Robert Bloch on TV Part Six-Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Landlady"

by Jack Seabrook

Dean Stockwell, on his way to being stuffed.

For his third teleplay of the sixth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Robert Bloch was assigned to adapt Roald Dahl's short story, "The Landlady," which had won the 1960 Edgar Award for best short story. Originally published in the November 28, 1959 issue of The New Yorker, the story follows 17 year old Billy Weaver as he arrives in Bath from London by train on a cold night, looking for a place to stay before taking his place in the business world. Young and naive, he imitates the brisk walk he has observed in successful businessmen.

He sees a sign advertising Bed and Breakfast in a cozy setting; through the window he sees a comfortable room. He starts toward a pub, the Bell and Dragon, for more congenial companionship, yet feels compelled to ring the bell at the house. A middle-aged woman welcomes him in as if she had been waiting for him and offers him a room at the "fantastically cheap" rates of five shillings and sixpence a night. "She looked exactly like the mother of one's best school-friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holidays." There is no evidence of another lodger, as she guides Billy through her "little nest" and shows him his room.

After washing up, Billy goes down to the living room, thinking "this is a bit of all right." He signs the guest book and notices that the two entries before his were made by Christopher Mulholland and Gregory Temple. The names sound familiar but he can't recall why. The landlady fixes Billy tea and a biscuit as he tries to remember where he had heard those names before. Billy notices a faint odor emanating from the landlady, who admits that Mulholland and Temple are both still there, on the third floor. She adds that Temple was 28 years old and had not "a blemish on his body." Billy notices that the parrot in the room's birdcage is stuffed. The landlady takes credit, and points out that the dachshund on the floor is stuffed as well. "I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away." Billy notices that his tea tastes of bitter almonds.

The story ends with the landlady telling Billy that there have been no other guests beside Mulholland and Temple in the last two or three years. The subtle message is that Billy is about to join them, as another of the pets she will kill and stuff for her collection.

Roald Dahl has been celebrated as a writer of wonderful stories for adults and children for decades. As Jeremy Treglown writes, in his introduction to the Everyman's Library collection of Dahl's stories, "his work is part of the mid twentieth century revival of gothic, particularly the vogue for 'sick humor.'" Dahl was born  in 1916 and lived till 1990.

It was fitting that Robert Bloch was assigned to adapt "The Landlady" for television, since he shared an affinity for the gothic style and sick humor. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents version aired on February 21, 1961, just a week after Bloch's last contribution to this series, "The Greatest Monster of Them All." Watching the show and comparing it to the story demonstrates Bloch's knack for making small changes to fit the material to the medium.

The setting of the tale is changed from Bath to "a provincial town in England," according to a superimposed title at the beginning of the show. This town is soon identified as Bramley by Wilkins, the bartender at a pub at which the first scene takes place. Bloch added this entire scene to help establish the English location and also to set up a red herring that will continue throughout the episode--the bartender and three patrons discuss a burglary in Bramley. Billy Weaver enters the pub, having just arrived by train, and soon uses a Swiss Army knife to open a jammed cash register. Billy, bespectacled and seemingly erudite despite his youth, stands out in the pub. The men in the pub exchange glances and the inference is that Billy's skill at opening locks could mean he is the burglar.



Burt Mustin, George Pelling, Barry Harvey, and Laurie Main

Billy then leaves the pub and walks around a foggy corner, immediately finding the landlady's home. There is no sign of the strange compulsion that draws Billy to ring the doorbell in the story; perhaps Bloch reasoned that it would be difficult to portray this internal motivation on film. Bloch then follows the story closely, even using lines of dialogue from Dahl's original, such as having the landlady refer to her "little nest." Billy mentions the rumor about a burglar that he had heard in the pub (keeping the red herring alive), but the landlady asks, "who'd want to harm an old lady like me?"

Alone in his room, Billy reads aloud a letter he has written to a friend, allowing Bloch to express directly some expository details that had been narrated in the story. He again mentions the burglary scare. Bloch cleverly added the idea of a burglar to the tale to divert attention from what is really going on. Unlike the story, which takes place in the course of an evening, the teleplay has Billy stay the night in his room and join the landlady downstairs the next morning for breakfast. It is raining and she advises against going outside.

In another change from the source, the landlady invites Billy to find out if the other two lodgers are still there. She shows him their coats and hats hanging in the hall and remarks, "you see, they did come back." In a lovely sequence, she tells Billy that they get together every Sunday afternoon and she plays the old hymns. Temple's favorite, she says, is "All Things Bright and Beautiful"--ironic, since the next line of this hymn is "All creatures great and small," creatures she kills and stuffs!

Patricia Collinge as the landlady

Billy notices that the overcoats are dry, even though it is raining outside. The landlady disappears upstairs and begins to play the organ; to the strains of the hymns, Billy ascends the stairs and investigates another lodger's room. This is filmed by alternating point of view shots with shots of Billy's reactions; the directorial trick is unusual for this series, which typically utilizes standard closeups and middle distance shots to tell ts stories. Billy finds a suitcase with some valuables inside, but otherwise the room is strangely empty.

The final scene takes place in the first floor parlor, as the landlady announces that she heard on the radio that the burglar has been caught. The burglar thread of the story thus is closed, and the viewer is slowly led to the horror of the tale's real denouement. Bloch's final addition is very subtle. The landlady asks Billy if  the silly register is in his way, referring to the guest register. Yet a careful viewer will realize that, in the opening pub scene, Billy was able to unlock the cash register, yet his subsequent inability to unlock the mystery of the landlady's guest register will prove fatal.

The end of the television adaptation is more demonstrative than the end of the story--the landlady tells Billy that "I stuff all my little pets when they pass away," and he seems to slip into paralysis. As he sits on the sofa, immobile, she announces: "Well, my pet, time to join the others!" as the camera cuts between her stuffed, dog, Basil, and Billy, who will soon be stuffed. While not as understated as the story, this is very subtle for a television program, and brilliantly done.




Jill Livesey as Rosie, in the pub

"The Landlady" was directed by Paul Henried (1908-1992), who was best known as an actor for playing Victor Laszlo, Humphrey Bogart's rival in Casablanca (1942), but who became a director, mostly of episodic TV, in 1952. He directed 28 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and one of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. "The Landlady" stars Dean Stockwell (born 1936) as Billy and Patricia Collinge (1892-1974) as the landlady. Stockwell began his career as a child actor in Hollywood and played many memorable roles, but for me he will always be remembered for the TV series Quantum Leap (1989-1993). Collinge was on stage from 1904 and in movies from 1941; she appeared on the Hitchcock series six times and had a role in Hitchcock's film, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

The other five cast members appear in the initial pub scene. Most memorable was Burt Mustin (1884-1977), who doesn't say a word but who plays an old man as he did in so many other TV shows from 1951 to 1976.

The Hitchcock episode of "The Landlady" is not yet available on DVD but can be viewed online here. The original short story has been reprinted often, most prominently in Dahl's 1960 collection Kiss Kiss, his 1979 collection, Tales of the Unexpected, and the posthumous 2006 Collected Stories.

"The Landlady" was adapted for TV a second time, as the April 21, 1979 episode of Tales of the Unexpected. Robert Bloch did not write the teleplay. The episode is available on DVD and can also be viewed online here.

Sources:

Dahl, Roald. "The Landlady." Roald Dahl Collected Stories. New York: Everyman's Library, 2006. 635-44. Print.

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 03 Jan. 2012. <http://www.imdb.com/>.

"The Landlady." Alfred Hitchcock Presents. NBC. 21 Feb. 1961. Television.

"The New Yorker" A Web Site for New Yorkers. Web. 03 Jan. 2012. <http://www.thenewyorker.com>.

Tales Of The Unexpected Episode Guide to Tv Series. Web. 04 Jan. 2012. <http://www.tales-of-the-unexpected-episodes.com>.

Treglown, Jeremy. "Appendix." Roald Dahl Collected Stories. New York: Everyman's Library, 2006. 849-50. Print.

Treglown, Jeremy. "Chronology." Roald Dahl Collected Stories. New York: Everyman's Library, 2006. Xxiv-xxvii. Print.

Treglown, Jeremy. "Introduction." Roald Dahl Collected Stories. New York: Everyman's Library, 2006. Ix-Xxi. Print.

Wikipedia. Web. 03 Jan. 2012. <http://www.wikipedia.org/>.

Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat

Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat by Andrez Bergen

Another Sky Press, 2011, 208 pp.

I never really knew the old Melbourne before the Wall, with its sundry pub music, its boutique club glamour, and vaguely dissident art, a not-so-contaminated Yarra River, all-night warehouse rave parties, superlative eateries, and its easy multicultural charm—I was still only a kid then.

This is the opening paragraph of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, by Andrez Bergen, a novel that recently came over my virtual transom. I was intrigued by the brief write-ups I read online and downloaded the novel for free, as a pdf that I was able to read on my Kindle.

Bergen’s novel is a science fiction detective story set in a dystopian Melbourne, which is the repository of what’s left of humanity in the not so distant future. The narrator is named Floyd, and he is a Seeker, whose job is to track down and arrest Deviants. The twist is that, in this world where acid rain falls constantly and quickly destroys even a new fedora, anyone can be labeled a Deviant. Floyd has had to kill his target only once, and that is the one mission he cannot remember; this unrecalled mission provides the catalyst for a trip into his own heart of darkness.

The government and a powerful corporation work hand in hand in this world, using fear to control what’s left of the population. Floyd sees everything through a haze of references to film noir, hard-boiled detective novels, Japanese films, you name it—all the things that bare*bones readers love to read, watch and quote!

The prose is solidly tough-guy style, more noir than sci-fi, with technical terms kept to a minimum, yet the Blade Runner-like futuristic world of corruption is never too far away. This novel has enough twists and turns to keep a Raymond Chandler fan happy. There are echoes of Total Recall, and any novel where the main character goes in search of another character named Wilton Parmenter and instead finds one named Agarn is bound to entertain fans of 1960s TV.

The book is published by Another Sky Press, an alternative publisher out of Portland, Oregon. It can be downloaded for free online; contributions are requested but not required. For old-fashioned lovers of paper, a printed copy can also be ordered. The novel is followed by several handy appendices that include a guide to pop-culture references in the novel, a glossary, etc.

--Jack Seabrook

2011 Was The Year That...

by Peter Enfantino

I started off writing a "Bestest Stuff of 2011" piece this morning before realizing that a list of my favorite things of 2011 would be embarrassingly predictable to anyone who read last year's bestest list. I'm a creature of habit and I tend not to try new things (just ask my beautiful, long-suffering girlfriend) so it would be no surprise that three superhero films make my top ten movies list (Number One, for those who care, would be 13 Assassins, a film that transported me back to the first time I saw Once Upon a Time in the West) and that the best music I listened to in 2011 was not Arcade Fire or Radiohead (in fact, the only music on Rolling Stone's annual list of "The Best Albums by Groups You've Never Heard" that I'd spin on my turntable would be Adele's 21) but the deluxe edition of The Rolling Stones' Some Girls featuring the same kind of pillaging of the Stones' vaults that made Exile on Main Street my choice for best cd last year.

So, instead of one of those boring "This is what I thought was the most stimulating, please choose to agree or disagree" exercises, I thought I'd opt with the possibly-just-as-boring list of happenings in 2011 that stimulated me:

2011 Was the Year That...  four superhero movies were released in one summer and only one of them sucked. You knew I had to work this in somewhere, right? It was a divine coincidence that Marvel characters would get the lavish treatment three times in a two months span at the same time we were rediscovering Marvel Comics' dawn. Thor, X-Men: First Class, and Captain America: The First Avenger all packed good acting, mature script, well-staged action sequences and, above all, a respect and almost reverence for its subject matter. Of course, it's all just a prelude to this fanboy's wet dream, The Summer of 2012, when we finally get to see how Joss Whedon intends to give ample screen time to seven Marvel characters and two super-villains and still squeeze in an interesting plot. The trailer doesn't do it for me but I'll still give Whedon the benefit of the doubt and turn up on opening day. I'm also interested to see how screwed up the reboot of Spider-Man will be with a completely CGI-ed Lizard as its villain. Then there's that 500 pound gorilla that will put all of them in the rear view mirror very quickly on July 20.

2011 Was the Year That...  I finally buckled and bought a blu-ray player and HD tv. Scoleri had been gently prodding me for years (just as he had to do with the computer, the cd player, the dvd player, the itouch, the dishwasher, and every other relevant electronic device of the last twenty years--I said I was a creature of habit) but I'd been resisting. Just how much better could this be than my big screen non-HD tv and my dvd player? Gulp! What finally pushed me over was seeing The Dark Knight  on blu at a buddy's house. Well, that, and the cheap prices on Amazon. Sadly, I find it near-impossible to pop in a dvd now. The $5 dvds in the bins at Wal-Mart now remind me of the $1 VHS tapes at the garage sales I once frequented. My wallet has taken a hit in the last month thanks to the afore-mentioned Amazon and their Gold Box deals. I've added blu boxsets of The Bourne and Jurassic Park Trilogys, The Alien Quadrilogy, and the Complete Dirty Harry, as well as all of Christopher Nolan's films to my collection. Anybody want to buy a bunch of dvds of those films?

2011 Was the Year That...  I discovered comics files. I'd seen these things offered up on the net but had never given them a try until we decided to tackle the Marvel Universe, one issue at a time. After buying every single Essential volume (yep, I sure did) and being disappointed with the black and white reproduction, I took a chance and ordered a couple of discs from a dealer. Now, I'll never try to convince you that reading your comic books on a computer is a more rewarding experience  than lovingly and carefully turning the original dusty pages themselves. No dice. I will say that it's quite a bit cheaper. Just to give you an idea, the forty or fifty B&W reprint volumes cost me upwards of $500 and files of those same comics set me back about a hundred clams (and that's not even considering what the original comics would cost you!). I also picked up several hundred files of public domain pre-code horror comics.  A lot of this will translate into blogs we're working on. I doubt our Marvel University blog would be as readable without these files.

2011 Was the Year That...  Stephen King remembered how to entertain his readers again. I read a Stephen King novel all the way through and enjoyed it for the first time in about twenty years (the last time was The Dark Half, if I recall correctly). I've had to replace my living room window several times thanks to King's annoying habit of drawing me in only to piss me off halfway through a novel with those fucking italics, annoying catchphrases and pop culture references (how many times, in that dopey slasher flick novella in Full Dark, No Stars, did he mention that soda pop sign?), and goofy colloquialisms like cockadoodie. King more than redeemed himself with his latest, the time travel novel 11/23/63, a rip-roaring "what if?" that puts the spin on his Johnny Smith character from The Dead Zone. What if you could go back and prevent JFK's assassination? Would it make the world a better place? It's not as easy a question as it seems, argues the author and the outcome may be a little predictable if you've read much of King's fiction but its final image of the central character dancing with his lover is haunting and will stay with me a long time. 

2011 Was the Year That...  HBO proved yet again that it's the place to go for the best TV programming with Game of Thrones, a thrilling fantasy series based on the novel by George R. R. Martin. Juggling several main characters, plot lines, and cliffhangers deftly, it proved that fantasy can be more than elves, unicorns and soft-focus fairies. Indeed, it's tough to view Thrones as a fantasy since there are only a few fantastical winks in its ten-hour running time to prove this isn't a dramatic piece based on historical occurrences. Beheadings, political shenanigans, and in-breeding? Sounds like modern-day Alabama to me. I was so lost in Thrones' universe that, a few days after I watched the last episode, I bought the five books that (so far) chronicle  the "A Song of Ice and Fire" saga. We're talking over 5000 pages for a guy who finds it hard to find the time to read his e-mails. Bravo to George R. R. Martin (or "little Georgie," as Stan Lee would call him on the letters pages of the early Marvel Comics) for creating such a fully developed and entertaining landscape for a reader to lose himself in.

2011 Was the Year That...  I spent more time listening to movie podcast than music on my iTouch. First time that's happened. I've listened to a few podcasts regularly (man, do I miss Mondo Movie!), but it's only been in the last six months that I've become near-obsessed with film discussion by fans rather than scholars. In particular, the laugh-out-loud observations by the crews of Filmjunk, 35mm Heroes, and The Gentlemen's Guide to Midnight Cinema. Junk and 35mm tend to stick to what's going on at the local cineplex but GGTMC eschews the current fare (for the most part, so do I) and opts to enlighten the uneducated (me) to the joys of Supervixens (1975) and Django the Bastard (1969), always in an entertaining and respectful fashion. All three podcasts have sent me running to Netflix, in the hopes I'll find salvation. 

2011 Was the Year That...  John and I met and befriended quite a few hard-working individuals. Make no bones about it, Jack Seabrook, Jim Barwise, Matthew Bradley, and Tom McMillion work long hours to help us produce Marvel University and all they get out of it is a sense of satisfaction (I hope) and a plea for "More, more, more!" A huge thank you to these gentlemen for making our part-time hobby that much more enjoyable. Just wait 'til you see what we've got planned for 2012! Speaking of which...

2012 Will Be the Year That...  I'll finally get to hear new music from Van Halen (after an absence of 28 years!), Aerosmith (11 years) and The Rolling Stones (well, we hope so, anyways). We'll thrill to (or groan at) the long-awaited final film in the Christopher Nolan/Batman trilogy. Pre-code horror comics will continue to be reprinted and re-assessed between hardcovers. The producers of Game of Thrones will have the unenviable task of adapting an 1100 page second volume that's long on character and a long time between action bits (and I loved it all the same). We'll be providing lots of entertainment here at our series of blogs. You already know about the Kolchak: The Night Stalker dissection we'll be undertaking for the next four weeks but let me give you a sneak preview of some other goodies we have planned: Jack Seabrook and I will be unveiling "Batman in the 1970s," a MU-style travel through Batman and Detective Comics from January 1970 through December 1979 that'll run from January 15th on through the end of 2012. Sometime in '12, bare*bones will be home to multi-part looks at DC's mystery and war comics. MU will continue to count down to December 1969 (and its authors' smiles will grow when Gi-Ant Man and The Torch lose their regular series slots). Then there's the matter of the follow-up to Kolchak, which will be...

Nope, some stuff has to remain a surprise!

Happy New Year!

Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Just in time to celebrate the New Year, we'll be starting up our latest TV-show-a-day blog, this time following the exploits of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

If you enjoyed our blogs on Thriller, The Outer Limits, and Batman, you won't want to miss this one! Expect to see several of the same panel of experts adding their two cents on a daily basis, and along for the ride this time out are Mark Dawidziak, author of The Night Stalker Companion, and Matthew Bradley, author of Richard Matheson On Screen.

We hope you'll pop over to It Couldn't Happen Here... to check things out, and watch for our official launch on January 1st!

Merry Christmas!

All of us at bare•bones want to wish our readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

We hope you all woke up to a nice surprise under the tree this morning (with special thanks to Ken Mitchroney for sharing an example Christmas surprise!).

Ann-Margret

Robert Bloch on TV Part Five- Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “The Greatest Monster of Them All"

by Jack Seabrook

Robert Bloch’s second teleplay for season six of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was “The Greatest Monster of Them All,” broadcast by NBC on February 14, 1961. As the show opens, Hal Ballew sits in his office in a run-down Hollywood studio, reading a book on entomology and trying to find a new insect around which he can build a cheap monster movie. Director Morty Lenton chides him for his cheapness, suggesting a giant cockroach. Tipsy screenwriter Fred Logan arrives and, in place of a giant bug, Ballew suggests that he write a horror movie with a high school angle—playing youth against death. Logan brings up the name of Ernst Von Kroft, an old-time monster movie star.

Later, Ballew brings Von Kroft to his office and introduces him to Logan. Von Kroft takes his job seriously, wanting to create a horror picture “in the great tradition.” Ballew and Lenton don’t have the same aspirations; Lenton even suggests a toothless vampire.

The scene then shifts to the movie set, where the young cast takes a coffee break as Logan brings in new dialogue for the scene about to be filmed with Von Kroft. Von Kroft acts out a scene with starlet Lara Lee, putting his all into it, and Logan applauds his efforts. Lenton insists on close-ups of Von Kroft but won’t say why.

The great Sam Jaffe.

Once the movie has been released, Ballew sends Logan to a theater to take notes on audience reaction to his new picture; he mentions that Von Kroft will also be attending. As Logan watches the movie unfold, Von Kroft sits nearby, in a theater otherwise filled with teenagers. They appear to be frightened by the events onscreen until Von Kroft’s scene begins. Lenton dubbed a Bugs Bunny voice for all of Von Kroft’s lines, and the theater explodes with laughter. Logan is shocked and Von Kroft is angry and mortified.

William Redfield

Logan, drunk, visits Von Kroft at his apartment, only to find the old man distraught, wondering why Lenton made him look like a fool. Von Kroft pulls out his old makeup case and Logan passes out. On awakening, Logan goes to Ballew’s office and finds it empty. He continues on into the studio, exploring the darkened set of the recently-filmed motion picture. He finds Lenton dead, with two puncture wounds in his neck. Nearby, he finds Ballew injured. Ballew tells him that Von Kroft killed Lenton and is still on the loose.

Von Kroft, in full vampire makeup and with knife in hand, leaps from a catwalk above Logan and Ballew but breaks his neck in the fall and dies. Says Logan, he was “the greatest monster of them all.”

Bloch’s teleplay was based on a story of the same name by Bryce Walton. Comparing the story to the teleplay demonstrates Bloch’s talent for solving dramatic problems in a way that utilizes the medium of television to improve upon a source.

The monster, shrouded in fog.

Walton’s short story features the same characters and plot, but Bloch’s teleplay expands it, adding more humor and making significant changes. The banter between Ballew and Lenton is new, and actors Sam Jaffe (as Ballew) and, especially, Robert H. Harris (as Lenton), play their scenes broadly, with Yiddish/Brooklyn accents and misplaced words (“Edgar Albert Poe,”  for example). At one point, Lenton vigorously massages his bald head in what appears to be an attempt to stimulate hair growth. Watching this program, it’s clear that everyone involved was having fun, going well beyond Bloch’s script in order to be entertaining. One suspects that the subject matter was quite familiar to all of them.

Robert H. Harris tries to promote hair growth.

The opening scene, where Ballew and Lenton try to come up with a new insect for a giant bug movie, is not in the story, nor is the scene where Von Kroft visits the producer’s office and spontaneously tries out for the part by attacking Lenton like a vampire. As he has done in other scripts, Bloch uses foreshadowing here, anticipating the later murder of Lenton by Von Kroft in a manner made to look like that of a vampire.

Best of all is the movie set. The show’s third scene opens with a close-up of a fog-enshrouded monster that looks like the monster from Night of the Demon (1957); the camera pulls back to reveal a woman dressed in black, who moves in to kiss the monster before they both take a coffee break. The blonde starlet, Lara Lee, chews gum incessantly until Lenton tells her to get rid of it; she takes it out of her mouth and tosses it disdainfully on the floor of the set, saying “yes, master” in a voice like that of a mad scientist's hunchbacked servant.

Director Robert Stevens, who directed 44 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (this was his last, until the series expanded to an hour), also deserves credit for this wonderful episode. He uses an extreme close-up of Von Kroft’s eyes during the informal tryout in Ballew’s office to show that Von Kroft has talent of the sort that is sorely lacking in the contemporary movie business.

One aspect of the story that Bloch chose to play down is the detail about Von Kroft’s rooming house, which Logan visits prior to seeing the movie. Describing the ancient Hollywood rooming house, Logan tells us:

It was really very old, with cupolas and a bell tower, and surrounded by untended masses of rose bushes, wisteria, and untrimmed palm trees whose branches hung dry and brown, like dead grass skirts.

Bloch chose to replace these evocative details with humor and action. In Walton’s story, Von Kroft is clearly an amalgam of Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, and Boris Karloff. He was a matinee idol in Hungary (like Lugosi), he became famous in Hollywood for playing a monster in heavy makeup (like Karloff), and he always did all of his own makeup (like Chaney). In Bloch’s teleplay, Von Kroft’s background is not discussed, beyond stating that he had been a great horror film star in the old days.

Meri Welles and Richard Hale

The biggest differences between the story and the teleplay involve Lenton’s betrayal of Von Kroft and the story’s ending. In the story, Lenton films Von Kroft in close-up, focusing on his toothless mouth. When shown on the big screen, a toothless vampire gumming a starlet evokes audience laughter. In the teleplay, Lenton instead dubs what has to be an uncredited Mel Blanc reading the lines in a Bugs Bunny voice. The effect is much more dynamic onscreen, both funny and cruel.

At the end of the story, Von Kroft uses his makeup to turn himself into a summary of various monsters he had played. When Logan arrives at the studio, he finds Lenton lying in a grave with a broken jaw and Ballew hanging dead from a gibbet, replacing a dummy that had been there before. In the teleplay, Von Kroft dresses as a vampire, as in the movie he had just filmed, kills Lenton with a knife to make it look like a vampire’s bite, and leaves Ballew in a grave with unspecified injuries. At the end of the story, Von Kroft is found lying dead under the gibbet from which Ballew is hanging; in the teleplay, he leaps to his death from a catwalk.

Bloch’s adaptation of Walton’s story is very creative, using sound and pictures to turn the story into a real send-up of low-budget monster movie making around 1960. Bryce Walton was a prolific pulp author who wrote over 1000 short stories in his career and lived from 1918-1988. “The Greatest Monster of Them All” was first published in the May 1959 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and it was reprinted in Ellery Queen’s 1967 Anthology.

The cast of the Hitchcock show features William Redfield as Logan. Redfield lived from 1927-1976, and was in many TV shows and movies. He had a key role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and helped found the Actor’s Studio, but I will always remember him as Floyd Unger, Felix’s brother, in the “Shuffling Off to Buffalo” episode of The Odd Couple, broadcast February 8, 1974. Floyd ran a bubble gum factory in upstate New York and briefly hired Felix, whose unsuccessful ideas included Opera trading cards for kids who didn’t like sports.

Playing Hal Ballew was Sam Jaffe (1891-1984), who had a long and brilliant career in Yiddish theater, on Broadway, in movies and on TV. He was blacklisted in the 1950s but spent 50 years in the movies. Robert H. Harris played Morty Lenton; Harris lived from 1911-1981 and appeared in 9 episodes of the Hitchcock series, including “The Dangerous People.”

Richard Hale played Ernst Von Kroft. Hale lived from 1892-1981 and appeared in many movies and TV episodes. Much to my surprise, as I was recently watching All the King’s Men, Richard Hale turned up in a crowd scene early in the film and then later had a key role playing the father of a girl killed in an auto accident. His character’s name? Richard Hale!

Other minor payers in the cast included Baruch Lumet, who also had a small role in “The Cuckoo Clock,” and Meri Welles (as Lara Lee), who appeared in “Madame Mystery.”

Sources:

EBooks-Library.com - Your Best Source for EBooks, Historical Documents and Sheet Music - All in PDF Format. Web. 20 Dec. 2011. <http://ebooks-library.com>.

Galactic Central. Web. 21 Dec. 2011. <http://philsp.com/>.

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.

"The Greatest Monster of Them All." Alfred Hitchcock Presents. NBC. 14 Feb. 1961. Television.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 20 Dec. 2011. <http://www.imdb.com/>.

Walton, Bryce. "The Greatest Monster of Them All." 1959. Ellery Queen's 1967 Anthology. Ed. Ellery Queen. New York: Davis, 1966. 146-57. Print.

Wikipedia. Web. 20 Dec. 2011. <http://www.wikipedia.org/>.

Robert Bloch on TV Part Four- Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “The Changing Heart"

by Jack Seabrook

Have you ever had the experience of reading a story that really excited you and then being disappointed at the filmed adaptation? Such was my reaction to “The Changing Heart,” adapted by Robert Bloch from his short story, “Change of Heart.”

After having a hand in three episodes of season five of Alfred Hitchcock Presents¸ Robert Bloch’s first episode for the sixth season was “The Changing Heart,” broadcast on January 3, 1961. During the first five seasons, the series had been shown on CBS on Sunday nights. For season six, it moved to Tuesday nights on NBC. “The Changing Heart” was the first time Bloch adapted one of his own stories for the Hitchcock program.

“Change of Heart” was first published in the winter 1948 issue of the short-lived magazine, The Arkham Sampler. It is set in New York City and narrated by a young man who inherited an old watch from his uncle. After learning that the jeweler at an expensive shop does not think it worth fixing, the young man happens on the small Greenwich Village shop of watchmaker Ulrich Klemm. Clocks are everywhere in his basement shop.

Bloch’s writing in this story is lyrical. The clocks are described as if they were living things: the narrator tells us that “the face of the grandfather’s clock leaned forward.” Klemm agrees to repair the watch and his beautiful granddaughter Lisa emerges from the back of the shop. The narrator compares her voice to those of the chiming clocks, and she is described as having “golden hair and silver flesh,” two metals used in watches.

The narrator also feels like a timepiece, writing that “something leapt in rhythm deep in my chest.” This is Bloch’s way of foreshadowing the story’s shocking dénouement. The narrator accepts a dinner invitation and listens as Klemm talks of clocks and his beloved home country of Switzerland. Lisa cuts her finger and the narrator bandages it, demonstrating by her flowing blood that she is a human being, something we will wonder about at the end of the story.



Abraham Sofaer as Ulrich Klemm

 The narrator goes home and dreams of Lisa, then returns to the shop often, listening to Klemm’s stories for hours on end and learning that the old man’s father had wanted him to be a surgeon but that he preferred repairing clocks. The narrator begins to take Lisa out, soon falling in love and proposing marriage. She says that she cannot leave her grandfather because he depends on her; Bloch writes that she shook her head no, “like an automaton.” When the narrator tells the old man that he wants to take Lisa away, the clocks say no and so do Klemm and Lisa. She was “the old man’s masterpiece. He had spent years perfecting her pattern of obedient reaction.”

The narrator leaves and accepts a job in Detroit. Months later he returns to New York and hears that Lisa is dead. A friend had seen Klemm, who told him that his granddaughter had had a heart attack and was dying. The friend later saw a wreath on the door of Klemm’s shop.



Nicholas Pryor as Dane Ross

The narrator goes to the shop, knocks on the door, and is let in and welcomed by Lisa, yet all of the clocks are strangely silent. Lisa tells him that Klemm saved her but that the stress of doing so caused his own death. She has not eaten or slept since the old man died. The narrator turns on a light and sees that the girl is “white and waxen, her eyes blank and empty, her body wasted.” He takes her in his arms and puts his head to her chest, only to run screaming from “that shop of shadows and silence.” From her chest he had heard “not a heartbeat, but a faint, unmistakable ticking.”

“Change of Heart” is a beautifully written story of love and horror, one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read by Robert Bloch since I began this project. I was excited to watch Bloch’s own adaptation for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which begins (coincidentally?) with Hitchcock emerging from a grandfather clock that cuckoos! Recall that Bloch’s last episode of the series, the prior spring, had been “The Cuckoo Clock.”

In adapting his story for television, Bloch did a very good job of expanding it and opening it up, setting scenes outside the little clockmaker’s shop and contrasting the claustrophobic interior with more open exteriors. The most disappointing aspect of the filmed episode is the casting. As Dane Ross, the narrator of the story, the producers cast Nicholas Pryor, who was 25 years old at the time. Seeing him today I cannot help but think of his roles in Risky Business (as Tom Cruise’s father) and, especially, Airplane!, as a sick airline passenger. He tries to be earnest but he just doesn’t look like someone who would sweep the lonely granddaughter of an old clockmaker off her feet.

Also problematic is the casting of Abraham Sofaer as Ulrich Klemm. Sofaer was born in 1896 in Burma and was of Burmese and Jewish ancestry. Despite his efforts at a German accent, his olive complexion, protruding eyes and unkempt hair do not fit my mental picture of an old Swiss clockmaker.

Bloch’s script for the show is outstanding. The plot generally follows that of the story with some minor changes: Klemm, not the young man, bandages Lisa’s finger, and the friend only referred to in the story appears in the filmed version and goes to a Bavarian-themed restaurant with the young lovers. Bloch uses foreshadowing again, and clock phrases and imagery are pervasive—when Lisa cuts her finger, she says she cut her “minute hand.” The young man is transferred to Seattle, rather than Detroit (there is no explanation for this change—perhaps Detroit was thought to be too close to New York in the world of 1960, where air travel was more affordable and common than it had been in 1948, when the story was published).



Anne Helm as Lisa

 Dane (the young man is named Dane Ross in the television adaptation) asks Lisa if her grandfather “can carry her around on the end of a chain, like this watch” and says that “he’s turned you into a piece of clockwork that he can wind up.” Most different from the story is the way Klemm seems to exert a hypnotic influence over Lisa. When he speaks to her, the background music sounds like a clock striking, and she obeys as if in a trance. Dane remarks: “you’ve turned her into an automaton.” Earlier in the show, Klemm had mentioned leaving his automatons behind when he left Europe.

Near the end of the story, the teleplay dramatizes Dane’s friend’s visit to Klemm’s shop, where Klemm tells him “I will not let her die!” as he refuses to consider calling a doctor. At the end, when Dane visits the shop for the last time, he has to break a window in the locked door to let himself in. Lisa does not welcome him and speak to him; instead, he first finds Klemm dead at his workbench, then goes behind a curtain into a back room where he finds Lisa, sitting immobile in a wheelchair, a doll-like smile on her face. She neither speaks nor moves, and we hear a loud ticking. Dane puts his ear to her chest and looks up in shock; the camera then pulls back to reveal Klemm’s masterpiece.

Robert Sampson

This final scene of “The Changing Heart” must have been pretty shocking when it first aired in early January 1961. The horror of the beautiful young woman with a clockwork heart is reminiscent of similar horrors that were airing on NBC's Thriller, which had debuted the prior fall and to which Robert Bloch also contributed many episodes. In fact, Thriller followed Alfred Hitchcock Presents on Tuesday evenings. The prior week, Thriller had aired "The Cheaters," based on a story by Bloch, and on January 3, 1961, Thriller aired "The Hungry Glass," which guaranteed a terrifying evening for viewers lucky enough to tune in to both programs.

"The Changing Heart", was directed by Robert Florey, born in Paris in 1900 and working in films from the early 1920s. Some of his efforts in the thriller genre included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), and “The Incredible Dr. Markesan” on Thriller. "The Changing Heart" was the first episode of the Hitchcock series that he directed; he also directed three episodes of The Twilight Zone, including “Perchance to Dream” and “The Fever.” His work with shadows often created an uneasy world that seemed like a bad dream.



Baruch Lumet

Also in the cast were the lovely Anne Helm, born in 1938 and 22 when this was filmed. She is perfectly cast as the young and innocent Lisa, though her innocence may have been long gone by the time she appeared with Elvis Presley in Follow That Dream (1962) and briefly moved into his house right after filming ended.

Robert Sampson played Dane’s friend; he appeared in many episodes of various TV series and was seen on TV as recently as 2008. Finally, Baruch Lumet (1989-1992) makes a brief, non-speaking appearance playing the concertina in the Bavarian restaurant; he was well known in Yiddish theater but is probably best known as the father of director Sidney Lumet.
\

“Change of Heart” was reprinted in the 1962 paperback collection of Bloch stories, Atoms and Evil, as well as in the fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales.

Sources:

Bloch, Robert. "Change of Heart." Atoms and Evil. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1962. 129-34. Print.

"The Changing Heart." Alfred Hitchcock Presents. NBC. 3 Jan. 1961. Television.

Galactic Central. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. <http://philsp.com/>.

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 29 Nov. 2011. <http://www.imdb.com/>.

Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. <http://isfdb.org/>.

Wikipedia. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. <http://www.wikipedia.org/>.