Milton Merlin wrote three Four Star Playhouse episodes starring Ronald Colman, and I disliked the other two for various reasons. But "Ladies on His Mind" is a singular achievement, unlike anything I've seen recently while watching over a hundred anthology segments from 1950s and early 1960s television.
Colman plays a psychiatrist, married to solid, down to earth Benita Hume, his wife in real life (who married George Sanders after Colman's death!). As a comical touch (in this very droll comedy) she is fixated on reupholstering Colman's couch in his office, upon which his femme patients lie while pouring out their stories to him. Colman boasts of his detachment, able to help his patients without becoming emotionally involved in their cases.
He encounters three contrasting beauties, and director Robert Florey, with a Dadaist painting hanging above the couch in Colman's office for inspiration, stages a sort of ballet or pantomime conjured up by Colman as he listens to each of them.
Impressive casting has brunette Patricia Morison as a housewife with marital problems, and in their fantasy dance Colman expresses romantic warmth, lacking from her husband. Morison reminded me a lot of Emily Blunt in her styling here.
Blonde Elisabeth Fraser is a patient torn between two men, her husband and his best friend, with clearly the friend more appealing to her. Colman is inspired by this to have a romantic dance with her.
Third patient is a newcomer, a striking, severe blonde beauty played by Hillary Brooke as almost a femdom, condescending in the way she speaks about her husband of seven years, and Colman has a pantomime scene with her where he poisons her to death, after which he pretty much gives her the brush off, ending her brief stay as a patient.
These fantasy scenes on abstract sets are reminiscent of a Gene Kelly movie, especially "Invitation to the Dance" (that was made three years AFTER this show aired), with Colman an odd but effective substitute for perhaps Astaire (who could have played this Four Star role). Director Florey was a master of movie suspense, and while watching this show I immediately thought of the famous Salvador Dali dream sequence in Hitchcock's "Spellbound". The theme of hiding one's true feelings under a cold, detached facade is brilliantly explored with highly literate dialogue and an elegant comic touch -hardly what was typical of American television in 1953 (or now).