The Scare Salon

As you guys who have been around for a while are aware, I’ve been (very) slowly making my way through the 1960s Thriller series, hosted by Boris Karloff. Though up to now I’ve been making posts and videos discussing six episodes at a time (a tradition I started for reasons I can’t even remember now), I’m starting to think that maybe that’s too much and I should concentrate on one episode at a time so that each post and video isn’t such a massive undertaking. I mean, each episode is nearly an hour, so after watching almost six hours of shows, I have to make detailed notes about each one, then record and edit the video, which usually ends up being like ninety minutes long. The daunting nature of this task has kept causing me to put off doing the Thriller (and Night Gallery) posts, so I figure if I just start doing one episode per post/video, I will get more of them done because it won’t be so time-consuming. Hopefully that’s okay with everyone; I just want to be able to get content out in a more timely fashion, because I get a lot of messages that you guys like these. I like doing them too, and that’s why I want to make more of them quicker.

Anyway, where were we? When we last left Thriller, we were discussing season two, episode six, so let’s move on to episode seven, titled “The Last of the Sommervilles.” This one was co-written and directed by Ida Lupino, and her innovative camera work is apparent in this outing as it is in the previously discussed episodes she helmed. Boris Karloff also has a fun turn in this one, playing a smarmy, not-to-be-trusted physician. While this installment is yet another story centered around scheming shitheads planning to bump off an aging relative to get their grubby mitts on some sweet, sweet cash, it’s still solid and nicely atmospheric, with a little comedic flair thrown in for good measure.

The episode has a great, gothic, and immediately engaging cold open in which a hooded figure drags a wrapped dead body across a foggy moor at night, then throws the stiff in a hole and buries it. When the hood of the cloak falls back, we see that the presumed murderer is a woman who looks super satisfied with her handiwork and gives a MWA-HA-HA kinda smirk back in the direction of the newly covered grave. We don’t actually find out who either the killer or the victim is until a bit later.

Meanwhile, a dude named Rutherford (Peter Walker) shows up at the mansion whose grounds contain the corpse we just saw buried. Rutherford, we discover, is the nephew of the elderly Aunt Celia Sommerville (Martita Hunt) and has arrived to visit her after fifteen years, so you know before he even opens his mouth that he’s gonna be asking for some money.

The woman who answers the door is the same woman we saw burying the body earlier; Rutherford at first thinks she’s the housekeeper, but this is actually Ursula Sommerville (Phyliss Thaxter), a distant cousin who lives in the house and looks after Aunt Celia in her dotage. Rutherford seems a bit taken aback because he’d never heard of her before, but he just rolls with it.

True to form, he goes up to Aunt Celia’s room and lays on the charm. Aunt Celia herself is a pleasantly dotty, theatrical old bat, complete with poofy hair, overdone makeup, and a ridiculously feathery dressing gown-type situation. I immediately love her goofy ass and want to get drunk with her. She chides Rutherford for not visiting her more often and exposits that she previously gave him some money to invest in some African gold mine or some such.

Funny she should mention that, because Rutherford has another very exciting investment opportunity for her. He’s heading off to Paris soon, you see, for some nebulous “business” that necessitates him buying some shares, and all he needs from her is a paltry thousand bucks. Which seems pretty reasonable, all things considered (for context, a thousand dollars in 1961 equates to about $10,500 today, so not quite as paltry a sum as I initially thought).

Celia seems open to the idea, but she’s got more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. She’s having a big party tonight, dontcha know, and she likes to take a really long bath before parties to “beautify” herself, so she scoots off to do just that. Ursula, after getting Celia squared away in the tub, tells Rutherford that no one is really coming over for a party; Celia just likes to imagine she’s having these big shindigs like when she was a social butterfly back in the old times.

Oh, and there’s also a mention of Celia’s sister, whose name is Sophie and who is possibly attending the party. Ursula tells Celia not to be silly; she knows very well that Sophie has been vacationing in Europe and won’t be able to attend. Remember this little detail for later.

As the evening wanes, Ursula and Rutherford have a bit of a tête-à-tête, where Ursula happens to “let it slip” that Celia isn’t quite as healthy as she appears, and has been suffering from some unspecified “heart seizures.” Neither of these assholes is making any secret about their desire for the hammy old biddy to just pop her clogs already.

So Rutherford stays at the house for a week, kissing Celia’s butt, frequently reminding her about the “investment” and trying to speed up the money-scamming process. But what he doesn’t know is that every time he seems to have talked Celia into writing a check, Ursula goes behind his back and insinuates that Rutherford is a dirty gambler who’s just gonna blow the money (which is probably true, as far as that goes). Rutherford is getting desperate and laments to Ursula about the time it’s taking for Celia to decide whether she’s gonna fork over the dough.

Ursula, who evidently has no shame and not a bit of a conscience, basically tells Rutherford straight up that she is practically the sole beneficiary of Celia’s will. She offers Rutherford twenty grand if he’ll “help” the old woman shuffle off her mortal coil, and make it look all accidental-like; she’d do it herself, she implies, but the authorities would suspect her immediately since she’s the only person who would benefit from the old woman’s death. Rutherford, who isn’t named in the will, wouldn’t even be a blip on the police’s radar.

Rutherford isn’t sure he’s up for this, but Ursula has clearly been thinking about this for a long time and has a plan all worked out involving Celia’s love of taking baths. They set up a day to do the deed, complete with alibis.

However, Celia unknowingly interferes with their plot by inviting her old friend Dr. Farnum (Boris Karloff) to dinner on the specified murder night. Rutherford and Ursula actually aren’t sure if Dr. Farnum is really going to show up, or if this is yet another imaginary party like the ones Celia usually has. Ursula goes to have a think and comes up with a backup plan in case the doc really does turn up, which turns out to be an even better plan than the one she came up with originally. She’s a doer, that Ursula. Thinks on her feet.

Dr. Farnum does indeed arrive, and is also obviously a grifter, smooching and fawning all over Celia in an attempt to get a piece of her pie, so to speak (sorry). Ursula tells Celia and the doc that Rutherford went to town to play cards with his friends and so won’t be joining them for dinner; in reality, Rutherford did do that earlier in the evening to be seen in public, but then snuck back to the mansion and bided his time in the basement, waiting for his moment to strike.

After dinner, Ursula claims that she also has to go to town for some charity event, and she manages to get Dr. Farnum to offer to drive her, which is exactly what she hoped would happen. If she’s with Farnum, of course, then she can’t have been responsible for killing Aunt Celia. It’s almost like the perfect crime!

After Ursula goes with Dr. Farnum, Rutherford creeps out of the basement and starts to put the plot into motion. Said plot is actually kinda out there but admittedly pretty clever (although I have no idea if it would work in reality). Basically, the potential murderers have rigged a live lamp cord to one of Celia’s bath sponges, so when she gets it wet, she’ll get electrocuted. Rutherford then just has to remove the sponge and the lamp from the scene, and it will look for all the world like Celia simply had one of her “heart seizures” and keeled over in the tub.

This admirably cockamamie plan works like gangbusters, and Celia is planted in the cemetery before you can say “Vaudeville is dead.” Celia’s lawyer Mr. Parchester (Chet Stratton) asks about the will and gives some reason why it can’t be read immediately; a fake-sad Ursula says that’s fine, she’s in no hurry, and tells him they can do the reading of the will a week from Friday. Rutherford blows his stack after the lawyer leaves, whining that at this rate it’s going to be at least two weeks before he can get the twenty large Ursula promised him, and he needs it now, goddammit. Ursula tells him to calm his tits; she doesn’t want to be in a big rush because it will look suspicious, she says. Rutherford grumbles about it, but concedes that she’s right.

Shortly afterward, though, a wrinkle appears in their carefully calculated scheme. An anonymous note shows up in the mailbox that claims to know that Celia was murdered. Neither one of them can figure out who wrote it, with Ursula blaming Rutherford for drinking too much in town and running his mouth, and Rutherford blaming Ursula for maybe letting something slip to Dr. Farnum. The wheels start turning in Ursula’s head, and she starts to think that maybe Dr. Farnum was behind the note too, although she denies telling him anything. No problem, though, she tells Rutherford: you just need to have him meet with an “accident” too.

Rutherford balks at this; he’s a bit of a sleaze, but he doesn’t fancy himself a killer, and offing Celia was about as much murdering as he could handle. Ursula then pulls out the ace up her sleeve, indirectly threatening Rutherford by telling him that old Aunt Sophie, Celia’s sister, isn’t in Europe at all; Ursula killed her, and in fact it was Sophie we saw her burying at the beginning of the story. The implication here is that if Rutherford doesn’t do what she asks, she’ll kill him too and get away with it.

Ursula goes to town for something or other and while she’s away, Dr. Farnum stops by the mansion and has a chat with Rutherford. Said chat is very suggestive and creepy, and the tone of the conversation solidifies the idea that Dr. Farnum knows that Rutherford and Ursula were the ones who killed Celia. He also indirectly implies that he knows Sophie is dead as well. Rutherford is understandably shitting bricks.

Later that night, Ursula wakes Rutherford up and tells him there’s someone out on the mansion’s grounds, possibly spying on them. It must be Dr. Farnum, she insists, and she hands Rutherford a gun. They both go creeping out into the foggy night in search of the prowler.

However, as anyone with a brain has already figured out, Ursula is double-crossing Rutherford so she doesn’t have to pay him the twenty grand. There isn’t anyone out in the yard; it’s just an old coat hanging in a tree, and Ursula leads Rutherford right into a convenient bog, into which he sinks, screaming the whole way and probably cursing himself for being such a knob. Ursula coldly watches him die from the shoreline, then sashays back to the house, not having to share the money with nobody.

We then skip ahead to the following Friday and the reading of the will. As previously explained, Ursula inherits pretty much everything, including the mansion and all of Celia’s expensive art and antiques. But wait, there’s a catch! It turns out that as a condition of receiving the inheritance, Ursula must marry the last male Sommerville, who of course was Rutherford. Who, if you will remember, is currently decomposing at the bottom of the bog on the property. If Ursula doesn’t marry Rutherford, she gets nothing and the whole enchilada instead reverts to the lawyer, Mr. Parchester. Shit, Ursula done fucked up!

Or did she? In a second twist, revealed only moments after that first one, it turns out that Ursula and Mr. Parchester were an item all along, and had planned this entire thing from the beginning. Ursula married Parchester, as evidenced by the enormous, tacky-as-fuck ring on her finger, so now both of them are stinking rich. End scene as they suck face, obviously very pleased with themselves.

Here’s the funny part, though. Because this was 1960s TV and fictional programs weren’t actually allowed to have the bad guys get away with their evil shenanigans, Boris Karloff comes on as host in a little coda at the end of the story. He’s standing in front of the Sommerville mansion, which now has a “for sale” sign on the gate, and he explains that both Ursula and Parchester were killed in a car accident off-screen (ironically sinking into the same bog that contained Rutherford’s rotting carcass), and thus did not live to enjoy the fruits of their nefarious skullduggery. Sort of lame, but Hitchcock used to do a similar thing, so I guess I’ll allow it.

As I said, this was another decent, middle-of-the-road episode, despite its sort of tired premise. It did have a few twists and turns I didn’t see coming, though most of them were telegraphed pretty obviously. I loved Phyliss Thaxter’s cold-blooded performance as Ursula, and both Boris Karloff and Martita Hunt were a lot of over-the-top fun. The camera work here was also really interesting in places, and the whole story had a nicely gothic atmosphere that went a long way toward elevating it above the lesser episodes of the series. Not great, but pretty damn good overall.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.