User Reviews

Two old friends, one (Dailey) in a stale marriage to adulteress Jan Sterling; the other (Duff) unattached and something of a gadabout. Dailey has fallen for a younger woman -- Sterling is 38 and Bettye Ackerman is only 28. This is an eminently sensible move. Ackerman is in love with Dailey too, despite the fact that Dailey here looks kind of old and flabby. And Ackerman is affable and attractive, despite her spelling her first name with an "e" on the end.

Dailey, ridden with guilt, confesses his affair to his best friend and says he intends to divorce Sterling. But he's being called out of town for a while and introduces Duff to Ackerman, and asks Duff to look after her while Dailey's elsewhere. Duff looks after her with a vengeance. The two of them are drawn together, or at any rate Ackerman likes Duff, although Duff seems motivated by not much more than his glands.

Are you following this? I ask because the plot gets even more intricate and at times confusing. Dailey steals poison from Duff and tries to slip it to his wife at dinner but mistakenly gives it to the dog, Brutus, instead. Brutus gives up the ghost promptly and without distress. Nobody mourns Brutus, although he's been with Dailey and Sterling for fifteen years. By my count, that makes Brutus AT LEAST one hundred and five years old in dog years. I hope when I'm that old some kind friend will slip me the Altrapeine.

I can't claim that the plot clears up as the episode moves along, because it gets more nebulous. There's another attempt to poison Sterling, Ackerman rejects Dailey, there's a car crash, and it all winds up with Dailey dying in a hospital bed and having an "A-HA! Erlebnis," during which he twigs to the fact that his good old friend Duff was after Dailey's girl friend. Dailey frames Duff for attempted murder, I think, but it's all rather murky.

The plot is torturous but the dialog has some sparkle to it. How many dogs do you know that are named Brutus? And here's an exchange I thought reflected some understated but deft wit.

When Dailey is first telling Duff about finding a newer model for his wife, he explains something like:

"You don't know how it is. All those dull years, and then, suddenly --"

Duff cuts in with: " -- It's spring!"

I believe that may be more clever than it appears. A popular song during the 1940s was "Suddenly It's Spring," first heard in a Ginger Rogers movie, "Lady in the Dark," from 1941. In 1947, another movie with the title "Suddenly It's Spring" was released, and the plot of the comedy closely mirrors the plot of this episode. Google the song on YouTube and listen to what Stan Getz did with it in 1953. I won't bother with the details because the point isn't important. It's just that it all doesn't seem coincidental, though it may have been.

The direction isn't bad either, considering the limitations of the genre -- dramatic, low-budget TV drama. For instance, there's an interest shot of a car making a fast U-turn during a rain storm, and the camera captures it from inside a roadside telephone booth, through rain-spotted windows, the telephone that has just played an important part in the story dangling from the box. Interesting composition. Not masterful, not poetic, but someone had to put some thought into it. The lighting is well done, too, highly noirish. Duff is appealing, Dailey seems half asleep, and Phillip Reed, as Jan Sterling's lover, is a great black cinematic hole. Watching him is a painful experience.

One minute he's Philip one minute he's Barney in the same conversation between people the name changes are the actors all brain-dead is the script miswritten one review I see here gave him both names.... calling him Philip Barney it drove me crazy has nobody else caught this or am I just that OCD??? Lol ...not really a review about the episode I love all Hitchcock movies TV I love the man himself I think he's hysterical but he's so precise about everything I cannot believe this got past him it's just annoying is all.

If the Bartels' dog were a Doberman Pinscher or a pit bull, I could see why it was named Brutus. But a spaniel? It sure didn't look like a Brutus to me. That Barney Bartel intentionally fed it the altrapeine poison didn't make a whole lot of sense to me unless he wanted to see just how effective it was. But he should have known that by his conversations with Peter Harding (Howard Duff) and the drug store guy (Stan Jones). He wasted the poor mutt for nothing.

Besides that little aside starting out, I thought this was a pretty effective and convincing episode, EXCEPT - right at the very end! Harding had to blurt out the fact that he and Lorna (Bettye Ackerman) were going away for a week or two. As Bugs Bunny would say - 'What a maroon!'. Bartel may have had his suspicions, but there's no way Harding should have been coaxed into admitting that he was having his own fling on the side with Lorna (Bettye Ackerman). As for Lorna, I can understand a woman going for an older guy, but neither Barney nor Peter looked like a catch for the lovely woman. Who in real life, the actress portraying Lorna was only three years younger than Jan Sterling, playing Barney's wife. And actress Ackerman was actually thirty eight, not twenty eight!

In any event, the twist at the end was perhaps one of the better Hitchcock finales, except of course Hitch's own epilog which diluted the effect of the unwelcome surprise for Harding. Not that you'd want to see Harding get away with anything, but the effect it leaves on the viewer is a bit of a letdown from the impact of the resolution. I wish he'd just let dead dogs lie.

This is one of the 60-minute episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour adapted from a full-length novel that does not seem to drag. Good performances all round by the four main leads, although it is hard to see what the lovely Lorna Dickson (Bettye Ackerman) sees in the boring, bland, unambitious, and colourless Philip 'Barney' Bartel (Dan Dailey) to have an affair with him; little wonder that his dashing 'best friend' Peter Harding, well played by a conniving Howard Duff, soon turns her head.

Regarding the poisoning of the Bartels' family dog Brutus by Philip, I believe that it was not accidental - he meant to do it deliberately to test if the poison 'Altrapeine' would really work. How utterly callous of him to kill the dog who had been with him and his wife throughout the 15 years of their marriage!

In the final scene at the hospital when Bartel gets Harding to poison him with the aforementioned 'Altrapeine' so as to avoid justice, I was struck by how cloudy the tap water was even before Harding put the deadly powder in - just how chlorinated was that tap water??!

I do not really understand this episode. Barney poisons the dog, whether it was meant for the dog or for his wife, but then he does not even care that the dog is suddenly deceased. This does not make any sense, as the dog had been with them for 15 years. If he didn't feel anything for the dog, then at the moment it was discovered that the dog was suddenly dead, his wife would question his lack of feeling. The fact that this did not happen was so completely unrealistic, I shake my head whenever I see that scene. Barney instead talks about death as if it were preferable to life, and Phil and his wife do not really think that is strange.

Also, why is Bettye Ackerman's character so flighty? She cannot even tell who she is in love with, or does she go around breaking up marriages regularly? I can't find any excuse for her character and that makes this episode seem rather phony.

All in all, not a very impressive episode, although Howard Duff is convincingly evil.