Nov 25 2008
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Lonely Place
Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran for seven season as a half-hour TV program. For the next season the title was changed to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the length of each episode was expanded, as the title made pretty obvious, to a full hour. The hour-long format continued for three seasons, when it went off the air, after producing a total of 93 episodes. As with any TV show, some episodes were outstanding, others were just average, and some real dogs popped up every once in a while. The Hitchcock show was no exception. Among the better episodes of the series was one called Lonely Place, a truly scary portrait of the impact of a psychotic loner on a rural middle-aged married couple.
Peach farmer Emery (Pat Buttram) and his wife Stella (Teresa Wright) live in a modest farmhouse in an isolated part of the country. It is almost time to harvest the peach crop and Emery is hoping to find help. Down the road comes Jesse (Bruce Dern) a down on his luck drifter. Emery, who is a tight old skinflint who wants to save as much money as possible, asks Jesse if he would like to assist in picking peaches. Jesse agrees, and Emery hires him at a low wage, which makes Emery happy. But Stella is doubtful about the stranger, who has a menacing look about him, and starts to taunt her at every occasion. He also carries a large knife. Stella has a pet squirrel, which she dotes on. Before long Jesse, claiming the squirrel attacked him, kills the squirrel. Emery doesn’t seem too concerned, but Stella is upset and begins to think of Jesse as a danger. The peach picking proceeds, and Emery is only too happy to have Jesse’s cheap help.
Stella feels more and more uneasy, as Jesse continues to torment her, and tries to get him fired, but Emery pays no attention to her pleas. He wants to milk Jesse until the peach harvest is done; the two men even seem to begin to gang up on Stella, with Emery seeming to take Jesse’s side against his wife. Stella, now totally afraid of what Jesse might do to her, decides to leave the farm until Jesse goes. She packs a suitcase and sneaks out a window. Naturally, before she can get very far, she runs into Jesse and his shiny, sharp knife. She manges to escape from Jesse and he steals the farm truck and takes off. Stella returns to the house, where she finds Emery seemingly asleep. But he opens his eyes and finally admits to Stella that he too is afraid of the psychotic Jesse, and was pretending to be asleep when he heard Stell’s screams after she ran into Jesse outside. Stella has had enough of her husband’s uncaring and cowardly actions, and takes her revenge on both Emery and Jesse.
The isolation of the farmhouse and the strained mariage of Emery and Stella make an excellent and spooky backdrop to the story. We get the feeling that there is no one around for miles. And when Jesse arrives, he just emphasizes the loneliness and vulnerability of Stella in relation to her cold-hearted husband. Within this atmosphere moves the figure of Jesse, a rootless man who has a manic laugh to go along with his meanacing scowl and strange ways. It doesn’t take long for Stella to figure out that Jesse has more than a few screws loose. Emery eventually gets it too, but he’s more interested in saving a penny than anything else; for his hard-hearted ways he will pay. The story builds slowly, as the power of Jesse’s insanity becomes harder to ignore.
In the confined environment of the farmhouse and orchard, the tension between the three characters is only heightened, especially that between Stella and Jesse and between Stella and her selfish husband, Emery. Pat Buttram, who often plays the humorous local yokel, presents Emery as a cold-heartened man who cares only about money and seems to long ago have lost any true affection for his wife. Stella, played by Academy Award winner Teresa Wright, has the role down cold as a middle-aged woman who seems tired of her life, but keeps on keeping on, since it seems the only thing to do in her harsh circumstance. Bruce Dern once again turns in his usual perfect take on the menancing psychotic who enjoys toying with his victims before he tries to finish them off. Dern became somewhat typecast in this kind of role in both TV and movies, but his Jesse is a truly evil man, who enjoys mentally torturing his victims. He is totally convicing as the quite mad Jesse. All three actors give outstanding performances.
Lonely Place is surely one of the best and most unsettling episodes of the whole Hitchcock Hour series, mostly because Jesse, at least initially, seems like the kind of person you might meet any day in real life. Only when it’s too late, can the viewer see just how crazy Jesse really is.
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was being shown on the Chiller, channel 257 on DirecTV. As it was just starting the third go around of the complete episodes, it was dropped from the schedule. It’s a good idea to see as many episodes as one can, because you never know when they will be shown again. Perhaps the series will return to the Chiller schedule in the near future. If that happens, be sure to catch the Lonely Place episode.
