Henry Slesar's short story, "The Case of the Kind Waitress," was first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's October 1958 issue. It was adapted for television and aired late in the fourth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on March 29, 1959. The story is well told and has been anthologized repeatedly; the filmed version is less successful, though better than the prior Slesar effort, "The Right Price."The story concerns Thelma Tompkins, a 44 year old waitress at the Hotel Gordon Restaurant who takes a special interest in Mrs. Mannerheim, an elderly regular customer whom she thinks must be over 90 years old. Thelma is another of Slesar's ordinary people: she has worked for "11 years as a waitress" and is no beauty; he mentions "the imperfect features of her drab face" and her "stringy brown hair." Mrs. Mannerheim seems barely alive; with a "tiny shrunken body," she is "white-faced and wraith-like." The third main character is Thelma's 34 year old brother Arthur, a lazy ne'er do well who works at a drug store. Since their father died, Thelma and Arthur are each other's only family.
One day, due to Thelma's kindness, Mrs. Mannerheim tells her that she has taken care of the younger woman in her will. Arthur is excited to learn of the coming windfall but his enthusiasm wanes as months pass and the old woman does not die. Eventually, tired of waiting, he suggests to Thelma that she "help her along," insisting that it would be a "mercy killing" that he could facilitate with powder from his drug store sprinkled on her food each night.Thelma resists this idea for a month but finally gives in and begins slowly poisoning her elderly friend. Yet Mrs. Mannerheim lives on! Thelma decides to give her one large dose to end the waiting (Thelma waits on Mrs. Mannerheim in both senses of the word--as a server and as an expectant inheritor). One evening, when the old woman does not come down for dinner, Thelma takes a tray to her room and loses her temper, leading Mrs. Mannerheim to threaten to change her will. Thelma strangles her and is discovered by a chambermaid. She is arrested and jailed, only to be told by a policeman of a surprising discovery at autopsy: Mrs. Mannerheim had had a parasitic infection and the only thing keeping her alive was small, regular doses of arsenic!
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| Rick Jason |
The title of the story was shortened to "The Kind Waitress" when it was adapted for television by William O'Farrell, who also changed the story in other ways that blunted its effectiveness. Arthur is no longer Thelma's younger brother; instead, he is her boyfriend, a handsome, clarinet-playing misogynist whose casual cruelty to his lover would not pass muster if this episode were filmed today. Thelma's desperate attempts to hold on to her man inform all of the wrong choices she makes. When Arthur hears of the promised inheritance, he thinks only of himself: "No more playin' for peanuts! I could start my own band!" As Arthur, Rick Jason is hard to watch; his performance verges on that of the beatniks and hipsters we will see in upcoming years on this series.
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| Olive Deering |
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| Celia Lovsky |
The conclusion of the show is also changed for no good reason. In the story, Thelma is caught red-handed, but onscreen she gets away with murder, only to blurt out a confession during a coroner's inquest. She then overhears Mrs. Mannerheim's doctor explain that he had been giving his patient Anotyne to treat her heart condition. He says that "Anotyne was the only thing keeping her alive" and, in case we did not get it right away, his words are repeated three more times as a voice over!
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| Cooking up some poison! |
"The Kind Waitress" was one of 29 episodes of the Hitchcock series to be directed by Paul Henreid (1908-1992), the actor turned director who also directed "The Landlady" and "Annabel." His work on this episode is competent but not outstanding.
Rick Jason (1923-2000) gets top billing as Arthur, though his performance was not one he would recall in his later autobiography, Scrapbooks of My Mind (2000), which can be read online here. Jason was on TV and in the movies from 1953 to the late 1980s; he never appeared on the Hitchcock series again but he had a five-year run as Lt. Gill Hanley on Combat. He ended his own life the year his book came out.
Olive Deering (1918-1986) plays Thelma, her wide-set eyes giving her face a fish-like appearance. She was the sister of actor Alfred Ryder and she was a member of the Actors Studio, onstage beginning in 1933 and in movies and on TV from the late 1940s. She also appeared in one episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and had a role in the classic Outer Limits episode, "The Zanti Misfits."
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| Robert Carson |
Finally, in a small role as the coroner is Robert Carson (1909-1979), brother of Jack Carson. Robert appeared on the Hitchcock show eleven times, always in small roles, including one as the inquest board chairman in "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?"
"The Kind Waitress" is available on DVD here and can be viewed online for free here. (If Larry Rapchak is reading this, perhaps he can identify the rather infectious melody that Arthur plays on his clarinet!)
Sources:
"Chemical of the Week -- Arsenic." Chemical of the Week -- Arsenic. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 July 2013.
Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.
IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 07 July 2013.
"The Kind Waitress." Alfred Hitchcock Presents. CBS. 29 Mar. 1959. Television.
"Main Page." The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 July 2013.
"Scrapbooks of My Mind - A Hollywood Auto-Biography by Rick Jason." Scrapbooks of My Mind - A Hollywood Auto-Biography by Rick Jason. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 July 2013.
Slesar, Henry. "Case of the Kind Waitress." 1958. Clean Crimes and Neat Murders: Alfred Hitchcock's Hand Picked Selection of Stories by Henry Slesar. New York: Avon, 1960. 126-36. Print.
Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 07 July 2013.
Henry Slesar's episodes are rather dull so far, aren't they? I think Slesar became a favorite of Joan Harrison and Norman Lloyd because his stories were so cheap to produce. None of Slesar's 37 (!) episodes of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS can be considered a classic. But every one of them is cheap, cheap, cheap. A few episodes barely qualify as mystery/suspense stories.
ReplyDeleteNice writeup, Jack! Although I do think the producers were a bit heavy on Slesar, I think some fine episodes were produced from his work. Unfortunately, like "The Kind Waitress," the journey from original story to screen adaptation was sometimes rocky and the writer and/or producers messed up a perfectly fine story by imposing illogical changes. Among the stories that are only marginally mystery/suspense, I think few if any belonged to Slesar and though he never produced anything as enduring as "The Glass Eye" or "Lamb to the Slaughter," he produced some nice episodes such as "The Right Kind of House."
ReplyDeleteHarvey, don't let these last two episodes bring you down! As Jordan points out, there are many solid ones, both in the seven I've looked at so far and in the many still to come.
ReplyDeleteBe sure to check out Jordan's excellent blog: The Twilight Zone Vortex!
Henry Slesar's stories are often two-headers requiring a minimum of sparsely decorated sets. Hitchcock once said that too many movies were actually "pictures of people talking" and we get a lot of talk in "Slesarian" episodes. They also lend themselves to the 30-minute format of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. By comparison, Slesar only scripted 10 episodes of THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR (including the unforgettable BEHIND THE LOCKED DOOR). Overreliance on one writer wasn't good for ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. A few more stories by Jack Ritchie, Richard Matheson and Bryce Walton et al would have been very welcome.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree with that last statement, Harvey. I would have loved to see more Ritchie and Matheson, and especially more John Collier, Fred Brown, Robert Bloch, and Roald Dahl. Even though the show used these writers a good bit, there was a lot of their work left over that would have made excellent episodes. Fred Brown's "Cry Silence" would have been great, as would have Matheson's "The Distributor." Hitchcock probably could have made an unforgettable episode out of Bloch's "The Cloak," although because of its supernatural nature, it may have been a better suit for a show like Thriller.
ReplyDeleteI used to enjoy reading Slesar's stories in mystery magazines. If my memory isn't failing me he published in both the Ellery Queen and Hitchcock magazines. I enjoyed reading his stories more than I've enjoyed watching televised adaptations of him.
ReplyDeleteOkay, as to The Kind Waitress: I just watched it again (second time I've seen it), enjoyed it more than the first time, well more than twenty years ago. It was Rick Jason's awful performance as the clarinetist boyfriend that damn near ruined it for me.
This time it worked better. Jason's acting still put me off, and the good part was that he had far less screen time than the more talented Olive Deering and Celia Lovsky. The latter enjoyed a long career, and in her later years was memorable playing elderly parts, became a sort of European female Ian Wolfe or Cyril Delavanti. I've seen less of Miss Deering, find her work always first rate.
The episode worked nicely for me. It helped that I forgot the ending. I'd rather that Jason had offed the old lady, as it was his idea. Deering's performance was sympathetic, her character, aside from the company she kept, struck me as decent.
Now here's a wild ending, Jack (and I wonder if it could have passed the censors), dig: while plotting to poison the old woman Deering marries Jason, who insists on it when he realizes the old gal's worth nearly a million. Disheartened when the poison doesn't work, he skips town for a while, while his now abandoned wife, desperate for the legacy, kills the women, as she does in the show, is sent to the gas chamber, where we see her husband visiting (just to make sure she dies,--he's faking grief the whole time, of course, weeping crocodile tears by the bucketload); and after his wife is dead we see him collect the legacy, thus getting off scot free! After all, it was is wife who committed the murder...
The last shot of Jason is of him walking arm in arm with Joi Lansing (or Yvette Vickers, take your choice) down Fifth Avenue, a most happy fellow, and set for life.
It's hard to believe it's been over 4 years since I wrote this post! I like your alternate ending and would be happy to see Vickers or Lansing pop up on AHP. Maybe you should try your hand at a short story!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jack. A bit of tongue in cheek there but that would make an interesting episode, especially for Hitchcock, with the transference of guilt literal, from one person to the other, with the "transferee" doing the deed, the "tranferer" reaping the benefits. There would be no way to prove it in a court of law.
ReplyDeleteMy story writing days are long over, though I could do a play/script on a similar theme. Things are so hi tech in films and TV these days I'm totally demoralized, and besides, I just became a senior citizen, still love writing but to leap into the fray,--once more!--at my age. That would take some pondering. I appreciate the kindness, though.
I just saw this on MeTV, part of it anyway. This seemed like another story where Eileen Heckart played a woman attending to her demanding mother until she died, then she was stuck at the end taking care of her new mother-in-law. Writer William O'Farrell must've lived well past 1962 if he was still writing into the late 1980s. IMDB didn't give his life span but did agree w/ you on writing credits to the late 1980s.
ReplyDeleteI think you're mixing up "Kind Waitress" with "Coming, Mama." Thanks for pointing that out about O'Farrell. I've revised the post. The death date of 1962 is correct. The two movies in the '80s were adapted from novels by O'Farrell, not written by him.
ReplyDelete