Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E9, "The Long Shot"

Up until now, criminal protagonists on Alfred Hitchcock Presents have mostly been amateurs. (And most often, of course, the lead characters have been victims or bystanders, not perpetrators. The nightmarish noir “Salvage” is the biggest exception to all of these points, obviously.) Their inexperience is, subtly or overtly, a common plot point. Essentially, the show’s suspense stakes rely on the fact that all of this is out of the ordinary for the characters, who aren’t used to being in this kind of danger or taking these kinds of risks.

“The Long Shot,” like “Salvage,” bends that rule of thumb even if it doesn’t outright break it, and like “Salvage,” it fits best in a separate-but-related genre. This isn’t a suspense story, it’s a crime story. It’s a good one, too.

Down-and-out gambler Charlie Raymond (Peter Lawford) gets one of my favorite establishing beats in the opening minutes of the episode: within seconds of Raymond’s horse losing, his bookie is calling his hangout bar to make sure he sticks around. But he has no intention of following through. Raymond owes $4,200, or, in today’s terms, a bit over fifty grand. He’s looking for the nearest exit when he stumbles across a promising classified ad: “LONDONER WANTED.”

Walter Hendricks (John Williams) is a lonely Englishman irritated to be on the wrong side of the pond. He has a cross-country trip he needs to make, and he’s seeking one of his countrymen to do the driving and talk his ear off about jolly old London.

Raymond isn’t a native Londoner, but he lived there for years. Close enough, he decides, so he puts on a fake accent and sells his services to Hendricks.

He soon finds himself earning every penny, because Hendricks’s around-the-clock need for his well-informed patter is exhausting. While Williams had the more storied on-screen career—Dial M for Murder, Sabrina, To Catch a Thief, and Witness for the Prosecution look good on anyone’s résumé—Rat Pack member Lawford acquits himself well in this episode, and one of the best touches in his performance is the soul-weariness that comes over him when he tries to escape all the London talk by going to the hotel bar for a nightcap … only to have Hendricks say he’ll join him. No wonder Raymond tries to escape his semi-legitimate employment the first chance he gets. To scrounge up the cash to bet on a “sure thing,” he rummages through Hendricks’s luggage—and comes up with documents that prove Hendricks is all set to inherit a fortune. And wouldn’t you know it, no one in America has ever met him before. Why, any man with an English accent and the right story under his belt could turn up at these law offices and collect. At least, he could do that as long as the real Hendricks was dead.

This is the kind of plan that would appeal to a lot of AHP characters. (One of the things the show understands is how hard it is to resist a good, lucrative, easily achievable scheme once you’ve thought of it.) And to be fair, Raymond isn’t a master criminal before he dreams up Hendricks’s murder. But he’s already a practiced opportunist, someone used to taking chances and even crossing lines to do it. The particulars here are new to him, but the feel of it all is old hat, and that makes the episode’s tone more relaxed than usual. The frisson of risk is traded for the satisfaction of being in on a well-oiled plan.

There are some really nice touches in this middle section. I love when Raymond does a trial run of his Hendricks impersonation—turning up on the doorstep of an aunt Hendricks never met—and does a subtle better-check-the-meaning-of-that double-take when she exclaims, “I can’t believe it!”

But the best part of this stretch of the episode is the murder scene. AHP episodes, especially in the hands of a good director, can make their violence felt even when it’s barely on-screen. The death in “The Long Shot” is surprisingly brutal, and director Robert Stevenson and writer Harold Swanton give the scene an agonizing sense of progression. Raymond has structured this leg of the drive so they’ll be going through the desert at night, and the visible loneliness of the space helps commit him further: a gambler who can’t step away from a good idea certainly can’t step away from a good opportunity. One of the best curveballs to throw at a would-be murderer is to make sure they have to deal with their victim when they’d prefer not to, and sure enough, though Raymond tries to kill Hendricks while he’s sleeping, Hendricks wakes up. Raymond doesn’t get the ease or moral comfort of knowing Hendricks never knew what was happening. He has to hear his cut-off cry as he backs the car over him. As an implicitly grisly detail, we get to see that Hendricks’s head is perfectly lined up with a rear wheel. Nothing, though, compares to the two unbearable bumps: one as Raymond backs up and runs him over, and the other as he drives forward again. I love squibs as much as any horror and action fan, but few sprays of fake blood can make me wince like those two thunks. The first is bad enough, and the second is even worse.

This episode ticks along well, with good performances by Williams and Lawford, and like I said, that murder scene is memorable in all the right ways. I’m conflicted about the ultimate ending: I wish the story wrapped up with more oomph, maybe with a bitterer irony or some deeper feeling, but there’s a grace note in Lawford’s performance in those last few minutes that I love, and the lower-key ending fits the story’s overall tone. It’s part-and-parcel with Raymond’s greater, more jaded experience in the world of risk.

The Twist: The Hendricks Raymond knew—and murdered—wasn’t Hendricks at all. He was a con artist named English Jim, and he’d killed the real Hendricks back in New York, before he ever picked up Raymond (who was supposed to refamiliarize him with London). But since he didn’t cover his tracks as well as Raymond did, Hendricks’s body was discovered, so Raymond is arrested for that original murder as soon as he turns up to collect the inheritance.

That Lawford moment I was just talking about comes when he understands he’s done for. He has such a great weary smile as he says, “I should have known. Long shots are for chumps.” If having Raymond as a protagonist switches up the usual thrust of the show’s suspense storytelling, it’s well worth it for moments like this, moments that a more naïve character—one who took more seriously the notion that he might have control over his fate, and who would be outraged and appalled at this turn of events—would never hit. Raymond knew going in that sometimes you lose. And when he finds out the full story—that the man he knew tried the same plan he did—all he can do is laugh. That dark amusement is a strangely endearing final note.

As far as the twist’s impact on repeat viewing goes, well, I did pick up the first time through that “Hendricks” was pumping Raymond for info about London, not reminiscing with him, and I’m guessing plenty of other viewers always have, too. That all stood out to me to the point where the biggest actual twist was finding out that English Jim actually was English, and simply hadn’t been home in a long time; I thought for sure this guy had never set foot outside of the States. But a better, subtler rewatch bonus is when Hendricks is hiring Raymond and briefly gets suspicious of him, asking if Raymond is conning him and faking all this. He’s right, but it still seems paranoid … until you revisit the moment knowing that English Jim here is in the middle of a con of his own. Of course he’s going to think of that as a natural, maybe even likely, occurrence. He’s alert to the idea that other people might be like him, whereas Raymond—used to betting on situations that were set up to run without him—isn’t. It never occurs to Raymond that the game he tries to knock over wasn’t straight to begin with, and that’s how he ends up in this mess.  

Directed by: Robert Stevenson

Written by: Harold Swanton

Up Next: “The Case of Mr. Pelham”