The Hitchcock Project-Lukas Heller, Part One-The Tender Poisoner [8.14]

by Jack Seabrook

Lukas Heller (1930-1988) wrote two episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "The Tender Poisoner" and "I'll Be Judge--I'll Be Jury," both of which were based on novels. Born in Germany, Heller began writing films in 1959 and TV shows in 1961. He shares writing credit with Henry Farrell on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (62) and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (64), which won an Edgar Award for best picture. He also wrote the screenplay for The Dirty Dozen (67).

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"The Tender Poisoner" is based on a novel called Five Roundabouts to Heaven, by John Bingham, which was first published in 1953 in the U.K.; its title when published in the U.S. was The Tender Poisoner.

The story is told by Peter Harding and it opens as he visits a school in Orleans, France, that he had attended 19 years before, as a teenager, to learn French. His boyhood friend Philip Bartels attended the same school and Harding recalls that Bartels abhorred seeing any creature suffer but did not mind killing. He was also claustrophobic. Bartels met Beatrice Wilson there and would later marry her. Harding strikes an elegiac tone in his narrative; the school is no longer active, and he admits that he is responsible for the downfall of Philip, something that will take the entire novel to explain.

First edition

Harding writes down his thoughts and recollections in an attempt to understand why Bartels did what he did. In the introduction to a 2012 edition of the book, John le Carre writes that Bingham, the author, "wasn't interested in whodunnit... he wanted to know whydunnit and whether justice was going to be served." These concerns are shared by the narrator. He details Philip's upbringing and his marriage to Beatrice before reaching the date of February 12, when the story begins in earnest. On that date, Philip meets Peter for lunch and confesses that he is in love with a woman named Lorna Dickson and that he plans to leave his wife. When Lorna walks into the restaurant, Peter falls in love with her at first sight.

In the days that follow, Philip finds himself unable to tell Beatrice about Lorna and decides that he may have to kill her to prevent her from suffering due to their breakup. During a visit to his aunt, he reads about a poison called altrapeine that is hard to detect and that produces a death resembling coronary thrombosis; he recalls Beatrice once having chest pains. Philip goes back and forth as to whether he will leave Beatrice or kill her, but eventually he buys a bottle of the poison while out of town on a business trip.

Dan Dailey as Philip

Meanwhile, Peter is plotting to steal Lorna's affections. He visits her with Philip's blessing and takes her to dinner, after which he is tortured by thoughts of her with Philip. Peter makes an unannounced visit to a vacation cabin where Philip and Beatrice stay on weekends and, through the window, he observes Beatrice in the arms of John O'Brien. Beatrice confesses to Peter that she loves John but explains that she will not consider divorce because Philip needs her. Rather than tell the truth to Philip and Beatrice about their infidelities and their feelings for each other, Peter conceals what he knows in an attempt to win Lorna for himself.

The next day, Philip's dog suddenly dies, and Peter later reveals that Philip gave it poison to test its efficacy. Finally, on Monday, February 26, Philip puts poison in a bottle of medicine that Beatrice takes every night before going to bed. After his day at work ends, Philip visits Lorna while worrying about his wife ingesting the poison later that evening and whether he will be caught. Unexpectedly, Lorna tells him that they cannot continue seeing each other and he sets off toward home, driving too fast in bad weather and worrying that he will not reach home before Beatrice takes the poison. A black cat runs in front of his car and he swerves to the side; a bus crashes into his car and his wife's fate is uncertain.

Howard Duff as Peter

In the novel's final section, Peter explains that Philip survived and notified the police that Beatrice was in danger of taking poison. The police went to their house, took the bottle, and told her what Philip had done. The next day, he gave a statement to the police. Peter visits him in the hospital and Philip, terrified of going to jail and being overcome by claustrophobia in a jail cell, begs Peter to give him a dose of the same poison that Philip had almost given to his wife. Peter agrees and gives Philip the poison, killing him. The novel ends in the present, as Peter, who has since married Lorna, contemplates his culpability in Philip's death and understands that his motives were selfish ones, since he was thinking that he would have no rival for Lorna's affections at the moment that he gave Philip the fatal drink.

Five Roundabouts to Heaven features a complex narrative structure, as Peter narrates through a series of memories while visiting a place he associates with happy times of his youth. Bingham creates suspense by dropping hints of what is to happen: Will Philip succeed in killing Beatrice? Will he get back in time to prevent her death? Why does Peter claim to be responsible for Philip's death? Will anyone be caught? And what of the women? Will Lorna end up with Peter or Philip? Will Beatrice marry her lover, John? The novel's final section is exciting as Philip decides to try to save Beatrice and races against time to get home. Time is compressed and expanded throughout the book, which begins after all of the events have occurred, goes back in time to summarize what led up to them, and focuses on the days leading up to the fatal Monday, which is described in detail.

Jan Sterling as Beatrice

Philip's personality traits are examined by Peter, the narrator, who explains that his friend hates to see any creature suffer and thinks a quick death is preferable to prolonged unhappiness. Yet Peter is the one who, in the end, commits murder with poison, and Philip is the victim instead of Beatrice. Peter betrays his friend in matters of love and later understands that his act of murder was done for selfish reasons. The women in the book are kind: Lorna gives up Philip because she does not want to hurt Beatrice, and Beatrice stays with Philip to protect him from harm.

Five Roundabouts to Heaven (the title is revealed near the end to be what Philip encounters every time he drives to see Lorna) is an outstanding novel. Unfortunately, when Lukas Heller adapted it for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, under the title, "The Tender Poisoner," he removed the elements that make it so effective. What is left is an hour of television that can serve as an example of how not to adapt a book. Gone is the complex narrative structure, gone is the point of view of Peter as narrator. In their place is a series of events that follow the plot points from the novel without any of the emotion. As is often the case, the location has been moved from England to America.

Philip Reed as John

The framing sequence in the book, where Peter visits the school where he and Philip were teenagers together and where Philip met Beatrice, is eliminated, as are all of the details of Philip's upbringing. Instead, the TV version begins with Peter and Philip having lunch together and Philip confessing that he wants to leave Beatrice for Lorna. With no background on the characters' identities, the viewer is left with no context by which to judge their actions and words. Peter refers to Philip by the nickname "Barty," which has led many viewers to think the character's name is Barney.

Philip goes home that evening to find Beatrice having drinks with John O'Brien; in the novel, Peter discovers John's romance with Beatrice much later, when he sees them together at the vacation cabin, while in the TV show, John is immediately set up as a rival for Philip. After John leaves, the relationship between husband and wife seems cold and we see Beatrice mixing her sleeping powder in a glass; this is done to prepare the viewer for later events. Beatrice is not depicted as a kind woman as she is in the novel and there is no indication that Philip is concerned about hurting her feelings.

In the following scene, Philip visits Peter while Peter is developing prints in his darkroom; there is a brief mention in the book of Philip having seen a bottle of altrapeine in Peter's darkroom, but Heller expands this into a scene where Philip asks Peter to visit Lorna while he is away on business. Once again, significant sections of the book have been excised, such as Philip's visit to his aunt's house, where he reads about poisons, and his giving a ride to a man whose sister died after a long period of suffering. In place of all of the carefully drawn characters of the book, where the author explains their motivations in detail, the TV show simply portrays one man having an affair and another man coveting his lover.

Bettye Ackerman as Lorna

Philip sees a bottle of altrapeine and picks it up; he asks Peter about the poison and is told that a doctor could not tell the difference between death from altrapeine poisoning and death from a heart attack. There is a sense that the TV show is bludgeoning the viewer with hints about what is about to happen, especially when the scene ends with another close up of the bottle and a musical sting on the soundtrack. Philip visits a pharmacy and buys a bottle of altrapeine, lying that he uses it for photographic purposes; once again, a small incident in the book becomes a poorly conceived scene in the TV show, while all of the details and color that make the novel enjoyable are removed.

While Philip is in San Francisco buying poison on the business trip that was set up by Peter to get him out of the way, Peter is having drinks with Lorna, in a scene that replaces his visit to her home in the book. Peter's deceitful nature is underlined when he lets it slip to Lorna that Philip plans to leave his wife. The next scene is similar to the one in the novel where Peter observes Beatrice with John through her window. Unlike the novel, where John does not appear before or after this scene, he is familiar to the viewer from the earlier scene where Philip arrived home to find him in a less compromising position with Beatrice. As in the novel, Peter disingenuously insists that divorce would destroy Philip.

William Bramley as
 Lt. MacDonald

The TV show is more obvious about the events of the story than the novel, and this is clear in the next scene, where we witness Philip liberally sprinkle poison on a plate of meat. He then brings a tray of food to the dinner table, where he sits with Peter and Beatrice, leaving the viewer uncertain as to whether he has already taken steps to poison his wife. She nearly takes a bite and then stops; soon after that, the dog is seen lying dead on the kitchen floor. In the novel, the author is oblique about Philip's act of killing the dog, but in the TV show it's crystal clear. The first half of the show ends as Philip tells Beatrice that how you die is more important than when. This sentiment is central to the novel and to an understanding of his character, but in the TV show it carries little weight.

Peter's calculated seduction of Lorna continues as he visits her beautiful, mid-century modern house and suggests that she is far from Philip's first mistress. Meanwhile, Beatrice and Philip go to bed for the night and, in the morning, there is another incident that foreshadows Philip's anticipated murder of his wife: he is already dressed for work and his shadow passes over his wife's prone body as she lies completely still in bed. He removes her sleeping mask and her eyes are open, suggesting that she is already dead, but when she begins to speak the illusion is shattered. As in the novel, he empties out some of her sleeping medicine and replaces it with poison, yet in the TV show he appears to feel no apprehension about his act: the TV version of Philip is simply a villain, with none of the moral complexity of the character in the novel.

Richard Bull

In the final section, all of the suspense of Philip's final day at the office is eliminated, as is his long drive to Lorna's house and his worries along the way. Philip and Lorna break up and he rushes out into the pouring rain to find a phone booth, but Beatrice does not answer his call because she is out with John yet again. The scenes go back and forth between Philip driving too fast in the storm and Beatrice entering her house and answering the phone to hear no one on the other end. In the novel, Beatrice's activities that evening are not shown and the reader shares Philip's concern that she may be about to ingest poison, if she has not taken it already. The suspense in the TV show is of a different sort and is less effective.

Philip drives on as Beatrice prepares a glass of the poisoned medicine; his car crashes and she is putting the glass to her lips when the doorbell rings and the police arrive to tell her about Philip's accident and his statement. The difference between the novel's complex narrative structure and the TV show's straightforward presentation of the events is acute here; in the book, Peter relates events after they have happened, explaining in retrospect how disaster was averted, while in the TV show, the story plods along from one event to the next.

Robert Reiner

The biggest change from book to TV show comes at the end. Peter visits the hospital, but Philip's reason for wanting to die is that he lost Lorna, not his dread of being trapped in a jail cell. The TV censors in 1963 were unlikely to allow Peter to kill Philip and get away with it, so the ending is altered. Peter brings Philip the poisoned glass of water, but instead of drinking it, Philip asks Peter to look after Lorna once he is dead.

Peter makes a fatal mistake and tells Philip that not only will he look after Lorna, but they may also go away together for a week or two. Suddenly, Philip realizes that his best friend has betrayed him and, instead of drinking the poison, he calls out to the policeman sitting nearby and announces that Peter has poisoned the glass of water in an attempt to kill him. The TV show ends with Philip getting his revenge on Peter rather than dying. While the novel continues to have Peter admit that he married Lorna and realize that his killing of Philip was done to get what he wanted and not out of mercy, the TV show simplifies the story and makes it about two men's rivalry for a woman, omitting all of the ethical and moral complexity found in the book. The title may be "The Tender Poisoner," but at no time in the TV show does Philip ever seem the least bit tender.

Would "The Tender Poisoner" be more enjoyable if not compared to the novel? Perhaps, but other than a few interesting shots and some brief moments of suspense, the episode falls flat.

G. Stanley Jones

The show is directed by Leonard J. Horn (1920-1975), whose first directing credit was the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, "A True Account." He also directed one other episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and three episodes of The Outer Limits, including "The Zanti Misfits." Most of his work was done for TV; he had a heart attack and died while directing the pilot episode of Wonder Woman in 1975.

Dan Dailey (1915-1978) receives top billing as Philip. He started out in vaudeville and became known as a dancer in musical films in the 1940s; he appeared on screen from 1940 to 1977. He was also in Broadway shows in the 1930s and the 1960s and appeared frequently on radio from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. This was his only appearance on the Hitchcock series.

Co-starring as Peter is Howard Duff (1913-1990). He was on radio starting in 1940 and, after a stint in the Army Air Corps during WWII, he began appearing in films in 1945. He was on TV starting in 1954. Among his many credits were The Naked City (1948), While the City Sleeps (1956), and appearances on The Twilight Zone, Batman, and Night Gallery. He was a regular on Flamingo Road (1980-1982) and only appeared on the Hitchcock series once.

Philip gets his revenge.

Making her third and last appearance on the Hitchcock series is Jan Sterling (1921-2004), as Beatrice. Her prior film roles included Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) and The High and the Mighty (1954), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. She appeared in two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including "On the Nose."

Beatrice's lover John is played by Philip Reed (1908-1996), who was born Milton LeRoy Treinis and whose onscreen career lasted from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s, including five episodes of the Hitchcock series. Reed was on stage and radio in addition to having a long career on screen from 1933 to 1965. He appeared as Steve Wilson in a series of "Big Town" films in the late 1940s and he was seen in five episodes of the Hitchcock series, including "The Derelicts."

Bettye Ackerman (1924-2006) plays Lorna; she had a recurring role on Ben Casey from 1961 to 1966 and was on screen from 1953 to 1994. She was married for many years to the much older actor Sam Jaffe and also appeared in "Specialty of the House" on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In smaller roles:

• William Bramley (1928-1985) plays Lt. MacDonald, who questions Peter at the hospital about Philip's motive for murder; his most memorable role may be that of Officer Krupke in West Side Story (1961). He was also seen in two other episodes of the Hitchcock show (including "The Test"), as well as episodes of The Outer Limits and Star Trek.
• Richard Bull (1924-2014) as the detective who sits in Philip's hospital room; his long screen career ran from 1956 to 2011 and he was on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour three times, including "Death and the Joyful Woman." He also had a recurring role as a doctor on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968) and he was a regular on Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983).
• The policeman who tells Beatrice about Philip's accident is played by an actor named Robert Reiner (1933-2013); he is not the Rob Reiner who co-starred on All in the Family. Rather, he was on TV from 1962-1965 and appeared in nine episodes of the Hitchcock show, including "Thanatos Palace Hotel."
• G. Stanley Jones (1926-1998) as the druggist who sells the poison to Philip; he was on TV from 1955 to 1964, playing small roles, and he returned to TV in 1977 to begin a 20-year career as a busy voice actor on cartoon shows.

Watch "The Tender Poisoner" here. It originally aired on CBS on Thursday, December 20, 1962.

The novel's author was John Bingham (1908-1988), who led a fascinating life. He became a baron by succession in 1960, but prior to that he fought in the Second World War and was a spy in MI5 for decades. He was admired by his younger colleague John LeCarre, who admitted that Bingham was one of two men on whom he based his character, George Smiley. Bingham encouraged LeCarre to begin writing and Bingham himself wrote 17 novels and one non-fiction book between 1952 and 1982. Murder off the Record was his second novel and the version done for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was one of seven times his books were adapted for the screen: five times on television (including "Captive Audience" for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) and twice on film. His biography is titled, The Man Who Was George Smiley (2013).

Rachel McAdams as Kay (Lorna)

In 2007, Five Roundabouts to Heaven was filmed as Married Life, with a screenplay by Ira Sachs and Oren Moverman. The film is a visual feast, set in 1949 in an unspecified American city. Twice as long as the TV show, it succeeds in conveying more of the spirit of the novel, in large part through voiceover narration by the Peter character. Only at the end does the film diverge wildly from the novel and the TV show; Philip (renamed Harry) discovers Peter (renamed Richard) with Lorna (now Kay) and rushes home to his wife, but there is no car crash! He arrives home, finds her alive, sees her lover running through the back yard, and realizes that she also had been conducting an affair. The two reconcile and live happily ever after!

Married Life is worth watching, especially for the sumptuous sets and costumes and for the performances by Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, and Rachel McAdams but, in the final analysis, Five Roundabouts to Heaven is a novel that resists translation to the screen. Like other novels adapted for the first season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, its complexities are too difficult to boil down to a 50-minute film and, as a result, the TV version ends up seeming like a paraphrase of the book with much of what makes it worth reading removed.

Sources:

Bingham, John. Five Roundabouts to Heaven. London: Hardaway Books, 2012.

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. OTR Pub., 2001.

IBDB, www.ibdb.com.

IMDb, www.imdb.com.

LeCarre, John. "Introduction." Five Roundabouts to Heaven.

"Philip Reed." Find a Grave, www.findagrave.com/memorial/19208/philip-reed.

"RadioGold Index." RadioGold Index, radiogoldin.library.umkc.edu/. Accessed 23 Sept. 2023.

Sachs, Ira (Director). 2007. Married Life [Film]. Sony Pictures Classics.

"The Tender Poisoner." The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, season 1, episode 14, CBS, 20 December 1962.

Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org.

Listen to Al Sjoerdsma discuss "A Bottle of Wine" here!

In two weeks: Our series on Lukas Heller concludes with a look at "I'll Be Judge--I'll be Jury," starring Peter Graves and Albert Salmi!