User Reviews

The lush theme music accompanying that cheating chicken Claude's transition from his backup pad to his wife's nest, which happily plays nearly to its end without dialogue to fully appreciate it, certainly belies the ugliness that is to follow. The conspirators manage to hide their devious dealings well, though Miss Clara who's hardly a shrewish harpy also ain't nobody's fool. But while just by itself her betrayal, especially by a neighbor she thinks is a friend, is low enough to begin with, Margo's swift descent into going hands-on to rub her out is gasp-making. And that she's so mild-mannered about it - no "I'll get you my pretty!" style evil showing - is what makes her the more scary; think Donna Reed & June Cleaver recast in Hitchcockian tones. And the who-knew ending twist is a Serves You Right! Moment I'm sure the contemporary audience were smacking their lips over.

I hadn't seen this in awhile, so earlier when I watched this morning's dvr recording over lunch (eek!), I had a Who He? About the contract killer that sent me here to look him up - and while I've seen some of the other shows e.g. Thriller he had guest-starred in, though not to recall any exact episodes, Further Reading disclosing that this episode played on George Kane's 95th birthday was a cosmic karmic Delightful Surprise that old Alfie H. Himself would have appreciated. He lived to a respectable age only a year short of the master's earthly tenure, and while his name isn't of the household type or his filmography lengthy, he made of his brief appearance here, a la Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg the previous year, a lasting-impression one. Shows it's best to leave any stranger at the door looking to make a pickup on the other side of it (locked) while you go & get it!

Good old Claude (Mark Miller) should have taken his girlfriend Margo's (Patricia Breslin) advice and leave the wife murdering business to herself. Margo couldn't trust Claude to follow through on getting rid of wife Clara (Vivienne Segal), so she comes up with a scheme to do the deed herself with a bottle of poison and make it look like suicide. Timing is everything in stories like this, and when a 'courier' arrives to collect a business envelope for Claude, he mistakenly assumes Margo is the Mrs. He was hired to kill. It would have been illuminating to see the husband's reaction to this faux pas, but instead we get Hitch's declaration that the perpetrators didn't get away with it, standard for his shows, presumably because the Motion Picture Production Code was still in effect until 1968.

A mistress and a wife within a few feet of each other. Dependence on the wife for corporate movement leads to the deaths of both, purely by happenstance. Once again, we pull for the one woman, the attractive one, to get away with her crime, but in AHP, no one gets off scot free.