Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E5: "Into Thin Air"(a.k.a "The Vanishing Lady")

“Into Thin Air” is an oft-told tale. Hitchcock himself, as he candidly admits in the opener, already told it at feature length in the frothy, superbly entertaining The Lady Vanishes.

This isn’t as good as that, in part because this is kind of complex problem-solving story benefits from a longer runtime than Alfred Hitchcock Presents can provide: it needs time to lay unobtrusive groundwork full of details both the audience and the characters will later need as proof. “Into Thin Air,” with only half an hour at its disposal, can’t help rushing things. It has to signpost a little too much. But within that framework, it’s solid and well-executed.

A young Englishwoman, Diana Winthrop (Pat Hitchcock¹), arrives in Paris with her mother (Mary Forbes). Diana is cheerful and excited about their holiday—when the world-famous Exposition is about to begin, no less—but she’s worried about her mother, who suddenly fell ill on the last leg of their trip. Pat Hitchcock is endearing in the lead role, and she plays Diana as so earnest and direct that she almost justifies the script’s insistence on having her explicitly draw attention to bits of set dressing, like an ormolu clock, that will come back later.

The episode does a better job setting up her just-memorable-enough personal interactions with the hotel staff, especially because Diana comes across as someone who does pay attention to individual people and reflexively expects the same from them. She has integrity but not, perhaps, much imagination. That makes the events of the episode especially destabilizing to her—she’s not well-equipped, mentally or emotionally, to handle what is done to her—but it also makes her eventual rallying all the more satisfying.

The hotel doctor who examines Mrs. Winthrop sends Diana off on a quest for medicine. At this late hour, he tells her, the chemist’s shops will be closed, but his wife can prepare it for her. When Diana—after a long, draining wait—finally returns, she’s greeted by a hotel clerk who no longer recognizes her. The registry doesn’t have their names in it, and she’d told their room has had another guest in it for days. No matter who she appeals to—the bellhop, the maid—no one admits to remembering her … and no one can help her find her sick mother.

This is the part of the story where Pat Hitchcock’s performance really shines, because Diana Winthrop’s good-natured sincerity gets caught in a vise. Every bit of dishonesty hits her like a separate blow, until she seems as stunned as a boxer who’s gone one too many rounds: this just does not make sense to her on any level. Hitchcock plays it all with baffled, personal hurt. Why are they doing this to her? It takes her some time to get ground down to where she feels like the world itself has turned on her; at first, she experiences each denial with a fresh sense of individualized betrayal.

It’s even better because she doesn’t go into the situation looking to be outraged, either. When she hits the first brick wall in the form of the desk clerk who tells her she’s in the wrong hotel, Diana, in defiance of all her own memories, instinctively believes him, because why, she clearly thinks, would he lie? She’s embarrassed and flustered by what she assumes is her mistake, and it takes her a beat to realize that no, that doesn’t make any sense. She does trust a friendly world above her own memories at first. More than anything else, her distress revolves around worrying about her missing mother. But as the world becomes less and less friendly—as the hotel staff feels like it’s closing ranks against her—she retreats, guarding her perceptions like she’s physically huddled around them.

With a little help from the British Embassy—the ambassador, Sir Everett (Alan Napier), basically pats her on the head and deems her imbalanced, but his staffer, Farnham (Geoffrey Toone), is kinder and determined to go about this as logically and doggedly as possible, verifying and eliminating whatever he can. The details here are pretty good, but again, it’s the characterization and the performances that make it. When Diana finally gets to see room 342 again and it’s not at all like she remembered it, she collapses more than she ever has before, sinking into a kind of numb misery. She’s willing to agree to any plan that will send her away from this city that now feels like it was designed to torment her. What brings her back to confident animation isn’t a memory but a fresh new sight.

Pat Hitchcock may not have been a natural actress—unsurprisingly, most of her roles were in her father’s projects—but she’s a capable screen presence here. Her relative plainness gives her a comfortable everywoman status, and she can turn her face lifeless or lively at a moment’s notice, suiting all the upheaval her character goes through in this episode. And the premise is unavoidably fun: one of my favorite things an AHP episode can do is invite the viewer into a sticky situation and implicitly ask how they would get out of it, and “Into Thin Air” nails those beats.

The Twist: Mrs. Winthrop died of the bubonic plague. The doctor realized her condition at once and sent Diana off—with a note to his wife to delay her—so he could have her moved out of the hotel without making a scene. She died almost immediately, and the French government covered it up and orchestrated the gaslighting: they knew that if the news got out, it could cause a panic and ruin the Exposition the economy was depending on.

I love how completely Diana transforms once it dawns on her that the hotel room must’ve had a hasty makeover. The way she talks her way into visiting 342 once more is almost the best scene of the episode: clever, cunning, and the first chance she’s had to turn the tables. But after a fantastic exchange where she leads the clerk—who, suddenly flop-sweaty, has told her 342 is, er, reserved, so sorry—into trying to appease her with a bigger room only to then use it against him (“Then you can give it to whoever has reserved room 342”), the sense of tug-of-war drops out too quickly. She gets what she wants—a trip back to her old room—but not as awesomely as she should. Still, after she’s been misled and lied to for so much of the episode, it’s refreshing to see her have the upper hand for once, even if it’s all too brief.

Diana feel refreshed by it too, which is another nice touch. When she rips off the wallpaper to reveal the pattern she described underneath, she’s the picture of triumph. She even gets to gloat over the smell of fresh paste. For the first time in a long time, the details are on her side. For a second, she’s just glad to have won. But—in another great use of her expressiveness—the flush of victory fades back to worry as she remembers the true stakes of the game: “Where is she? What have you done with my mother?”

It’s a stark question, and there’s something deliberately unsettling about how it gets a bureaucratic answer, delivered in a meandering sit-down with Sir Everett, who has now been clued-in. (He’s an official before he’s an Englishman, apparently, because he sympathizes more with the French cover-up than the deceived Diana: he doesn’t quite say he’d do the same thing, but he certainly understands it. The money, you know.) He’s here to be the mouthpiece of the conspiracy, and Diana is more human-sized than ever in response. What is all this about the bigger picture? She’s a young woman, dazed with grief, being told she can’t take her mother’s body home. It’s the prosaic directness of that—the concerns of the flesh, rather than the nation and the economy—that makes Sir Everett spell it out: “You see, your mother died of plague. The bubonic plague.” A nation-sized horror—enough to make us, like Sir Everett, understand—but also a horror of the body that’s been shuffled around and denied, a horror of a bad death. That last part is what the episode fades out on, with Diana Winthrop grappling with something enormous.

Ending right after that revelation is a smart move—the abruptness and lack of cushion works in the episode’s favor. The whole idea of the plague is that it was, for a Paris on the verge of a major cultural event, unspeakable; the mere word has to be enough to motivate the bizarre plot Diana’s been trapped in and create a kind of retroactive, gut-level understanding. It has to gobsmack, and keeping it as the literal last word makes the impact linger.

Directed by: Don Medford

Written by: Marian Cockrell

Up Next: “Salvage”

1. Hitchcock’s daughter. Others may object to the nepotism, but I’m charmed by Hitchcock’s bit in the outro where he wraps it all up and then ducks back in just to add, “Incidentally, I thought the little leading lady was rather good, didn’t you?” ↩︎