Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E8, "Our Cook's a Treasure"

This is one of the great “normal” episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It doesn’t have enough juice to be a top-tier classic, but it’s a well-executed version of the show’s regular pleasures. I think of it was a good starter episode if you want to introduce someone to the series.

It’s also charming episode. It isn’t a comedy, but it has an intimate, playful tone even as it’s tackling suspicion and slow poisoning. Sarah Weinman, who helped lead a revival of mid-century domestic suspense, once wrote on her TinyLetter about wishing the contemporary version of the genre had “more warmth and wit … less whine and wheedle,” and “warmth and wit” helps pin down the appeal of “Our Cook’s a Treasure.” (Originally a short story by Dorothy L. Sayers, whom Weinman cites in that piece.) This is a tale where a man believes his talented but crotchety cook may be a serial poisoner out to murder his beloved wife, and watching it is as pleasant as sipping on a cup of arsenic-laced cocoa. There’s banter. There’s an absolutely spectacular nightgown. Civilians can drop glass jars of cocoa off for poison analysis, like friendly toxicologists are stationed at CVS.

The backbone of the episode, though, is its cast, especially Everett Sloane and Beulah Bondi. Both are major figures with significant filmographies littered with performances I love—Bondi in Make Way for Tomorrow and It’s a Wonderful Life! Sloane in Patterns!—and I love watching them share the screen here.

Sloane plays Ralph Montgomery, an affable family man with a regrettable penchant for needling his sour-faced cook, Mrs. Sutton (Bondi). But no matter how much he likes to play it up, his irritation at her hogging his morning paper and leaving it creased is really just a minor grouch … until he finds out about the manhunt for Mrs. Andrews, a housekeeper who poisons the pretty young women she works for. Come to think of it, Ralph’s been having some suspicious indigestion lately. And his wife said she wasn’t feeling too well, either ….

“Our Cook’s a Treasure” follows Ralph down the Mrs. Andrews rabbit-hole as he gets more nervous by the minute. There are some good scenes here, especially when Ralph, trying hard to seem normal, attempts to use other people in his life as sounding boards. I like the doctor at his bridge game who says that he’s not a psychiatrist and so can’t speak to Mrs. Andrews’s state of mind—and more or less sticks to that principle, opining and theorizing a lot less than everyone else at the table. The best moment, however, comes when Ralph requests a back issue of the newspaper, one where they ran a picture of Mrs. Andrews. For a second, he’s relieved: she’s much younger than Mrs. Sutton! Then his more astute secretary points out that it’s an old photo¹—“Look at that big hat with all those flowers on it …. Nobody wears anything like that today”—and Ralph peers at it like he’s trying to age it in his head. Even with the best will in the world, he can’t warp an old newsprint photo into either exoneration or proof.

Ralph’s quest feels especially important to him because he’s not doing it for himself. Even though he’s the one who’s collapsed with “indigestion” cramps, he’s only worried about Ethel.

Janet Ward² is beautifully cast in the role, youthful and glowing beside her somewhat grizzled husband. She moves about the house like she’s starring in a fabric softener ad, wafting sweet, fresh scent everywhere. Of course, she fits Mrs. Andrews’s victim profile to a tee: she feels like the embodiment of “young and pretty wife.”

But it’s not enough to merely make the audience believe she might be in danger. The audience also has to feel at least a sliver of Ralph’s own sense of urgency, which means the episode needs to sell his head-over-heels adoration of Ethel. Once again, as in “Don’t Come Back Alive,” there must be a domestic idyll in danger of shattering.

“Our Cook’s a Treasure” handles that by not overplaying it. Ralph teases Ethel about her drama club, pretending to have forgotten she’s told him about it, but this faux-prickliness and faux-inattention is Ralph’s shtick. For better and for worse: the danger isn’t that the audience won’t buy into Ralph’s worry, it’s that they’ll be annoyed by this kind of “ha, got you riled!” nonsense. For me, what makes it work is that Ralph shows that he’s comfortable with Ethel having a life outside him. He doesn’t get jealous of her having a love scene, he looks out for her keeping her fair share of the audience’s attention: “Don’t let Don Welbeck turn your back to the audience!” When he’s sick, he tells her not to miss her rehearsal to look after him. He’s the furthest thing from overbearing.

If anything, he’s too anxious to not step on anyone’s toes outside of a joke. He thinks his cook may be a murderer, but for much of the episode, he’s too worried about sounding paranoid, scaring Ethel, or getting Mrs. Sutton in any unjustified trouble to do anything about it. This leads to a delicately funny line where he feels out the possibility of letting Mrs. Sutton go at the end of her first month and says to Ethel, “I was wondering if we’re completely satisfied with her.” It’s a masterpiece of a wishy-washy sentence, almost every part of it dodging the heart of what he means:

• the imperfect tense, heightening the vagueness
• “wondering” rather than “thinking,” to make it seem like he hasn’t explored this with any real concentration
• “completely” thrown in to cushion the inconceivable idea of not being satisfied at all
• the switch from “I” to “we” to make the responsibility of firing her more diffuse

That’s the kind of light humor that helps make this episode such a treat. The threat of death is always there, but Robert Stevens and screenwriter Robert Dennis keep the tone light, and all the actors calibrate their performances so that even the more ominous moments—like a shot that reveals Mrs. Sutton was lurking in the shadows all along, listening to Ralph’s meek brainstorming about how to let her go—have a playfulness to them. There’s almost a thread of camp running through all this, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s not the tone every episode should aim for, but it works beautifully here.

The Twist: Mrs. Sutton is innocent … but Ethel’s stage kisses with Don Welbeck have turned into something more, so she’s the one poisoning Ralph’s cocoa.

There’s another “oh, Ralph” moment late in the episode that reveals how truly conflict-averse this guy is: fresh from being scared out of his mind for his wife’s sake, he finally steels himself to fire Mrs. Sutton … and not only is he incapable of doing it without promising his poisoner (or so he thinks) a month’s wages in lieu of severance, he also backs down the second the newspaper reveals she couldn’t have been Mrs. Andrews after all. He’s so embarrassed about this wrongful firing that he forgets about his very real arsenic problem.

Bondi gets the best line delivery of the episode, cutting through all his anxious, vague excuses with the plainness and directness he’d never use himself:

Ralph: “It was just a misunderstanding … now that I’ve spoken to my wife, I know she was upstairs all the time.”

Mrs. Sutton: “Was she?”

She says it like he already knows the answer on some level. He doesn’t—Sloane doesn’t play it like he does—but that’s because he’s been looking at his life from the inside, taking it for granted that the specific texture of his marriage is what matters. Mrs. Sutton, in the house only a month, has already seen enough to know that the archetypes of gossip hold true here. It’s like the psychology the bridge club was bullshitting about. That Ethel is Ethel matters less than that she’s a beautiful young woman … married to a not-so-beautiful older man. Of course she’s trying to get him out of her way now that she has a new passion. It’s almost mean, how little the specifics matter. It feels as cruel, in its way, as the poisoning.³

That last shot is the cherry on top of the episode’s camp undercurrents. When Ward fills up the screen, speaks directly to the camera, and extends the cup of poisoned cocoa center-frame toward the audience in a kind of imagined 3D, it exaggerates the suburban domestic into queasy spectacle. It’s like Stevens turns the camera over to Douglas Sirk or Todd Haynes. Now that’s style.

Directed by: Robert Stevens

Written by: Dorothy L. Sayers (story) and Robert C. Dennis (teleplay)

Up Next: “The Long Shot”

1. I appreciate that this minor female character gets a chance to contribute and that her fashion knowledge is as matter-of-factly useful and unremarked-upon as the poison testing. ↩︎
2. Another actor with some iconic performances: she eventually played Arlene Iverson in Night Moves. ↩︎
3. What hurts the most is the disrespect! ↩︎