The Hitchcock Project-Night Caller by Gabrielle Upton and Robert Westerby [9.15]

by Jack Seabrook

"Night Caller" may be the most misogynistic episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

According to The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion, the show is based on an original story idea by Gabrielle Upton, and the teleplay is credited to her and Robert Westerby. This episode aired on CBS on Friday, January 31, 1964, and stars Felicia Farr as Marcia Fowler, a beautiful woman married to a much older man named Jack, played by David White.

In the first scene, Marcia is wearing a swimsuit and sunbathing on the patio of her upper middle-class home in a Los Angeles suburb. A telephone rings on the table next to her and she engages in a flirtatious conversation with a man who is not her husband; she calls him "darling" but reminds him that she is married. As she speaks, we see a young man watching her from behind a bush on the other side of a fence. Eventually, she notices the watcher and confronts him. He does not seem concerned that he has been caught and Marcia runs inside her house.

Felicia Farr as Marcia Fowler

She calls the police and two patrolmen arrive. Marcia has put a robe over her swimsuit but the men gaze admiringly at her face and figure and seem amused by her concern with the man who was watching her. She explains that her stepson, Stevey, is "'at a swimming lesson or something'" and her husband is in Chicago on a business trip. The police take Marcia in their car and drive down the street, quickly identifying the young man who was watching her as Roy Bullock, who is new in town and who lives with his aunt. At his home, one of the policeman questions Roy in his bedroom, which is a mess and which features pinups of models on the walls and erotic paperbacks and magazines strewn about. Roy calmly explains that "'she was sunbathing and I was looking at her,'" and denies being a Peeping Tom. The policeman warns him and leaves, but Roy looks menacingly out of the front door at Marcia as the police car drives off.

Jack Fowler arrives home from his business trip to an empty house and is soon joined by his flirtatious, nosy neighbor, Lucy, who tells him that Marcia was "'sunbathing with no clothes on ... well almost'" and explains about the visit by the police. Lucy leaves and Stevey enters; Jack gives him a present of a motorized toy plane. Marsha enters next and, though her husband is initially angry with her, she quickly calms him with a kiss. After she explains what happened, Jack says that he will pay a visit to Roy after dinner. The telephone rings and Marcia answers and hears a male voice; she hangs up and tells Jack that it was a wrong number.

Bruce Dern as Roy Bullock

That evening, Jack visits Roy at home and Roy dismisses two young women who are dancing the twist on his porch. Again, Roy is calm and confident, characterizing his earlier actions as innocent and disarming Jack with a seemingly sincere apology. The next day, Roy befriends Stevey in the park and helps him fly his new toy plane. Jack drives up and agrees to let Roy walk Stevey home. That evening, Jack and Marcia are bickering at home when Stevey enters, followed by Roy, which upsets Marcia. After Roy leaves, Jack and Marcia continue to fight and Stevey listens from halfway up the stairs. Jack insists that Roy is "'a good-natured boy'" and, when Marcia says that Roy scares her, Jack angrily replies that "'I've never known you to object to being looked at before--by anything in pants!'" Jack storms out, going to play poker at a friend's house and, after he leaves, Marcia looks out of a window and sees Roy watching her from the yard, though he runs off when she sees him.

At 11:30 that night, Marcia is alone in bed when the phone rings. She asks who it is and a male voice replies, "'Don't you know?'" before asking her what she's wearing and telling her that she's very pretty. Marcia hangs up, calls the house where Jack is playing poker, and is at first frightened when she hears someone enter the house--it turns out to be Jack, returning home. She tells him that Roy called and he downplays her fears before driving to Roy's house. He confronts the young man and accuses him of making the telephone call, but Roy explains that he was on a date and just got home. Roy suggests that Marcia may be trying to get her husband to pay more attention to her and Jack leaves, but before he gets home, Marcia receives another telephone call from the unidentified man, who asks her what she's wearing and tells her that she's "'very exciting.'"

David White as Jack Fowler

The next day, Stevey and Roy are playing basketball in the park together. At the Fowler house, Jack learns that he must travel to San Francisco on another business trip. He invites Marcia but she declines, so he plans to fly up and back the next day and take Stevey with him. Roy again walks Stevey home and chats with Jack on the sidewalk in front of the house, learning that Jack and his son will be gone all the next day.

In the morning, Roy hides behind a tree across the street from Marcia's house and watches as she drives off alone. That evening, she returns home to an empty house. The telephone rings and the same man asks her if she's alone. After she hangs up, there is a knock at the back door and Roy enters, carrying a toy plane, a present for Stevey. He tells Marcia that he has waited all day to talk to her while she is at home alone. He stops her from calling the police and accuses her of treating Stevey the same way that Roy's stepmother treated him. He was neglected and thinks that the woman's behavior drove his father to suicide. After Roy grabs Marcia roughly and calls her "'vain and selfish and conceited,'" promising that her husband and stepson will learn her true nature, she slaps Roy and pulls a gun out of the drawer in her makeup table. As he approaches her, Marcia shoots Roy twice. He falls and she blurts out, "'I didn't mean to kill you.'" Just then, the telephone rings and the same man begins talking to Marcia. She drops the receiver in horror, realizing that she has killed Roy but he was not the man who was calling and harassing her.

In the decades that followed "Night Caller," most of Gabrielle Upton's credits would be as head writer for various soap operas, and this episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour plays like a cross between a soap opera and a thriller. The acting, especially by Bruce Dern as Roy, is outstanding, but his character's motivations are confusing. Roy seems attracted to and repelled by Marcia at the same time. In the first scene, he is clearly hiding behind a bush as he stares at her, yet later on he insists that he was trying to find a shortcut home and just looked at her. Roy claims to have a girlfriend of sorts, telling Jack that Nancy, one of the girls twisting on the porch, has been with him for about a week and later claiming that he spent the evening on a date with her. Yet when Roy is playing basketball in the park with Stevey and Nancy pulls up on her bicycle and invites Roy to join her for a soda, he dismisses her, preferring to play with the boy.

Leslie Barringer as Stevey Fowler

The walls of Roy's bedroom feature pinups and both the policeman and Jack flip through Roy's collection of erotic magazines and books, but Roy sidles up to Jack and asks him, with a knowing grin, if he didn't have magazines like that in his bedroom when he was Roy's age. After Roy walks Stevey home, he is seen watching Marcia through a window from her yard before he runs off, hardly the actions of someone who does not think he is guilty. Finally, he watches her from behind a tree as she drives off when Jack and Stevey are away. That evening, he walks in through the back door of her house, carrying a toy plane that he claims he wanted to give to Stevey, even though he knows that Stevey is not home. Once again, Roy knowingly tries to cover up what appears to be his real objective: to look at or spend time alone with Marcia.

Roy's angry speech to her in the show's final scene demonstrates his duality. On the one hand, he has entered her home uninvited, approaches her menacingly, and grabs her when she tries to telephone the police. Throughout the scene, he moves toward her in a threatening way. However, his words tell a different story. Roy claims that his goal is to expose Marcia for the selfish, bad stepmother that he thinks she is. He tells her about the way he was neglected by his own stepmother and how he believes that the woman drove his father to kill himself by driving off of a cliff in broad daylight. "'Sure, it was an accident,'" he rants, "'that's what the papers said...'" With this speech, Roy attempts to create an excuse for his behavior; he claims that he has been watching Marcia and getting close to her husband and her stepson out of good intentions, in order to protect them from sharing the trauma that he experienced as a child. Bruce Dern is such a good actor that Roy is almost believable, yet the way he has behaved throughout the show strongly suggests that, at best, he is torn between lust and vengeance.

Will J. White

And what of Marcia? Her character is portrayed as vain, selfish, and uncaring, just as Roy describes her. In the first scene, she engages in a flirtatious telephone call with a man who is not her husband. She admits that she doesn't know or care where her stepson is and she fails to tell the boy when his father is coming home. Even after she claims to be afraid of Roy, she declines Jack's invitation to come to San Francisco for the day, preferring to stay home alone. Does she plan to call her male friend? She drives off in her expensive convertible that morning and returns that evening, but we never learn how she spends her day. Although Marcia is victimized by the unknown telephone caller, she is never portrayed as worthy of sympathy; instead, she is shown as someone whose behavior encourages men to pay attention to her, whether she likes it or not.

Diane Sayer as Nancy

The entire neighborhood is filled with unlikeable people, many of whom display some degree of the nosiness that gets Roy in trouble. Lucy, Jack and Marcia's neighbor, is a woman closer to Jack's age who pays close attention to what his family is doing and who clearly has designs on Jack, flirting with him and caressing the lapel of his jacket right before he tells her, "'that's about enough.'" When the police arrive at Roy's house, neighbors across the street gather on the sidewalk to watch the show. And Roy, who has only lived in town for a week, has already memorized Stevey's daily schedule. The residents of this Los Angeles suburb spend an unhealthy amount of time keeping tabs on each other and don't seem to be looking for ways to help their fellow man or woman.

The female characters in "Night Caller" are all portrayed in a negative light, something that would not occur in an episode produced by Joan Harrison. Marcia Fowler is vain and selfish. Lucy Phillips is nosy and flirts with her married neighbor. The woman pushing a shopping cart along the sidewalk has probably taken it without permission from the grocery store, though she is quick to deny this when spoken to by a policeman. Nancy Willis, Roy's girlfriend, is portrayed as a vapid teenager, someone he is quick to dismiss. Only Roy's aunt comes out unscathed, and even she seems harried. On the other hand, all of the male characters seem to belong to a secret club where each understands the other. Roy tries to excuse his behavior as a voyeur and a stalker by blaming it on bad experiences in childhood. Jack is more than willing to believe Roy, a stranger, over his own wife. The policemen who respond to Marcia's telephone call seem amused by her concern and make no effort to hide their admiration of her physical appearance. The only innocent character is the boy, Stevey, who is portrayed as an unwitting victim of neglectful parents. The relations between men and women in "Night Caller" represent one view of suburban life in America in 1964, and it is a world that is not very appealing.

Elizabeth Harrower as Mrs. Masters

Alf Kjellin, the episode's director, creates some suspense and there is a good use of shadows and light, especially in the scenes when Marcia is alone in the house and the phone rings, but the title of the episode, "Night Caller," doesn't seem to give a good sense of what this show is all about. Calls from the mystery man come in the daytime and the nighttime and, since his identity is never revealed, it seems like a better title was called for, one that addressed the tension between Roy's lust for Marcia and his desire to expose her as a bad parent.

In the final analysis, "Night Caller" is an uneven episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, one that doesn't hold up to careful scrutiny.

Gabrielle Upton (1921-2022) worked mostly as a writer for TV from 1951 to 1978. She wrote for anthology shows like The Web and One Step Beyond, but most of her credits came as writer for soap operas such as The Guiding Light (1966-1968), The Secret Storm (1969-1974), and Love of Life (1976-1978); her last credit was for Search for Tomorrow in 1981. She also wrote the screenplay for the teen hit, Gidget (1959). "Night Caller" was her only teleplay for the Hitchcock TV show.

Frances Morris as the woman with the shopping cart

Robert Westerby (1909-1968), who co-wrote the teleplay, was born in England and wrote magazine articles, short stories, and novels from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. He began writing films in 1947 and TV shows in 1953 and his last credit was in 1966. This was his only work for the Hitchcock TV show.

Director Alf Kjellin (1920-1988) mixes the bland, suburban setting with more noirish camerawork and lighting in the night scenes. He was born in Sweden and started out in the movies in 1937 as an actor. He began acting on TV in 1952 and continued until 1979. He started directing films in 1955 and worked as a director on American television from 1961 to 1985, concurrent with his acting work. As an actor, he appeared in the 1966 film adaptation of Jack Finney's Assault on a Queen and in "Don't Look Behind You." As a director, he was at the helm for one episode of the half-hour Hitchcock series ("Coming Home") and eleven episodes of the hour series.

Angela Greene as Lucy Phillips

Starring as Marcia Fowler is Felicia Farr (1932- ), who was born Olive Dines. She lied about her age and became a lingerie model at age fifteen; she appeared on screen from 1954 to 1992. She was married to actor Jack Lemmon from 1962 to 2001 and this was her only role on the Hitchcock TV show.

Bruce Dern (1936- ) gives a strong performance as Roy Bullock. Dern trained with the Actors Studio and appeared on Broadway in 1958 and 1959 before starting his long screen career in 1960. His many roles include appearances on Thriller and The Outer Limits, another episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ("Lonely Place"), and roles in Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) and Family Plot (1976), in which he starred.

Marcia's husband Jack is played by David White (1916-1990); he was a Marine in WWII and appeared on Broadway starting in 1949. He was on screen from 1949 to 1989 and appeared in many television shows. He was in four episodes of the Hitchcock series (including "Dry Run") and two of The Twilight Zone, but he is best remembered for his supporting role as Larry Tate on Bewitched (1964-1972).

In smaller roles:

• Leslie Barringer (1950-2011) as Stevey Fowler, Marcia's stepson; he appeared mostly on TV from 1961 to 1969.
• Will J. White (1925-1992) as the policeman who questions Roy; he was on screen from 1952 to 1979 and appeared in one other episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "Memo From Purgatory." He was also seen on The Twilight Zone twice and on Thriller.
• Diane Sayer (1938-2001) as Roy's girlfriend; she was onscreen from 1962 to 1971 , appeared on The Twilight Zone, and was seen in two other episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, including "The Gentleman Caller."
• Elizabeth Harrower (1918-2003) as Roy's aunt, Mrs. Masters; like Gabrielle Upton, she wrote for TV soap operas, including The Days of Our Lives, from 1973 to 1991. She also acted on radio in the 1930s and on TV and in film from 1949 to 2003, appearing on The Twilight Zone, Batman, Night Gallery, and in one other episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,  "Wally the Beard."
• Frances Morris (1908-2003) as the woman pushing the shopping cart; she was on Broadway in 1912 and 1916, then appeared in film and on TV from 1929 to 1964. She was on Thriller and appeared in one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "The Big Kick."
• Angela Greene (1921-1978) as Lucy Phillips, Jack and Marcia's flirtatious next-door neighbor; born in Ireland, she worked as a model and dated John F. Kennedy. Her screen career lasted from 1944 to 1976 and included roles on Thriller and Batman; she was also in one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "Dead Weight."

Watch "Night Caller" online here.

Linda Fiorentino in the 1980s version

"Night Caller" was remade as an episode of the 1980s color remake series of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This version, which is adapted from Upton's story by John Byrun, is just 30 minutes long and features Linda Fiorentino as a young woman who is newly divorced and living in an apartment for the first time on her own. As in the original version, she is tormented by a series of telephone calls from an unknown man and, at the end, she shoots the neighbor whom she thinks is the caller, only to have the telephone ring again to reveal that she was wrong.

There is no husband or stepson in this version, and the character of the neighbor is barely seen. The focus instead is on the woman and the way in which the repeated telephone calls cause depression and then insanity. Although the episode is more graphic and less subtle than the original version, it is also more straightforward, concentrating on the suspense and horror of the situation and leaving out the family dynamics. Watch the 1985 version online here.

Sources:

"Gabrielle Upton Papers." https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82f7wbh.

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

IMDb, www.imdb.com.

"Night Caller." The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, season 2, episode 15, CBS, 31 Jan. 1964.

"Night Caller." Alfred Hitchcock Presents, season 1, episode 5, NBC, 5 Nov. 1985

Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org.

Listen to Al Sjoerdsma discuss "A Little Sleep" here!

In two weeks: "Act of Faith," starring George Grizzard!