Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E39, "Momentum"

For the season finale, AHP returns to a topic it first considered as early as its fourth episode: a married couple in need of money.

Richard Paine (Skip Homeier, former child star and frequent TV actor) already has one job, but he’s scouring the help wanted ads in a futile search for a second. His wife, Beth (the great Joanne Woodward), keeps pressing him to approach his boss, Burroughs (character actor Ken Christy), to ask for his back pay. When the business was in trouble, Burroughs asked Paine to work for half-pay, and now that he’s back on top, he’s yet to make up the difference. It’s the easiest fix, Beth thinks, for a problem that could easily land them on the street–they owe so much rent that their apartment’s being advertised while they’re still in it–but Paine only ever wants to do it when he’s been drinking.

The episode establishes all this pretty deftly: yes, Paine and Beth are offloading backstory they both know already, but they’re doing it in the context of old, familiar arguments they’re both sick of having, and that’s exactly how those squabbles go. That also makes them feel more real than their counterparts in “Don’t Come Back Alive,” who start the episode too sweetly unbothered for a man and woman on the verge of homelessness; here, I believe Paine and Beth love each other, but I also believe they’re tired and desperate. None of this is groundbreaking, but it’s all good writing and performing.

“Momentum” also kicks off with some directorial stylishness, giving us a transparent Paine superimposed over busy city backgrounds. The world is rushing all around, and he can’t get into the flow. He might as well be a ghost.

After that tense exchange with Beth, he steels himself to be more than that … but he needs a little Dutch courage (and another possible way out) before going over to talk to Burroughs. There’s something sad and sweet about him trying to get a loan off his bartender friend first: this guy’s more approachable, but all he can ultimately do is spot Paine a drink. There’s kindness to be found between equals, but there’s no money. So he’ll have to beg for something he has every right to–but at the last minute, Paine finds a third option.

Peeping through Burroughs’s window, he sees Burroughs cheerfully turning money over to an unseen figure, and that lets Paine know where his private cashbox is. One short break-in later, and Paine’s brief cash-in-hand triumph is immediately scuppered by Burroughs holding him at gunpoint and vowing to call the police. Poor Paine can’t catch a break, but in the scuffle that ensues, he makes Burroughs catch a bullet. At this point, buddy, just take what’s left in the cashbox, not only what you’re owed. I mean, you might as well.

The rest of the episode involves Paine–and, to a lesser extent, Beth, whom he’s infected with his fear–circling the drain with paranoia. Having the money doesn’t do him much good now that he’s jumping out of skin at every knock on the door and every idler across the street; unsurprisingly, he soon makes his position worse by tussling with (and getting shot by) a finance company collector he mistakes for a cop. This is probably the best stretch of the episode, with everything–down to an unusually effective score–serving to ramp up the tension as Paine starts to unravel. It’s well-plotted too, with Paine’s imagined problems leading inexorably on to real ones and forcing him into tighter and tighter spots. He could have gotten away with the initial murder if he’d played it cool–but if he’d been able to play it cool, he probably wouldn’t have committed the murder in the first place. It’s a hard world out there for the broke and neurotic.

There are a fair number of nice, bitter touches in the back half of the episode. The most obvious is probably Paine getting to the point where he can honestly tell a cabbie, “Money is the least of my worries,” a painful and poignant change, but my favorite is how cutting it is to have the apartment they’re desperate to hold on to get summarily dismissed by another prospective tenant (“Ain’t much, is it?”). Episodes with familiar plots tend to live or die by their details, and while this story is an old one–and, alas, sometimes fumbles the ball in its execution–the details are good. The atmosphere is well-evoked. All in all, while we’re not sending season one off with a bang, I at least wouldn’t call this a whimper.

The Twist: Knowing how reluctant her husband was to approach his boss about the loan repayment, Beth went to see Burroughs on her own. She was the out-of-frame visitor he was paying when Paine dropped by, and she even says he was nice about it all. As Paine realizes the robbery and murder were all unnecessary, he dies in Beth’s arms, bemoaning the rat race one last time.

The rat race angle doesn’t work as a final beat, since it’s a callback to an opening that felt strangely out-of-sync–stylistically, structurally, and thematically–with the rest of the episode anyway. And if you bother to think at all about who Burroughs’s mystery guest could possibly be, you’ll almost certainly come up with the right answer. But despite those two flaws, which are indeed fairly significant, the ending does muster up an appropriately glum, noir-toned weight for me. It was all for nothing, and they’ll never get to Mexico.

It’s worth noting, though, that if Burroughs had been a little less vindictive and a little more compassionate in the moment, he too could have averted all of this too. I don’t think Burroughs’s role here–asking an employee to work at half-pay for a while and not thinking to give him the back pay of his own accord–is something the episode is all that interested in exploring, and that’s a shame: it means that no matter how much Paine gets to talk about the rat race, the ultimate message is that he is, so to speak, a rat. It puts the blame on him–oh, he was too much of a coward to talk to his boss face-to-face, but Burroughs was actually perfectly nice to Beth when she approached him! It was all in Paine’s head!–and doesn’t bother to try to convey what would’ve made him act like this. I don’t want to insist that this episode would’ve been better if it had been completely different, but, well, a little more illustration of Paine being in a kind of working man’s vise, needing his job too much to risk losing it for asking for his due, would’ve gone a long way. And that does feel more consistent with the jazzy, stylish opening and its greater sense of fundamental despair.

Still, again, the ending doesn’t fall completely flat. Part of what makes it work is the mundanity of the bus station setting: such an ignominious place for our protagonist’s life to come to an end. He never escapes the grind, even in death; he never finds any kind of transcendence or safety. He dies as he lived–striving, on the way to somewhere he’ll never really get.

Next week: a wrap-up post for the first season and a discussion of what’s next for the column!