

Arlington is assured that there’s no real cause and effect at play here: no matter what he does, no matter how many hornets’ nests he pokes, he’ll be killed at the appointed time by the appointed person. In a juicier, more genuinely philosophical episode, that would feel like a threat. Here, the dryly witty Arlington has taken his death more or less in stride, so it only amounts to a guarantee of fair play. The game is rigged in his favor, or so it seems. This isn’t life, it’s a kind of simulation for his benefit. He should get his answer.

What he finds first is that while his professional pride was rankled by not knowing his own murderer, that wasn’t the first time he’d failed to use his art to understand his life. He was already living in a traditional murder mystery; he’d already become a standard-issue Golden Age victim who, to muster up a whole host of plausible suspects, is necessarily a bit of a prick. His assistant (Herbert Coolidge, last seen in “The Perfect Murder,” and isn’t this an episode stuffed full of recurring players!) has–if we can believe him–contributed to his last few books and gotten very little recognition to show for it; he’s salivating over getting Arlington out of the way and taking over the Slade Saunders name for good. Carol, his wife (Amanda Blake), is having an affair with Jerry Paris’s Wally*, and that’s a problem good old Rob Petrie never had–with good reason, Carol would tell him, since it’s his cold, distant behavior that drove her into Wally’s arms in the first place. “I’m beginning to wonder what sort of person I was,” Arlington says to Wilfrid.

We don’t have to take all these potential killers at their word, of course; they all want something, so they all have a vested reason to believe they deserve it. But it’s a nice touch that only Arlington’s money-grubbing nephew (Bill Slack) is straightforwardly venal (and therefore gets one of the best lines: “Sure, I want the dough, Uncle A., but I wouldn’t like to see you knocked off just for that. If I could get it any other way”). A saintly Arlington surrounded by slavering monsters would make for a much duller episode. As it is, the setup–aided by a deft Williams performance–actually gives Arlington a kind of arc. 

That’s good, because the normal plot falls so flat it doesn’t even make a good thunk. Arlington initially shudders at the idea of reliving his murder and requests to be airlifted out, so to speak, a few minutes before. When, despite his machinations, he winds up with all the suspects gathered around with the hour nigh, he gratefully accepts Wilfrid’s offer to let him (painlessly) go through it all again after all. That’s enough structure that you’d think it would lead to something–some darkly ironic twist or reveal–but all it leads to is a collapse. Wally turns out the lights, plunging the room into darkness, and Arlington doesn’t see a thing. He’s back in heaven again, still without a clue.

The Twilight Zone’s stingers were not always as cruel as its reputation suggests–many TZ episodes are tales of redemption–but at its meanest, it would’ve known what to do with this (see “A Nice Place to Visit”). If AHP is going to traffic in heaven, you’d think all this was leading to the revelation that it could also traffic in hell. Arlington realizes he’s short-changed the people in his life, and now he has to spend eternity with an unsolvable mystery and the niggling certainty that his plotting chops weren’t what he thought. Oh no, it was the other place all along! (It even goes nicely with the frisson of horror atmosphere that, despite all odds, hits when Wally turns off the lights.)

“Whodunit” is kinder than that, which is certainly fine, but its shrug of a conclusion is far less fine. Wilfrid, with polite if-I-may deference, points out a clue Arlington missed, and Arlington cracks the case and gets an answer that has little impact on him and even less on us (it was Carol). It feels like such an afterthought that the only real juice comes from Arlington’s realization that his admiration of Wilfrid’s deductive reasoning was condescending as (appropriately) hell: “I must have been rather obnoxious, I fear.” In fact, he’s starting to wonder how he got into heaven at all. Williams plays the moment well, with a very British combination of self-deprecation and a stiff upper lip; he throws it off lightly but not without meaning. This really is a man sincerely asking if he shouldn’t be in hell right now.

Wilfrid’s answer? Oh, all mystery writers go to heaven. Why? “I must remember to ask sometime.” It doesn’t even feel like a joke about the popularity of mysteries–they’re even a hit in heaven!–or an idea of divine mystery. It lands more as a meta line about this suspense show having a bias in favor of its own genre. Okay, then!

The longer I linger on that damp squib of an ending, the less I like the episode, so I’m going to think about Williams and Napier instead. They do make the episode sing a bit, even if they can’t give it the voice of an angel.

The Twist: None, even if I mangle the meaning of the term beyond recognition.

Directed by: Francis Cockrell

Written by: C. B. Gilford (story), Francis Cockrell & Marian Cockrell (teleplay)

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