Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E6: "Salvage"

“Salvage” opens with a woman in distress.

In these early scenes, Nancy Gates plays the unlucky Lois as someone on the brink of disaster, but her reaction to that disaster keeps shifting. At the local crime world watering hole, appealing to Lou Henry, she’s frantic, hunched-over, cowering. With good reason: Dan Varrel (Gene Barry) is out of prison now, and he’s coming to kill her. Lois says that she can explain everything, but that’s the insistence of someone who knows, deep down, that no explanation will make things better.

Lou—not exactly hostile towards Lois, more cold-blooded in his distaste—provides the essentials, the bald facts that can’t be massaged away:

Dan’s kid brother, Richie, was trouble … and in trouble. Dan took the rap to save him, and he was in the middle of serving his brother’s time when Lois convinced Richie to commit another robbery: “And who squealed to the cops when the caper backfired?” Richie died shooting it out with the police—died at the hideout Lois told them where to find. In the hazy underworld “Salvage” portrays, those are the only facts that matter. Lois might as well have killed Richie herself, and no one is interested in helping her convince Dan otherwise.

Lou sees Lois as Richie’s femme fatale, but the next big scene reveals a more pathetic truth: she’s actually just someone else’s schmuck. She’s desperately in love with the milquetoast Tim (Peter Adams), and as soon as she’s with him, she melts into someone clingy and weepy as she pleads for his affection. Her nerves aren’t showing anymore, but neither is her backbone.

Tim is Lois’s homme fatal, and he doesn’t even realize it. She has to tell him that he’s the reason she manipulated Richie: “So I could get half the money, so I could dress well to please you. … You always liked me when you thought I had money, didn’t you?”

But now he knows she doesn’t, so he’s planning a date with his latest big fish love interest. He’s not interested in running off with Lois, and he even dismisses her fears, though, out of lukewarm kindness or simple self-interest, he’ll pay for her to go away (from him). But in a key detail, he can’t even remember where she’s from. He has no idea about her past, no interest in her present, and no investment in her future. It’s a set-down that’s all the more devastating because he’s not even trying to hurt her.

Lois’s distress takes on its final, bleakest shade: resignation. (“Why run when you haven’t anywhere to go?”) She heads home, where she knows Dan will find her, where she doesn’t even bother to lock the door against him. When she gets a hang-up call, the way Gates’s flicker of expressiveness fades into deadened calm says she understands: that was only meant to check that she was there, as a prelude to her never being anywhere again. She lights a cigarette, knowing it could be her last.

Enter Dan. It takes him a minute to realize he can’t get much of a reaction out of her—an instant of remorse, yes, but no more terror. (Gates has some good physicality here, letting Lois drop onto the bed like a sack of potatoes, as if her body is already a corpse she’s hauling around.) As it sinks in that Lois won’t fight him, his performance changes too. Barry’s been playing him as so driven and goal-focused that he’s essentially a man in a dream, wrapped up in the archetypal fantasy of his revenge and only now awaking to the fact that it’s not going as planned. He’s in a “dump,” with a numbly lovelorn woman whose eyes are glazed over with a despair that has nothing to do with him. There’s no satisfaction to be found here.

“I never figured it’d be this way,” Dan says. “This is like doing you a favor.” Lois agrees. If he doesn’t kill her, she says, she’ll probably do it herself.

Confronted with the bottomless well of her despair, Dan pivots. Barry delivers the next set of lines in a half-strangled voice, like he has to choke his feelings down to move forward, to—with a nod to the title—salvage something from this mess. Instead of killing the hopeless Lois, he sets her up in the dressmaking business again. She has talent and a clean record, and he needs a legitimate business to look good while he’s out on parole.

Lois is initially dumbfounded by this proposal, understandably enough, but their odd partnership is key to the rest of the episode.

Once she has the dress shop, Lois blossoms. She’s a completely new woman: lively, thriving, and in charge. There’s even a new note of romantic tension between her and Dan, with Barry playing their scenes together with a sense of palpable yearning; Lois can’t shake Tim, which provides a thin layer of Teflon between her and Dan’s intensity. But even if she can’t fall in love with him, she’s enchanted by his devotion: every time he comes to her rescue, his help still feels fresh and unexpected. She’s never had someone who says, “I just want you to be happy,” and means it. She went to see Tim, but Dan comes to see her; Tim would give her a little money, if he had some lying around, but Dan goes out and gets a $5000 loan for her, catching some derision from the crime world in the process. (I’ll just use that scene to wave at Elisha Cook Jr.) Tim went after other women; Dan, his potential suit rejected, goes and gets her the man of her dreams. Tim is, of course, more amenable to the idea how the Dan drives home that Lois will have money.

I suspect one’s opinion of this episode mostly depends on the reception of the ending, so I’ll leave it at that as we move on to the spoilers.

The Twist: Dan only wanted Lois to be happy to he could feel he was taking something away from her when he killed her. He was playing the long game the entire time, and when, with his help, she’s at the peak of her success—newly engaged to the man of her dreams, owner of a thriving business—he finally gets his revenge.

It’s a mean-spirited twist, but its over-the-top nature wins me over, even though it made the second half of the episode incredibly hard to discuss in a spoiler-free but not obnoxiously misleading way. (Will I cave and allow myself to be obnoxiously misleading in the future? Only time will tell.) It’s not an especially good episode overall, and I’m more interested in the gentler story it discards than the revenge narrative it pursues. Still, I have a soft spot for characters whose commitment leads them to absurd and extreme places, and Dan certainly qualifies. This guy is the definition of goal-oriented.

Suspense and horror exist on a shared spectrum, and while “Salvage” opens as suspense, the way Dan’s patient sadism builds up Lois’s dream life only to turn it into a nightmare makes it wind up squarely in the horror genre, with plausibility deliberately sacrificed for effect. This isn’t the genre the show does best, but the turn here is well-executed, and director Justus Aldiss leans into it with that final shot of Lois’s face melting into a scream. There’s even a bit of blocking that feels like it marks the transition between genres, where an exuberant Lois is framed in a doorway, spreading out her arms, and it keeps us from seeing Dan draw his gun. When she turns around and sees it, the story she thought she was in is over.

Directed by: Justus Aldiss

Written by: Fred Freiberger (story), Fred Freiberger & Dick Carr (teleplay)

Up Next: “Breakdown”