Something in the Woodwork
Night Gallery
A divorcée moves
into a house unoccupied since a bank robber was killed in the attic at the time
of its construction, and said to be haunted. She drinks, tries to get her
husband back, seeks out the ghost. “Leave me alone,” it says to her. She hounds
the young mistress, and with a threat to burn down the house, gets the ghost to
murder her husband by agitating the heart condition he now has.
And he does die,
with a scream and a thud. She looks in the mirror and laughs, until he walks
downstairs with a ghastly expression and says, in the ghost’s metallic voice,
“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” She screams, he throttles
her.
Short Fuse
Columbo
“Short Fuse”
means the alteration imposed on Hamlet, who here as Roger Stanford, Jr. is
obliged by his stepuncle (James Gregory) to take immediate action or see his
father’s company sold to a conglomerate. The gag, which ultimately does in
Roger as well, is not the point envenomed nor in the cup an union, but the old
exploding cigar trick.
The Elizabethan
dichotomy permits the bravura of Roddy McDowall’s Hamlet as well as William
Windom’s businesslike Fortinbras.
The spectacle of
their confrontation occurs during an ascent of “the Palm Springs Aerial
Tramway, which passes through five climate zones from desert to alpine.”
The Most Dangerous Match
Columbo
The opening
nightmare sequence effectively modulates to waking on a matched shot of
Laurence Harvey “tumbling” out of bed.
The bizarrerie of
the setup employs Oscar Beregi in a cameo as the restaurant proprietor. “Duddy
Kravitz,” says Lloyd Bochner into the telephone, speaking the dialect of his
nation. Jack Kruschen’s marvelous turn as a chess-playing mensch
approaches the Nabokovian.
A consequence of
all this abstraction is to render the piece descriptive and evocative of a
state of mind in which a solipsistic ambition is undone by the constraints of
nature.
The Adventure of the
Hard-Hearted Huckster
Ellery Queen
TV makes its appearance,
as Ellery Queen demonstrates in a free-moving impromptu live performance its
preferability in certain circumstances to “impressions”.
The gag is an ad
man who’s averse to broadcasting, done in by exploiting his fixed personal
schedule.