The Hitchcock Project-Final Arrangements by Robert Arthur [6.36]

by Jack Seabrook

Each morning, Rutherford Parnell sits and daydreams, fascinated by an idea. His shrewish wife Elsie has been confined to a wheelchair for a decade, ever since she was injured in an auto accident while Rutherford was driving. Mrs. Casey, the eighth in a series of companions that he has hired for his wife, arrives only to announce that she has found another job. Resolved to carry out his plan, Rutherford rides the bus downtown but disembarks early, telephoning the office to say that he won't be in to work today.

The unhappy husband visits a funeral home and makes arrangements, asking the funeral director to come to his house this evening but omitting the name of the deceased. Back at home, Rutherford dismisses Mrs. Casey and confronts his wife, showing her poison he bought at the drugstore and calling it "'something to help you escape your constant loneliness and bitterness.'" He pours a large glass of milk and adds a generous helping of poison. After some last bitter words are exchanged, Rutherford tells Elsie that he cashed in his life insurance policy. He asks her if she'd like to go to a rest home and, after she defers, he swallows the poisoned milk, telling her that she will soon realize that things at home were not so bad.

"Final Arrangements" was
first published here

A short story with a predictable twist ending and two-dimensional characters, "Final Arrangements" was published in the July 1961 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. It's author, Lawrence Page, is a mystery man who has no other stories to his credit in the FictionMags Index and about whom I was unable to uncover any information. Is the name a pseudonym? The issue of the digest in which it appears also includes stories by William Link and Richard Levinson, Jack Ritchie, Henry Slesar, Bryce Walton, Donald Honig, Mann Rubin, Avram Davidson, and Helen Nielsen, all of whom either had episodes of the Hitchcock TV show based on their work or wrote teleplays for it, sometimes both. If Lawrence Page is a pseudonym for one of the authors who has another story in this issue, the most likely candidate is Henry Slesar, who wrote so many episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; however, when the story was collected in anthologies, including the 1980 volume, The Best of Mystery, it was also credited to Lawrence Page, so it may well be that "Final Arrangements" was the only story he ever had published.  IMDb lists him as Lawrence A. Page, but the source of the middle initial is unknown. Read the story online here.

Martin Balsam as Leonard Compson

The July 1961 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine most likely hit the newsstands before July and the TV version of this short story aired on Tuesday, June 20, 1961, so it appears that the producers of the TV show purchased the rights to the short story and filmed the adaptation before the magazine went on sale. Chosen to write the teleplay was Robert Arthur (1909-1969), who was born in the Philippines, where his father was stationed in the Army. He earned an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Michigan before moving to New York City in the early 1930s and becoming a prolific writer of short stories. He later was an editor at Dell and Fawcett but is best known as the ghost editor of many of the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. He also wrote a beloved series of books about Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators for young adult readers. In 1959, he moved to Hollywood to write for television and edit screenplays. Before that, he won two Edgar Awards as a writer for radio. Many of his stories were adapted for TV; five episodes of the Hitchcock TV show were based on his stories but "Final Arrangements" was the only teleplay he wrote for the series. There is a website devoted to him here.

Vivian Nathan as Elsie

Arthur makes significant changes to the characters and the story structure, though the payoff is the same. The TV version begins with a scene where Leonard Compson (as Rutherford Parnell has been renamed) visits the mortuary, seeking information; he chooses the most expensive casket before revealing to Simms, the mortician, that "'there isn't any deceased...yet.'" Adding this scene at the start of the story creates intrigue about what Leonard is up to and who is in danger of losing their life. In the second scene, Leonard is at the office, speaking to Elsie on the telephone. She is lying in bed and she voices a litany of complaints; we understand that Leonard is henpecked and the scene ends with him taking a life insurance policy out of his desk drawer, but we don't yet know who is insured.

O.Z. Whitehead as Simms

Scene three is completely new, as Leonard visits a curio shop where he is clearly an old customer. The owner, Mr. Bradshaw, shows off odds and ends including a tribal mask, a blowgun that shoots poison darts, and Persian daggers. Leonard's interest in the poison darts is tamped down by Bradshaw, who explains that he would have to remove the poison before he could sell them. Taken together, this first trio of scenes suggests that Leonard is considering killing his wife.

In scene four, Arthur makes a big change when he demonstrates that, rather than being confined to a wheelchair following an auto accident, Elsie is a malingerer who doesn't seem to have much wrong with her at all. Dr. Maxwell pays a house call and we learn that Elsie has considered herself an invalid since a trip to Haiti fifteen years before when she fell while climbing on old ruins with Leonard. The reference to a trip to Haiti ties in with Leonard's interest in curios and sets up the show's final shot. In this scene, Elsie gets out of bed and walks around, something she is unable to do in the short story; she complains of pain and the doctor recommends exercise. Leonard arrives at home and, after the doctor leaves, Elsie accuses him of wishing her dead, something he immediately denies. The viewer is becoming more and more certain that Leonard plans to do away with her, especially after he reminds her that the doctor said that she could live another thirty years.

Slim Pickens as Bradshaw

After the commercial break, Leonard pays a second visit to the mortuary, which corresponds to the single visit in the short story. He sets up the finale by paying in advance for the most expensive funeral and asking Simms to come to his home the next evening at eight p.m. to "'collect the party.'" The viewer at this point assumes that Leonard is being cagey about identifying the person who will die because he is planning to murder Elsie, but in reality, he is planning suicide. Another new scene follows, as Leonard encounters a young boy named Billy on the sidewalk near his home. Billy's bicycle nearly runs into Leonard and causes him to drop a lucky amulet, a foreign object that he must have bought at the curio shop. Leonard counsels the boy on not taking a wrong turn and ending up in a stagnant swamp, and he buys movie tickets from the boy but absentmindedly forgets to take them.

Bartlett Robinson as
Dr. Maxwell

Billy brings the movie tickets to Elsie, who is sitting on the porch. She is rude to the child, insisting that she is not well enough to go out and learning that Leonard told Billy about an impending long trip. The clock reads 7:30 p.m. in a brief scene where Leonard buys rat poison at a drugstore, requesting something painless and quick. The druggist assumes that Leonard feels sorry for the rats but, as we will see, he is protecting himself.

Susan Brown as
the secretary

Finally, the time is 7:55 p.m. and Leonard is at home, where he pours the rat poison into a glass before filling it with milk. There is a brief echo of the scene in Hitchcock's Suspicion where Cary Grant carries the glass of milk up the stairs to Joan Fontaine as Leonard brings the poisoned glass of milk into Elsie's bedroom and puts it on the table beside her. She confronts him about the upcoming trip and he replies that he quit his job and cashed in his $5000 insurance policy, most of which he has already spent. Leonard tells Elsie that they are almost broke and she is as "'strong as a horse'" before the doorbell rings.

Leonard orders Elsie to answer the door, taking control of their relationship for the first time, and she complies. The episode's big surprise then occurs in a shot filmed from Leonard's point of view as he drinks the glass of poisoned milk and Elsie is seen through the bottom of the glass as she leaves the room. Simms enters through the front door, having arrived to pick up the corpse, and the final shot shows Leonard lying dead, a smile on his face, holding his lucky amulet, which the viewer assumes he hopes will guide him in the afterlife.

Despite Robert Arthur's extensive revisions to the short story, "Final Arrangements" plays flat, mainly due to the decision to portray Elsie as an utter shrew with no sympathetic aspect. In the short story, her behavior is understandable if not excusable; she was crippled in a car accident and blames her husband for taking away her health and her freedom. In the TV version, Elsie is a malingerer and it seems like Leonard should have put her in her place much sooner than the final scene.

George Kane as
the pharmacist

This is the only episode of the ten-year Hitchcock TV series to be directed by Gordon Hessler (1925-2014), who was born in Berlin, raised in England, and came to the U.S., where he served as a story reader for Alfred Hitchcock Presents before being promoted to story editor, a job he held from 1960 to 1962. He went on to be an associate producer and later producer on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour from 1962 to 1965. He directed for TV and film from 1965 to 1995, including an episode of The Night Stalker and the film, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973).

Bryan Russell as Billy

Martin Balsam (1919-1996) plays Leonard. Born in the Bronx, Balsam's early stage career was interrupted by a stint in the Air Force during WWII. He then joined the Actors Studio in 1948 and began appearing on TV in 1949. His big break came when he played Juror #1 in the film Twelve Angry Men (1957); this led Hitchcock to cast him as Arbogast in Psycho (1960), where he makes the memorable backward fall down the stairs of the Bates house before he is murdered by Norman in drag. "Final Arrangements" is one of his two appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the other was "The Equalizer." He also appeared on The Twilight Zone and many other TV shows. By the early 1970s, he was appearing mostly in movies. He later was a regular on Archie Bunker's Place, the sequel to All in the Family, and he continued to make regular appearances on TV and in the movies until his death. He won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for A Thousand Clowns (1966).

Vivian Nathan (1916-2015) plays Elsie; she was a founding member of the Actors Studio in 1947 and appeared on Broadway starting in 1949. She was born Vivian Firko in New York City and made a handful of appearances on screen from 1953 to 1989. This was one of her two appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents; the other was "Fatal Figures."

Oh, for a time machine!

In smaller roles:

• O.Z. Whitehead (1911-1988) as Simms, the mortician; Whitehead was a member of John Ford's stock company who appeared in such films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). He appeared in one other episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "Not the Running Type."
• Slim Pickens (1919-1983) in an odd bit of casting as Bradshaw, who runs the curio shop; his face and voice are instantly recognizable from countless westerns but he will always be remembered riding the atomic bomb and waving his cowboy hat at the end of Dr. Strangelove (1964). Pickens was on film and TV from 1946 to 1983 and was also in "The Jar" on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
• Bartlett Robinson (1912-1986) as Dr. Maxwell; he was on screen from 1949 to 1982 and he was seen in no less than 11 episodes of the Hitchcock show, including "Thanatos Palace Hotel."
• Susan Brown (1932-2018) as the secretary in the office where Leonard works; she was on screen from 1955 to 2004, appearing on soap operas such as General Hospital. Brown was also seen in "Cop for a Day" on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
• George Kane (1926-2006) as the pharmacist; he was on TV from 1951 to 1964 and he appeared in one film, the adaptation of David Goodis's The Burglar (1957). He was on Thriller twice and he was in two other episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including "Cop for a Day."
• Bryan Russell (1952-2016) as Billy; his brief screen career lasted from 1959 to 1967.

Watch "Final Arrangements" online here or buy the DVD here.

Sources:

"Final Arrangements." Alfred Hitchcock Presents, season 6, episode 36, NBC, 20 June 1961.

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

IMDb, www.imdb.com.

Page, Lawrence. "Final Arrangements." Alfred Hitchcock: The Best of Mystery. NY: Galahad Books, 1980. 589-592.

Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org.

Listen to Al Sjoerdsma discuss "A Man Greatly Beloved" here!

In two weeks: "Don't Look Behind You," starring Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles!