Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E30, "Never Again"

Karen Stewart (Phyllis Thaxter) is miserably hungover: she knows it even before she opens her eyes and sees her bandaged wrist and the hospital room around her. She’s all voiceover and groggy thrash, and so “Help Wanted” instantly pins her down as vulnerable, self-loathing, and unguarded. Everything she feels comes out in her body. This is a story of psychological and physical disintegration.

The voiceover is a stylized touch that’s common elsewhere, if not here; the luminous cocktail glass that takes over Karen’s vision as she tries to remember what happened last night is rarer. It’s cheesy–so’s the thrashing, for that matter–but effective, and it takes us back to a much more composed, much more elegant Karen. “Four weeks, two days, and six hours” sober, she carries an empty cocktail glass around her apartment as a kind of superstitious token: look, still bone dry. The burned, blackened dress in her closet is another token, and it’s intentional overkill–past awareness and acknowledgment and into a kind of self-flagellation.

It’s a visual cliché of contemporary alcoholic stories for the jittery early-sobriety days to include some anxious fondling of a one-week or one-month AA chip, but you can feel the difference there: that’s someone holding on to the clarity they’ve gained and want to carry on with. Molly’s surrounding herself with tokens of failure, trying to shame her past to buoy up her present. Let’s say it’s not the best strategy in the world.

And Karen needs a better one, both because she’s fragile and because neither she nor her boyfriend, Jeff (early TV stalwart Warren Stevens), have good instincts about helping her avoid temptation.

Karen is to blame for a lot of it–one of the script’s and Thaxter’s strengths is implicitly showing what Karen gets out of drinking. To be kind, Karen has no self-confidence (no wonder she is, or thinks she will be, more motivated by shame than hope, more able to scold herself for her past than envision a future); to be mean, she’s a bit of a drip. She worries about Jeff being late. She worries about whether or not Jeff is drawn to bright, vivacious Renee (Louise Allbritton)–whom he unhelpfully describes as “the brightest woman in advertising.” She worries about making small talk at a party. I say all this knowing full well that I come close to being the same way–God knows making small talk at a party is one of my biggest fears, and I can drink–but showing all Karen’s weaknesses and none of her strengths makes her a kind of sponge, and we know exactly what she’ll inevitably soak up. A woman whose tearful internal monologue despairs at her boyfriend going off for a few minutes of talk with her rival, but who won’t follow him or conclude beforehand that maybe she’s not ready for such a stressful party, is not a woman who will keep up her sobriety for very long.

But for that much, to be honest, I blame Jeff. He shows exactly one hint of awareness of how hard it is for Karen to resist the ease and consolation of a drink–he initially balks at having one in front of her–but when she, with glassy brightness, insists on fixing it for him, he instantly forgets again. People can’t entirely agree on how alcoholism works now, so I don’t expect a TV character written in 1956 to necessarily match my views, but Jeff knows how vulnerable Karen feels right now. He knows she’s nervous about this party! I watched her tell him! He owes it to her to stick close, and he doesn’t.

And she can’t correct his mistake in any real way, because she doesn’t want to annoy him. She’s needy but has trouble asking him to satisfy any of those needs–because her insecurity runs so deep that she’d rather blame herself for having them–so she turns to drink instead.

There’s some sharp writing in this party scene, and it feels like it was crafted by either a recovering alcoholic or someone who knew one: the way a non-drinking Karen is treated as a kind of implicit buzzkill (“Sweetie, don’t be disagreeable,” a man tells her when she refuses a glass) and the cruel kindness of having the warm martini she’s scrupulously not sucking down being replaced with a freshly chilled one are memorably good details. The direction is strong and stylish, too, especially with all the intercutting to the booze around the room, like it’s all Karen can pay attention to.

But she doesn’t drink. Not yet. The flesh is still weak, though, so she throws a drink in Renee’s face.

And, in a painful little development, the evening goes from bad to better … but only for a little while. Karen and Jeff retreat and have a real conversation, and he offers her the best reassurance and external sign of value he has: a proposal. That could be enough for a night. It could ground her to where she could start figuring herself out. But–flush with triumph–Karen decides to clean herself up and return to the party instead, risking embarrassment for the rare chance to fluster rather than be flustered. After all, she’s on top of the world, right? What could knock her down now?

The problem–and again, I know this firsthand–is that when you build your self-image entirely out of other people’s opinions, you can always be knocked down, and often incredibly quickly and easily. Renee’s brother, Marlow (Jack Mullaney, who has a sweet but slightly off-kilter vibe, like Anthony Perkins in Psycho), who doesn’t know who she is, innocently tells her that Renee is biding her time to steal Jeff away from his girlfriend (“a drunk–and you know, they never get over it”).

That’s all Karen needs to viciously vindicate Renee’s dismissal of her, and she takes that drink the way Clint Eastwood finally takes his in Unforgiven, as a kind of decisive self-damnation. She takes the sloshed Marlow with much the same attitude, like she’s willfully seeking “her own level,” escaping the party to hit up the bars with him, escaping the endless hurt of trying for the comfort of giving in. But Jeff loves her enough to track her down and help her up off the floor, where she’s fallen and broken her brandy bottle: a new and messy low, but one he wants to help her recover from. The instincts may be bad, in all cases, but maybe the love is true.

This is a quieter episode that, truth be told, isn’t much “fun,” and it isn’t as emotionally affecting as I would like it to be: it feels like it needs to be either a little bit rawer or a lot more polished (to the point of having an almost poetic sense of every line and image counting). But it’s well-written¹, psychologically well-developed, and directed with real flair. I don’t exactly like it, but it has depth and resonance. And Phyllis Thaxter goes all-in on the physical side of the role once Karen starts drinking again: when we catch up with her in the bar, it legitimately feels like she’s undergone a transformation. It’s the most deliberately ugly a female character on this show has gotten since “Guilty Witness.” All in all, solid and effective, and if it’s a bit po-faced, well, it’s not really trying to be anything else.

The Twist: Short and sad: Karen finds out she isn’t in the hospital, she’s in the infirmary of the city jail. She cut Jeff’s throat with the broken brandy glass.

Thaxter’s big, fearless performance hits a kind of woodcut grotesquerie in these final moments: screaming and weeping, with her face stretched out in a howl and her hands bent into claws, she looks like a page torn out of EC Comics. Of course she does. For her, this has been a horror story. Right now, at least, it feels like an inescapable one. The title of the episode goes from a vow to a litany. Never again will he come to her door. Never again will they embrace. Never again will he help her up.

I rarely talk about the intros and outros, but the tag here–a hope that this story will “somehow, somewhere, help someone”–is unusually solemn and earnest. It’s odd to get a sincere appeal from Alfred Hitchcock. While it’s certainly possible that he meant it, I’ll admit it feels more like a network mandate. Given what tonal whiplash we would get from a sudden jab at the sponsors, maybe it’s an appropriate one. Let there be grief.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Adela Rogers St. Johns (story), Gwen Bagni, Irwin Gielgud, and Stirling Silliphant (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Gentleman from America”

1. One of the writers here is Stirling Silliphant, a major figure in TV and film writing: this is his first AHP appearance, but like a few members of the cast, we’ll see more from him as we go forward. And if you’ve seen In the Heat of the Night or The Poseidon Adventure, to name but two, you’ve already had another taste of his work. ↩︎