The Hitchcock Project-The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow by Alvin Sargent [9.25]

by Jack Seabrook

"The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" is based on a long story of the same title that was first published in The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow and Other Stories, a 1961 collection by Patrick Quentin.

Hugh C. Wheeler (1912-1987) and Richard W. Webb (1901-1966) used the pseudonyms Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge. They wrote many novels together and won a special Edgar Award in 1963 for The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow. Wheeler also wrote the books for Broadway shows, winning Tony Awards for A Little Night Music (1973), Candide (1974), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" was adapted for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour by Alvin Sargent and it was broadcast on CBS on Friday, April 17, 1964.

As Quentin's story opens, Adelaide Snow, a sixty-year-old widow who lives in Manhattan, is apprehensive when her niece Lorna announces her engagement to Bruce Mendham, whom she recently met and who has neither job nor money. Mrs. Snow keeps her own counsel and agrees to hire Bruce to handle her affairs. Eighteen months later, her sapphire ring disappears.

"The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow"
was first published here

After Lorna goes to Long Island with her friend Sylvia Emmett for the long Labor Day weekend, Mrs. Snow has lunch with Bruce and begins to suspect him of having stolen the ring and tampered with her bank accounts. She calls her banker and her statement arrives by mail the next day. After telling Joe, the handyman, that he can take the weekend off, she discovers that Bruce has been writing forged checks on her account. She writes "Forgery" across one of the canceled checks and calls Bruce into her study, where she confronts him.

Bruce claims that he lost the money on a bet at the racetrack. Adelaide telephones Sylvia, intending to tell Lorna about Bruce, but Lorna is out. Bruce threatens Mrs. Snow, who walks into her vault to get her lawyer's telephone number. Bruce closes the door behind her, locking her inside the vault. She calls out to him but he ignores her and the house is otherwise empty, since Maggie, the maid, stayed home due to illness. Bruce makes sure that no one will rescue Adelaide by telephoning Arlene, the cook, to tell her that Mrs. Snow went away for the weekend. Bruce puts the forged checks and the sapphire ring in his briefcase and leaves to join Lorna.

Patricia Collinge as Adelaide Snow

Mrs. Snow begins to panic and thinks of her late husband for support. Though she expects Arlene to arrive at noon, the cook is delighted at the prospect of a four-day weekend and, though she nearly goes to Mrs. Snow's house to collect her salary, she is talked out of it by her boyfriend, who convinces her to enjoy her time off with him. By 12:45 p.m., Adelaide realizes that Bruce must have told Arlene not to come and switches her hopes to the arrival of Joe or Lorna. Lorna is enjoying her time in East Hampton when Sylvia tells her that her aunt telephoned; Lorna heads for the house to call Adelaide but is intercepted by Bruce, who lies and tells her that Mrs. Snow found her missing ring, so there is no need to call her back.

After six hours have passed, Adelaide gives up on Lorna and hopes that Joe will arrive. She has begun to tap on a heating duct to make noise that will be heard by anyone who comes to the house. Meanwhile, Joe sets out to go to Mrs. Snow's house to pick up a machine to sand the floors in his apartment but detours to a bar, where he ends up spending the rest of the evening. By midnight, Adelaide realizes that Joe is not coming and begins to fear her own death. Unscrewing a light bulb from the ceiling, she lies down on the floor to sleep in the darkness.

Jessica Walter as Lorna

The next morning, Adelaide awakens and pries open an air duct to provide herself with fresh air to breathe. In East Hampton, Lorna again nearly telephones her aunt but is stopped by Bruce, who reports that Mrs. Snow is spending the weekend at the home of a friend named Mrs. Lindsay. Lorna fleetingly wonders if her husband is making up the story. Adelaide recalls that Hilary Prynne, her banker, always comes at 12: 30 p.m. on Saturdays for lunch. She hears him ring the door buzzer but only her cats respond. Standing outside, Hilary begins to worry before concluding that Mrs. Snow must have been called away.

That night, after dancing with Bruce at Sylvia's house, Lorna overhears a stranger ask him about the $5000 bet he lost on a horse. She begins to suspect him of stealing money and the ring from her aunt, but he reassures her. In the vault, Adelaide's despair grows as she spends a second night alone. On Sunday morning, Lorna learns that Mrs. Lindsay died the week before and realizes that Bruce has lied to her. She telephones her aunt and gets no answer, then she telephones Arlene and learns that Bruce gave her the weekend off. In Bruce's briefcase she finds the ring, the check marked "Forgery," and a gun. Realizing that Bruce must have locked Adelaide in the vault, Lorna pockets the check and the ring.

Don Chastain as Bruce

When Bruce discovers that the check is missing, he thinks that he must have dropped it in Mrs. Snow's study and makes an excuse to insist that they return to Adelaide's house right away, assuming that the woman must be dead by now. Bruce drives Lorna back to New York City and they enter Mrs. Snow's home. The hungry cats jump on Lorna, who drops her wallet, from which the check falls out. Bruce sees it and knows that Lorna has learned the truth about him. They struggle until Bruce suddenly collapses, hit on the head by the sanding machine wielded by Joe, who has appeared in the nick of time. Joe and Lorna open the vault to find Adelaide, groggy but alive, who tells Lorna that she was worried about the cats!

In a review of the collection, Anthony Boucher called the title story "an almost too professional and neat exercise in suspense," but I think it is well-plotted and carefully structured. "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" creates great suspense even though the reader never really thinks that Adelaide will die in the vault. Each potential savior fails to arrive and the narrative moves back and forth between the vault and the acts of those connected to the woman inside; all of her family, friends, and staff have unrelated reasons for not going to the house, either encouraged by Bruce or on their own. A few of them almost go there but change plans at the last minute. Adelaide is heroic and selfless, solving the problems of a lack of fresh air and the need for darkness in order to sleep. Lorna is a detective of sorts as well as a woman in danger; she solves the puzzle and is in peril at the same time. Only the sudden and unexpected appearance of Joe prevents her from an uncertain fate.

George Macready as Hilary

The story was adapted for television by Alvin Sargent (1927-2019) in his only teleplay for the Hitchcock TV show. Born Alvin Supowitz, he began writing for TV in 1956 and branched out into writing films in 1966. After 1974, he wrote only for the big screen, winning Academy Awards for his screenplays for Julia (1977) and Ordinary People (1980).

Sargent did a fine job adapting "The Ordeal for Mrs. Snow" for television, finding ways for characters to express their thoughts in dialogue, making small changes that tighten the story's structure, and improving the ending. The show begins with a scene where Mrs. Snow talks to her two Siamese cats like they are people, setting her up as a lonely, older woman and establishing that she talks to her pets, a detail that will be important when she is locked in the vault. Bruce and Lorna are introduced in the next scene and there is already a subtle division between them; she is still in a negligee, eating breakfast in bed, while he is dressed for work, sitting on the floor and reading the newspaper. Their dialogue quickly establishes their background and relationship; she went to Bennington, an exclusive college, while he grew up poor and frequented the East Side Athletic Club.

Cal Bartlett as John Wilson

In the first addition to the story, it is revealed that Lorna will inherit money on her birthday. Bruce is called downstairs to speak to an unexpected and unwanted visitor, a man named Charlie Arthur, who is there to try to collect money that Bruce lost on a bet. Arthur is charming and funny but behind his smile is a threat and he's clearly a member of the criminal class; their exchange establishes that Bruce has a gambling problem and needs cash.

The following scene shows Bruce and Adelaide in her study, where she explains that she follows her late husband's practice of signing every check herself. After Bruce leaves, Lorna confronts her aunt in another scene that is not in the story. She wants to collect her inheritance ahead of schedule because she and Bruce need the money to advance in society, but Adelaide reminds her that she does not control the money. The older woman is firm but clearly disturbed by the altercation with her niece and, in the next scene, Mrs. Snow is in her study with Hilary, her banker, as she writes out a check to give to Lorna. This act causes him to mention her other, recent large checks, of which she recalls nothing, and soon her bank statement is delivered and she discovers Bruce's deceit.

Unlike the story, where a maid, a cook, and a handyman are all dissuaded from coming to the Snow house by a combination of Bruce's lies and their own activities, in the TV show, Adelaide simply tells Frieda, the maid, that she can take the weekend off. There is no mention of it being a long weekend and the scenes in the story where Arlene and Joe start out on their way to the house before being distracted are omitted. Adelaide writes "Forgery" across one of the checks and, when she confronts Bruce in her study, she has a different reason for walking into the vault. In the story, she goes in looking for Hilary's telephone number, but in the TV show, one of her cats runs into the vault and she follows it in to retrieve the pet. When Bruce locks her in, she has her cat to talk to, which allows her to express her thoughts aloud, even though the only response she gets is an occasional meow.

The vault as seen from above.

There is a wonderful shot from overhead soon after Adelaide is trapped that establishes just how small the space is and, from then on, when she is shown in the vault, a combination of close ups and tight shots remind the viewer that Mrs. Snow has very little room to move. Since Arlene and Joe have been eliminated from the plot, Adelaide pins her hopes on the arrival of Hilary, who is coming to take her to dinner that evening at 7:30 p.m.

A contrast is set up between Mrs. Snow's dire predicament and the empty life of the young and rich in East Hampton in a scene at the house of Sally Wilson (as Sylvia Emmett has been renamed), where she and Lorna engage in insipid conversation over drinks. Bruce's lack of concern for his fellow man is underlined by an offhand comment he makes after he and Sally's husband John arrive, having driven to Long Island from New York City; he remarks, seemingly in jest, that "'a man jumped off the Triboro Bridge,'" showing that a stranger's death only concerns him as the cause of an inconvenient traffic slowdown.

Early that evening, Hilary and his wife Ruth arrive to take Mrs. Snow to dinner. He rings the doorbell and the addition of his wife, a character not in the story, gives him someone to talk to as he waits on the front step. In fact, in the story, Hilary muses that he might propose marriage to Adelaide at some point, but in the TV show he is happily married and his banter with his wife, both on the front step and at the restaurant soon after, provides some of the only humor in the episode. Right before the commercial break, music supervisor Stanley Wilson inserts a snippet of Bernard Herrmann's ominous, five-note phrase from "Behind the Locked Door," an episode that had aired not quite four months earlier and whose title fits this episode equally well.

From here on, the show consists of alternating scenes, as Lorna gradually begins to figure out her husband's duplicity while Adelaide slowly deteriorates inside the vault. She never manages to create a source of fresh air, as she does in the story, and at one point she looks at a model ship on a shelf and recalls sailing with her late husband, hallucinating that the model ship is being tossed on real waves. Mrs. Snow gains strength when she resolves to leave a message for Lorna about what Bruce has done. In the story, she writes a note and drops it in the air duct, but in the TV show she cannot find a writing utensil and instead resorts to a wonderfully visual method of written communication, tearing the shapes of letters from sheets of paper, spelling out "BRUCE SHUT DOOR" in paper letters arranged on the floor of the vault.

June Vincent as Ruth

In East Hampton, Lorna discovers the forged check in the inside pocket of Bruce's jacket when she hangs it in the closet. She learns that her aunt is not visiting a friend when she makes a telephone call and learns that the woman is vacationing in Europe (not dead, as in the story); when Bruce enters the room, she holds the folded check behind her back and there is more suspense as he nearly touches her hand and almost discovers what she is holding. They go back downstairs, where a party is in full swing; Lorna tries to sneak out and get in the car to drive back home to check on her aunt, but Bruce catches her and insists on driving her to New York City.

The final scene is somewhat different than that in the story. When Bruce and Lorna arrive at home, she rushes around the house, looking for her aunt, while Bruce goes immediately to the study. A cut to the inside of the vault shows Adelaide lying unconscious or dead on the floor, her message to Lorna spelled out on paper next to her. In the study, Bruce insists that Adelaide has left, but when Lorna confronts him with the forged check, he admits his crime and attempts to portray himself as a victim, blaming his wife for bringing him into a world where he had to forge checks to keep up. Lorna is relieved and believes Bruce's story until she hears a cat meowing in another room. She brings the cat into the study and it leads her to the door of the vault, where she suddenly understands what has happened. Bernard Herrmann's menacing, five-note musical phrase plays again on the soundtrack and Lorna searches for the combination to the vault. She finds it and, as she opens the door, a gust of air scatters the paper letters on the floor, eliminating what could have been a dying clue. Fortunately, Adelaide awakens and looks at Bruce before asking Lorna to bring food for the cats. The show ends as Lorna and Bruce exchange looks.

Presumably, Bruce will be imprisoned for theft and attempted murder and his marriage to Lorna will be over. The ending is subtle but effective; as in the story, Adelaide is selfless and only concerned for her cats even though she has just survived a near-death experience. Lorna is devastated by her husband's treachery, while Bruce is resigned to his fate. Alvin Sargent's way of resolving the conflict is more believable than the sudden appearance of Joe the handyman at the end of the story, who saves Lorna by hitting Bruce on the head with a heavy object.

Pamela Curran as Sally

"The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" is an outstanding adaptation of a story that uses dialogue to translate thoughts into words for the visual medium. The teleplay is focused on the key event and eliminates characters who are not necessary to the central story. Having Adelaide locked in with one of her cats gives her someone to talk to and strengthening the theme of Bruce and Lorna's lack of money and Bruce's desire to fit into society gives the villain of the piece a more nuanced reason for his crimes.

This was one of the 49 episodes of the Hitchcock series that Robert Stevens (1920-1989) directed; he won an Emmy for "The Glass Eye."

Patricia Collinge (1892-1974) gives a strong performance as Adelaide Snow. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, and began her career on stage in 1904, coming to the United States with her mother in 1907. Collinge appeared on Broadway from 1908 to 1952 and played roles on screen from 1941 to 1967. Her films included Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and she was seen on the Hitchcock TV show six times, including "The Landlady."

Bartlett Robinson

Her niece Lorna is played by Jessica Walter (1941-2021). Walter started on TV and on Broadway in 1960 and had a long career on the big and small screens. She was featured in many TV shows and won an Emmy Award in 1975 for Amy Prentiss, a short-lived mystery series. She had a great deal of success late in her career with regular roles on two long-running series: Arrested Development (2003-2019) and the animated Archer (2009-2021). "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" was her only appearance on the Hitchcock TV show.

Don Chastain (1935-2002) plays Bruce. He had an unremarkable screen career from 1960 to 2002, mostly on TV, and this was his only role on the Hitchcock show.

In smaller roles:

• George Macready (1899-1973) as Hilary*, the banker; familiar as a heavy, he had been on stage since 1926 and began working in film in 1942, adding TV roles in 1951. He had a noticeable part in Gilda (1946), appeared in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), and was on the Hitchcock show four times, including "Vicious Circle." He also made appearances on Thriller, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery.
• Cal Bartlett (1935- ) as John Wilson, Bruce's friend and Sally's husband; he has had a long career on TV and film, starting in 1963, and he appeared in one episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and one other episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
• June Vincent (1920-1988) as Hilary's much younger wife, Ruth; she had roles in films from 1938 to 1959, but once she started appearing on TV, her film roles mostly dried up and she was a busy TV actress until 1976. This was her only role on the Hitchcock TV show.
• Pamela Curran (1930-2023) plays Sally Wilson; she was on screen from 1958 to 1971, appeared three times on Thriller, and was also in "Where Beauty Lies" on Alfred Hitchcock Presents..
• Bartlett Robinson (1912-1986) plays Harvey Crane, a talkative guest at Sally's house party; he was on screen from 1949 to 1982 and was seen in no less than 11 episodes of the Hitchcock show, including "Thanatos Palace Hotel."
• Edit Angold (1895-1971) as Frieda, the maid; she was born Edit Goldstandt in Berlin and had a career on the German stage and on film in Germany before coming to the US, where she was on screen from 1940-1967. This was one of four appearances on the Hitchcock series, including "Sylvia."

Edit Angold

• Danny Gardino as Charlie Arthur, who comes to the Snow house to try to collect on a gambling debt from Bruce; this was one of his two TV credits, both from 1964.

Danny Gardino

Read "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" here. Watch the Hitchcock version here.

*In the story, Hilary is spelled "Hilary," while in the credits at the end of the TV show, it is spelled "Hillary." I use "Hilary" for consistency.

Sources:

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

IMDb, www.imdb.com.

"The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow." The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, season 2, episode 25, CBS, 14 April 1964.

Quentin, Patrick. "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow." The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow and Other Stories. London: Victor Gollancz, 1961, pp. 7-64.

"Summer and Smoke: The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow and Other Stories (1962), by Patrick Quentin." The Passing Tramp, 27 July 2018, thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2018/07/summer-and-smoke-ordeal-of-mrs-snow-and.html.

Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org.

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