Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E31, "The Gentleman from America"

This is a case where I was familiar with the source material going in: I’d read Michael Arlen’s “The Gentleman from America” in The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories: Volume Four.¹

We have another historical piece here, with the bulk of the episode playing out in 1940 and the epilogue picking the thread back up in 1945, but the WWII atmosphere–part of the urgency in the first act stems from the fact that Sir Stephen Hurstwood (Ralph Clanton) is about to be called up–is smoked out by the Gothic. We may open in an upper-class club, with horse races on the radio and England in peril, but we’re soon plunged into a cobwebby manor lit by one guttering candle.

This is a classic horror tale setup: the superficial, “gentlemanly” rationality of one period slipping into the dark, dank, and still-present horrors of the past (with their “feminine” hysteria). “The Gentleman from America” gains critique but loses punch by having its “present” also set in its original audience’s past.

Sir Stephen and his friend² Derek (John Irving) overhear a wealthy American, Howard Latimer (Biff McGuire), winning a bundle on the same horse race that’s putting Sir Stephen further in debt … and further in danger of losing his family home (though, in a good bit of historical color, it’s about to temporarily pass out of his hands anyway, to serve as a rest home during the war). They need little conversation to hatch a plan to bilk this arrogantly, blithely naive American for enough cash to keep Hurstwood limping on for another year. They stage a “friendly” conversation with Latimer in which Sir Stephen is–in the weary fashion of English gentry–positively oppressed by the financial responsibilities of maintaining his family’s legacy: “The death tax people and the mortgage holders can fight it out with the ghost for possession.”

Oh? Is there a ghost? … Why, if Latimer doesn’t believe in it, then he won’t have any problem staying in the most haunted room in the house and coughing up a thousand pounds if he leaves before dawn.

The first stretch of the episode gains much of its interest from the transatlantic culture clash. At least to start with, Latimer comes off worse: gullible enough to be easily conned, not well-mannered enough to be a skeptic without being a poor sport at the same time. As soon as he suspects the joke might be on him, he can’t get in on it. This is a very British episode, and Latimer is very American: blithe and superficially easygoing, but essentially a child in the ways of the world. He has money but no responsibilities, or at least no legacy to maintain. The episode complicates the thrust of that criticism later on, but in the early stages, it’s easy to see the British characters as sharper and worldlier. 

Alone in his room at Hurstwood, Latimer reads the story of the famous Hurstwood ghost. The episode generates some decent atmosphere here–it’s nice to have a change of scenery, at least–but that comes second to the power of a well-constructed little horror tale. The Hurstwood ghost story works, especially in its pacing: the deliberateness that leads us from Geraldine’s relief at touching Julia’s nightgown to the slow reach up to the warm, bloody emptiness up above is a masterful bit of mini-story construction, establishing tension, resolving it just long enough to create a false sense of security, and then immediately undermining it again for a glide towards an inevitable horror.

I can see why it gets in Latimer’s head, but that’s no excuse for him not realizing how obviously he’s being tricked here. Of course they gave you a gun with one real bullet and a bunch of blanks, Latimer! Get your shit together! You’re embarrassing your fellow Americans!

Latimer’s screaming faint at the headless ghost approaching him–undissuaded by the “bullets” he’s wildly firing at it–takes us to the 1945 epilogue, which trades the gaudy horror of Gothic for the quiet, aching loss of the post-war period. It’s been five years, and Derek and Sir Stephen have trouble even recalling the name of the “gentleman from America.” They’ve had a whole war between the start of the episode and its conclusion, and he, they realize, probably has too. When he unexpectedly arrives on the heels of this conversation, with lampshaded good timing, they’re prepared to reconnect with him in a friendly way. No hard feelings, right?

This is another episode that simply doesn’t do it for me. There’s little here that’s actually bad–some bits are farfetched to the point where I roll my eyes, but they’re deliberate stretches of plausibility, not infuriating failures of logic–and much that is interesting, but it all feels stuck in a lower gear. Just not lively enough, and only briefly scary enough.

The Twist: Latimer did not go home and have his own war. The prank shattered him, and he’s been in the local sanitarium ever since, convinced that Julia is his sister and he must avenge her murder.

I am sometimes happy to go with a twist utterly unfounded in basic human psychology if it’s cool enough, but this one is not, so I’ll just say that while I can buy Latimer having lasting trauma from his night at Hurstwood, I don’t buy it looking like this.

That being said, the ending does pick up some emotional resonance through McGuire and Clanton’s performances. I’d even go so far as to say McGuire doesn’t really hit his stride until this last scene, when he shows a deft touch with Latimer’s new vagueness and slight disconnection from reality: it’s like all the things Derek and Sir Stephen say to him–until Julia’s name–land on him like soap bubbles and pop harmlessly away, leaving no impression. He’s less good at the screaming breakdown, unfortunately, so it winds up feeling stagy rather than uncontrolled.

That leaves Clanton with the major emotional beat–the crushing realization that he ruined a man’s life to trick a thousand pounds out of him–and he carries it off pretty well (“May God have mercy on us”); now he’s haunted, those last seconds say.

It’s all layered in an interesting–if undeveloped–way with the post-war trauma we see a few hints of: the 1945 Sir Stephen has acquired a limp, and he’s selling his ancestral home (an overhaul that feels like an acknowledgment of some of Britain’s laudable post-war social changes). There’s a quiet melancholy to it; the world has changed, and characters like Derek and Sir Stephen are facing all that with a stiff upper lip, but they can’t help being nostalgic about what’s gone before. That gives a certain force to the reveal that what’s gone before–their “innocent” world of all-in-good-fun maintenance of a certain family wealth and style at the cost of other people, to get obnoxiously pointed about it–had lasting, ruinous consequences. (For a rich American, the last person they’d affect in real life, but hey.) All of this can reward thought, but it still feels contrived and somewhat weak. It’s easy to dissect a dead frog. I prefer the AHP stories that work, Graham Greene-style, as straightforward “entertainments,” and only then invite and yield to analysis. This one is a little too limp.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Michael Arlen (story), Francis Cockrell (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Babysitter”

1. I will miss no opportunity to praise Valancourt Books, which does exceptional work with horror and queer reprints in particular. This anthology also includes John Peyton Cooke’s “Let’s Make a Face,” which is cruel and funny and highly recommended. ↩︎
2. Or “friend,” since Irving gives Derek a slightly fey quality: he reads as gay to me, which further substantiates why he’s been willing to spend years helping Sir Stephen resolve his financial difficulties and why the two are rarely seen apart. I’m curious if this implication came about through the direction or if Irving contributed it all on his own, perhaps to make up for having an underwritten role. ↩︎