Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E27, "Help Wanted"

Recurring player John Qualen (“A Bullet for Baldwin” and “Shopping for Death”) turns in his best AHP work yet as put-upon Mr. Crabtree, who only wants a decent, steady job that will give him a little dignity and let him pay for his wife’s medical treatments.

The episode has a homey opening that establishes not only Crabtree’s drives but his two main character traits (with condensed storytelling like this, we rarely have time for more): his sweet, sincere ordinariness (he’s dear enough to read his cover letter out loud to his wife because he’s proud of it, and he’s unimaginative and unambitious enough that said letter includes him bragging that his “record for attendance and punctuality stands alone”) and his easily stirred-up temper (he gets so frustrated when talking about how age discrimination cost him his last job that his wife has to calm him down again).

In a suspense story, the latter trait will obviously be relevant, and “Help Wanted” maybe hits that nail a little too hard in driving it home. But the relatable, endearing mundanity of Crabtree will matter too, and one of the best details there is his utter lack of self-aggrandizement. If he boasts about attendance and punctuality, it’s because he’s honest enough to know those are the only areas where he really excelled–but why should he let that bother him? He’s not asking for the moon here; he only wants to do solid work in a solid job. He doesn’t claim he was the best employee in the world, but he did the work “better than anyone else they could get at the salary they were paying [him].” That’s such a key line: the relationship between man and job, Crabtree implies without even thinking about it, goes both ways. The amount of effort he applied was commensurate to what he got for it, and anyone else with good sense would’ve done the same.

Luckily–or is it?–Crabtree’s latest application meets with his new employer’s approval. They don’t even mind that he lost his temper and attacked the man who fired him, which you’d think would give a lot of HR departments pause. Soon enough, Crabtree has a comfortable salary and a comfortable office¹, and all he needs to do for his pay is collect some odd data from various publications and mail it in.

Honestly, this would be paradise for me as far as necessary employment goes. I get good money to sit in a quiet, serene place all day doing fine-grained work (I love mundane but weirdly comprehensive tasks), and not even that much of it? Imagine how much writing time I’d have! Imagine how many books I could bring into this office no one ever visited!

But that’s how they get you, alas, because Crabtree does get a surprise visitor one day. It’s his employer, an unnamed man credited as Mr. X (extremely long-running TV presence Lorne Greene, probably best known for playing Ben Cartwright on Bonanza²). Mr. X is as upfront about his strangeness as Crabtree is about his ordinariness: “I envy you, Mr. Crabtree. I deeply envy you. You have emotions. I am entirely devoid of feeling.” AHP was ahead of its time in understanding that the corporate world is often run by sociopaths.

Mr. X, it turns out, deliberately selected Crabtree–a man with few resources, desperate financial need, and a certain innate capacity for violence–to murder his blackmailer for him. Crabtree doesn’t have to arrange a thing: the man will walk right into his office at a prearranged time, looking for a handout he’ll call a charitable contribution. Crabtree will hand him an envelope–but inside will be the man’s suicide note, and Crabtree will then push him out the open window to his death.

Of course Crabtree doesn’t want to, and of course what he wants is irrelevant to his employer. If Crabtree complies with his wishes, he’ll get a year’s salary in advance, more than enough for his wife’s operation.

What’s great about this episode is how laser-focused it is on one man’s working life, even when he’s pushed to have that work include murder. Mr. X doesn’t bring any special pressure to bear here; he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t need to threaten Crabtree with violence when ending his employment is, in essence, killing or debilitating his wife. And as far as Crabtree’s concerned, X is untouchable, since he planned for all this from the start and made sure Crabtree would have nothing on him. There’s an indifferent kind of cruelty in him revealing that Crabtree’s job was pointless from the start—all those burned reports!—and designed to be nonsensical; whatever pride or illusion of meaning Crabtree managed to attach to it comes crashing down here. It only ever existed so he’d look delusional if he tried to go to the police.

Crabtree was never a “big” man, or a man people took seriously, but X has made him smaller and sillier, and if Crabtree crosses him, X will make him worse yet. There’s no advantage to it, and yet Crabtree is determined to do it anyway. He can’t imagine fighting back, but he can imagine quietly losing. He’s been doing it for most of his life.

If you look at all the machinations of the plot in “Help Wanted,” it can look a little absurd: I’m sure there are more convenient ways to arrange a murder. But as an amplified, twisty tale of employer-employee power relations, it’s a great little story that gets even better in its conclusion. If we look back at “Don’t Come Back Alive,” a superficially different story with several of the same thematic concerns, “Help Wanted” becomes even more luminous in comparison: tighter and more focused, with any absurdities decently hidden away behind the curtain. This will be John Qualen’s last appearance on the show, and it gives him a wonderful send-off.

The Twist: When his visitor arrives right on schedule to collect his “contribution,” Crabtree, distraught at the imminent loss of his job, works himself up into a fury at the blackmailer he blames for it–and, without having planned on following through with Mr. X’s plan at all, still shoves the man out the window. Mr. X, who saw the whole thing from the street, promptly drops his payment in the mail and calls Crabtree to say that it’s done. But as everything is wrapping up, a second man–with a much less trustworthy demeanor than the first–stops by for his “contribution,” and the penny drops. The man Crabtree killed was genuinely collecting for a charity, and this is the real blackmailer. But as far as Crabtree’s concerned, he has the payment, so it no longer matters.

A twofer of a twist! What makes this ending for me is how John Qualen lets Crabtree’s shock settle into a kind of self-assured calm we didn’t know he was capable of. Crabtree has faced a lot of upheaval from his employers in the later years of his life, and he’s finally given some back. The way he hits the line “That’s something you’ll have to take up with the man you’re blackmailing” is beautiful to behold: his voice is a bit weedy and wavery, because he’s still stunned, but he knows he’s escalating a confrontation he won’t have to see, and he’s happy about it. Let them kill each other.

Like I said, this was, ironically, a “good” job in some ways–the sudden, dramatic change in his duties was at least addressed with adequate compensation, and he had no trouble getting paid on time!—but it was also nonsense busywork that gave way to Mr. X leveraging Crabtree’s need for money and healthcare to get him to break his principles. And the episode’s sympathies are entirely with Crabtree on this: there’s no suggestion that he owes it to Mr. X to give one single solitary shit about X’s problems now that the cash is already en route. If Mr. X wanted him to, maybe he shouldn’t have carried out his own kind of blackmail.

I’m sure Crabtree, a decent man at heart, will eventually get around to feeling bad that he shoved a completely innocent man out of a window, but this is a tightly focused episode, and it makes the right decision in its final moments. From the start, “Help Wanted” was about jobs, about employers and employees. Crabtree’s brief backstory was marked by a past employer’s victory over him. The episode’s first big turn: same thing. Even the initial twist–Crabtree doesn’t mean to do it, but he gets so worked up that he does it anyway!—is a victory for his boss, not for him. It got him the money, and his conscience isn’t too tarnished, since he didn’t do it in cold blood (and he had no great regard for blackmailers), but his spirit was broken.

This ending gives it back. He gets all the cash and none of the problems. He didn’t do what he was told after all. Sure, he walks out of the office a murderer. But he’s also a much freer man than before.

Directed by: James Neilson

Written by: Robert C. Dennis (teleplay), Stanley Ellin (story), Mary Orr & Reginald Denham (adaptation)

Up Next: “Portrait of Jocelyn”

1. It even has a window! I’ve never worked anywhere with a view. ↩︎
2. Thanks to Simon for pointing this out in the comments. I’d been too hasty when running through Greene’s TV credits and had actually missed his most notable role, so I had Battlestar Galactica here instead. ↩︎