Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E7: "Breakdown"

“Breakdown” sees Hitchcock behind the camera once more, and if you had only half an hour to convince someone that he fully deserved the moniker of the Master of Suspense, this would do it. I could reuse this intro for several of his AHP episodes.

Here, he’s aided by Joseph Cotten’s superb work in the leading role. Cotten was already a screen legend in 1955, able to look back on a filmography that included Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Gaslight, and The Third Man, not to mention two other Hitchcock pieces: Shadow of a Doubt and Tropic of Capricorn. He doesn’t treat his work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents like it’s in a lesser medium, either—he gives this his all, turning in a complex, magnetic performance that works within its technical constraints to become one of the most memorable in the series. (Considering how this episode goes, it’s worth mentioning that Cotten also had extensive experience working in radio.)

Cotten plays William Callew, an executive so high-powered that he can’t even relax on his own vacation. “I’d go nuts trying to do nothing but nothing,” he says, disgusted by the very idea. He’ll condescend to wear a bathrobe on his hotel balcony, but he’s going to issue dictation while he does it—and take a phone call from an employee who’s distraught over Callew firing him via memo.

The physical contrast between the two men is pronounced, all the better to highlight the key emotional distinction the episode will soon focus on with a laser-like intensity. Hubka, the employee—played by silent movie stalwart Forrest Stanley, making excellent use of his well-honed expressiveness—is a little past his prime, a slightly heavyset man with a rumpled look; he wears every year, every disappointment, every pleasure on the surface. Callew, hard-edged and still ruggedly good-looking, would disdain to do the same: one of the best acting touches Cotten has in the whole episode is the way he rolls his eyes and moves the phone away from his ear when Hubka starts getting emotional. It’s magnificent irritation, but it’s also even more visceral than that, like he doesn’t want Hubka’s tears and uncertainty to contaminate him. In the end, he hangs up while Hubka’s still panicking on the other end of the line.

“He may have saved himself from something worse by breaking down now,” Callew’s friend says, but Callew has no patience with that idea, retorting, “He didn’t have to weep about it. You should show some control of your emotions.”

As hard-bitten as he is, Callew is the story’s protagonist, not a strawman villain to be humiliated and shown up; the episode puts his ideas to an honest test and gives him the virtues of his faults. Even in adversity, he really is the man he thinks he is, his own ideal man, and it could kill him. That sense of fairness—simultaneously generous and brutal—is part of what makes this one of my favorite episodes.

The next day, Callew drives home. Plot necessity is probably the real reason for him not having a chauffeur, but it does fit, because this is not a man who likes to be passive. Well, bad news for him: on a back-country detour, right where a prison work crew is being loaded back into a truck, Callew loses control of the car. He drives straight into the men, and everything goes black.

He wakes up dazed. His vision is blurry, and he can’t even blink to clear his eyes: he is, at least for this stretch of the episode, entirely paralyzed. The imagery here is so specific that it’s going to be burned into my head forever: the steering wheel crushed to his chest, tight against his chin so that his head is pinned back at an extreme angle. I can’t look at it without thinking about how I’d feel the wheel on my throat when I swallowed. As I said last week, there’s a fine line between suspense and horror, and this is a suspense story with a visual that’s pure nightmare fodder.

I mentioned earlier that Cotten’s radio experience comes in handy for this episode—he can’t even let a facial muscle twitch, so he has to convey everything by his voiceover. It’s a high-wire performance, too, because he needs to express enough feeling to make the audience aware of the panic building inside him … but he has to keep it locked down, too, hewing to his own principle of keeping a cool head. Cotten balances it perfectly, rarely letting Callew’s distress surface for more than a few seconds at a time before he strangles it again. It’s almost inhuman self-control—impressive (“inhuman” can mean “superhuman,” too) but, as his friend tried to tell him, ill-advised, even dangerous.

But help will come soon, Callew reasons, so why get worked up about it?

People come, but help does not. This is a well-scripted episode, and I love the unfussy, crime genre realism of Callew’s near-misses with rescue. This isn’t a world devoid of sympathy, but it’s also teeming with self-interest, indifference, incompetence, and petty corruption. (Callew should recognize it: it’s a businessman’s world.) Locals come by to gawk at the accident, but instead of getting help, they steal his luggage and strip his car for parts. A couple of the convicts circle back for his spare clothes to cover up their prison duds, and when they see they’re too late, one decides to strip Callew’s “corpse” instead. He’s left on his back, freed from the steering wheel but stripped down to his undershirt. Evening is coming on. It’s going to get cooler.

Earlier, he consoled himself that at least he wasn’t staring at the sun. Now he is.

But this is not just a series of misfortunes and humiliations. If it were, the suspense would ebb. Instead, there are opportunities here, too, enough to keep both Callew and the audience on the hook. One of the escapees pities the “dead” Callew, even wishing for a mirror check to see if he’s breathing—but with his companion rushing him, he can’t think to check for a pulse. But for a second there—

Almost. Almost. It’s enough human connection that Callew, who, on the edge of panic, had despaired over the “criminals and ghouls” his accident exposed him to, misses the prisoners when they’re gone: “I guess they were company, in a way. … It’s just that it’s so silent now, I guess. And lonely.” The repeated use of “guess” is illuminating, too. His decisiveness and sureness are wilting into something softer and more uncertain, now that he turns to discussing his own feelings while he’s in these dire straits.

Another “almost” comes when he discovers he now has the tiniest degree of movement. He can tap his little finger, and that’s enough to shore up his crumbling self-possession. He can act and plan, and when someone comes—and they will come—all he’ll have to do is tap, and they’ll hear him.

Or will they? When “rescue” finally comes, Hitchcock oversees some terrific sound work, showing how easily the sound of Callew’s tapping finger—once the loudest thing in his silent world—is lost in the sea of noise that comes with rumbling engines, chattering men, squeaky wheels. This last act is the finest sequence yet, a near-constant parade of raised and crushed hopes. Relentless bad luck can feel cruel, and there’s a hellishness to all this, but Hitchcock knows that, perversely, too much of it would actually let the audience relax. After all, if it’s mean enough to feel contrived, I can see the strings being pulled, and I know it’s just a puppet show after all: “Oh, good, I’m real, so I would never be in this situation!”

This is relentless but plausible, and that makes it perfect suspense. Hitchcock saves his well-honed ghoulishness for two particularly excellent, macabre details.

The first is off-screen, a horror mentioned but breezed over (possibly by network mandate): Callew is brought to the morgue in a truck, loaded up alongside the “other” dead men. Once I noticed that detail, it burrowed its way into my brain. If I think about how the steering wheel would press against my throat, I also wonder how they stacked up the bodies in that truck bed, whether or not Callew was laid out touching them, whether or not he could smell them after they’d spent all day in the sun.

The second is the fade-in after Callew’s been left all night in the morgue with a sheet over his face. When the scene faded to black, it was obviously a thin, light piece of fabric, the sheet that we knew it was. When the scenes fades back in, when Callew wakes, Hitchcock changes how the sheet looks, making it opaque rather than gauzy and adding a watered effect. It no longer looks like a sheet. Now it could be the silk lining of a coffin.

This is as clever and devious as the second, longer staircase at the end of Notorious. I’ve seen this episode multiple times, and every time, this makes my breath catch in my throat. For a split second, I always think that Callew, who knew his last chance to tap would come with the coroner’s examination in the morning, slept too long, and now he’s woken up buried alive. It’s made even more anxiety-spiking because Callew’s face suddenly looks more frozen than ever—it may even be a still image of Cotten, to heighten the stiffness and uncanniness—and it takes longer than usual before his sleep-muzzy voiceover kicks in.

“Breakdown” is one of the show’s greatest hits, a story that can sit comfortably with Hitchcock’s best work. “Revenge” was already good, but this is a definite step up, with a strong central performance, nightmarish situation, convincing plotting, and memorable visuals. It satisfies every key point I once imagined for a lasting story, which means it’s easy for it to have a reputation even with people who haven’t seen the episode—but spoilers can’t spoil something this good.

The Twist: Callew’s last, best chance to signal that he’s alive is ruined when he realizes that whoever moved him last laid him out with his hand wedged underneath him. With all his hope gone and with the coroner about to cover him up again, Callew finally gives way to his emotions—and his tears save him from being buried alive.

This is a classic ending. It hearkens back to Callew’s conversation with and about Hubka, of course, but that talk is handled well enough that what it’s setting up doesn’t feel obvious, probably because it’s not just a warning but an explication of Callew’s own character, which the episode goes on to thoroughly demonstrate. Like I said, he is the man he thinks he is, he is preternaturally good at keeping it together. No one has ever been as good in a crisis. It’s the exact quality that would, in almost any other thriller scenario, keep him alive, and here, it almost kills him. That’s the kind of elegant, acidic irony Hitchcock could convey better than almost anyone else.

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Written by: Louis Pollock (story), Francis Cockrell & Louis Pollock (teleplay)

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