Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E32, "The Baby Sitter"

S1 E32, “The Baby Sitter”

I’m glad I don’t have to assign these episodes formal grades, because on the one hand, we have the terrific  Thelma Ritter in a rare front-and-center role. On the other hand, we have a plot that spins its wheels and one of the worst musical cues in television history.

Ritter stars as Lottie Slocum, whose life of small pleasures and even smaller means is suddenly altered by her proximity to a murder. She often babysits for the Nashes, and she’s been nursing a crush on Mr. Nash (Theodore Newton, whom we’ll see several more times)–and an equal bitterness towards his “ungrateful” wife, Clara (Carole Mathews)–for a while now. Their separation only fueled those hopes. Now Clara’s been murdered, and Lottie, as one of the last people to see her alive, is experiencing a kind of true crime glamor-by-association. A detective hangs on her every word. People want to buy her story. And the love of her life is single again. Obviously, this new status comes with its own accompanying dangers–Clara’s boyfriend, Mr. DeMario (welcome back, Michael Ansara), is hanging around the periphery with a vague aura of danger, and Lottie had better not breathe a word against him–but they’re worth it. Right?

Not much plot to talk about this week, as the episode mostly introduces the murder, sets its watch so it doesn’t technically give the killer away until the end, and then sits back and devotes itself to small-scale character work that lets Ritter shine.

I’ll get to her in a minute, but first I want to complain again about that obnoxious musical cue. AHP’s score is usually unobtrusive, but when Lottie’s chatty friend Blanche (prolific character actress Mary Wickes) brings her some … ice cream? Milkshakes? Horrifying 1950s foodstuff that may result in brainwashing? in exchange for hearing her whole story, the music gets boisterously comedic for a few seconds in a way that feels both silly and out-of-character for the program as a whole. (On the bright side, this makes me forgive TZ’s “The Mighty Casey” some of its sound effect sins: apparently there was an epidemic of sprightly scoring at the time.) This should not be one of the most notable parts of the episode!

In general, the showier comedy is outside the show’s wheelhouse, and while Ritter can certainly be funny, the jokes here are at her character’s expense rather than buoyed by her comedic talent. (She does get to say “lounge lizard,” though.) Her best moments, however, come when the episode either leans into her limited perspective–“And she had the nerve to get sore about it, even though I was right”–or goes for a rare poignancy. The shot of Lottie’s coat in the same closet as Clara Nash’s–a plain, serviceable dark overcoat that has surely seen better years within arm’s reach of a gorgeous white fur–is already a nice visual touch, emphasizing the good costuming in this episode, and Lottie’s wistful reaction (“It was funny seeing the two of us hanging there, her and me”) only adds to it. It helps that Ritter sells that Lottie is well-accustomed to such wistfulness, used to daydreaming and analyzing her daydreams with a light touch. (Notably, while she’s hurt when her friend razzes her for luxuriating in a particular memory of Mr. Nash–does she really think she has a chance with him?–she’s not especially surprised.)

Lottie can be unpleasant, and she’s clearly judging Clara for falling short of her own standards of supportive womanhood without, say, judging Mr. Nash for the poor judgment of marrying a woman who doesn’t share his interests or lifestyle concerns, but she feels real. Her external life has a certain worn shabbiness, but her internal life is vivid. I’m fully willing to give the credit for that to Ritter, who deserves the spotlight here.

The Twist: Not so much a twist as a Bad Ending. It turns out that Lottie knows Mr. Nash, that nice man who couldn’t possibly have killed his wife, was lurking in the bedroom when Clara came home. She still thinks there’s some innocent explanation for this, but of course there’s not, and when he pays her a much-longed-for visit, her heartfelt letter to him winds up so much ash in an ashtray, and she winds up dead on the floor.

This is a dismal fate for Lottie, who feels like she deserves something akin to what Martha was angling for in “The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby.” Let Mr. Nash be shackled to his clueless witness in forever matrimony, while she is, in a comedic irony, forever unaware of how she got so lucky: I could go for that. Her blinkered perspective has been the source of the episode’s (mild) comedy, and brutally correcting that feels mean-spirited without any compensating wit or verve. All can be forgiven if you do it with enough energy, but this feels like more of a damp squib.¹

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Emily Neff (story), Sarett Rudley (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Belfry”

1. However, I do like Hitch’s outro joke about Nash failing to yield … to a train. ↩︎