The Scare Salon

Jumping back into season two of Thriller, we’ve come to episode nine, “A Third for Pinochle,” directed once again by Herschel Daugherty and written by Mark Hanna and Boris Sobelman. This installment, another one based around a murder plot, is far more comedic than most of the episodes so far, recalling both Arsenic and Old Lace and a season one story featured on Thriller, “A Good Imagination” (episode 31), even down to starring the same actor (Edward Andrews) playing the same type of overconfident, self-satisfied killer. That said, I thought this episode was a hoot, and laughed out loud many times at the wacky hijinks that ensued, as well as the entertaining performances all around. Don’t expect something scary or suspenseful, though; this one is purely a dark comedy.

The pre-credit sequence plays out completely in silhouette, as a man is packing a suitcase in his bedroom when a dotty old lady sneaks up behind him and caves in his head with a meat cleaver. Subsequently, another old lady comes into the room and gently admonishes her for committing that pesky little murder.

After Boris Karloff’s amusing introduction, we discover that these two old ladies are sisters, Melba and Diedre Pennaroyd (played by Doro Merande and June Walker, respectively), and the murdered man was their brother. We also learn that neither old bat is playing with a full deck, though Diedre is clearly the nuttier one. The pair of them spend their days playing cards and spying on their neighbors through binoculars.

The main neighbors they keep tabs on are Maynard and Mrs. Thispin (Edward Andrews and Ann Shoemaker), who live across the street. Mrs. Thispin is a nagging, imperious old battle axe who constantly makes demands of her husband, ordering him around like a servant. Maynard appears mild-mannered and happy to cater to her wishes, but it’s obvious there’s some long-standing resentment festering there.

This suspicion is confirmed pretty overtly when a delivery man comes to the door with some cyanide Maynard ordered. Because his wife is right there, Maynard quickly sends the man away, claiming he doesn’t want it anymore, and tries to cover his ass by telling his wife he only bought it to kill some particularly stubborn weeds in the yard. Riiiiight.

Shortly afterward, Maynard toddles down to his basement man cave, where he not only takes out a phone he keeps hidden in a little coal heater so he can call a potential mistress named Babs (Barbara Perry), but also slides open a hidden compartment in the wall, behind which is concealed a papier-mâché head of his wife, which he proceeds to strangle with a long scarf. Practice does make perfect, as they say.

So the deal is that Mrs. Thispin is about to set out on a very long trip to visit her sister, and she’s going to leave on a train that evening. Maynard has plans to murder her before she goes, but fix it so it looks like she left on her trip and got killed later.

And it seems as though he has everything pretty well ironed out. A hauling service arrives and loads all of Mrs. Thispin’s luggage into a truck, while the crazy sisters across the street watch out the window, even coming out on their porch to flirt with the two much younger men carrying the bags (much to the men’s obvious confusion).

Mrs. Thispin sends Maynard on an errand to buy a bunch of birdseed so he can feed her birds while she’s gone, and we see that the crotchety old hag is loaded, as she peels off three singles for the birdseed from a fat wad of cash. After Maynard buys the birdseed, he drops by Babs’ apartment, telling her that as soon as a “close relative” kicks the bucket, he’ll be able to buy her a nicer place and an expensive mink stole. I thought the implication was that he had also banged her, but of course this was 1961 and you couldn’t really come out and say shit like that on TV. Oh, and Maynard either purposely or accidentally leaves the birdseed at Babs’ apartment; I thought this was going to play into the plot as a clue that would point to his guilt somehow, but it really didn’t; it only ended up being a setup for a brief, throwaway joke later on.

After Maynard gets home, he pretends to be happy about helping his wife write goodbye notes to all of her many, many friends, and sits there seething while she phones a bunch of them too, tut-tutting that it wouldn’t be proper to just take off on a long vacation without bidding everyone farewell. It finally seems that she’s finished this onerous task, and Maynard sneaks up behind his wife, scarf at the ready. But various things keep intervening to stop him from strangling her: a door-to-door salesman rings the bell, for example, or the phone rings and it’s one of his wife’s friends wanting to have a long conversation. At last, Maynard becomes so impatient that he simply picks up his wife’s bag (which contains some very heavy glass paperweights she’s taking to her sister’s as a gift), and bashes in Mrs. Thispin’s head with it. Mission accomplished.

As an aside, the same door-to-door salesman who interrupted the murder also inquires at the Pennaroyd sisters’ house. They invite the poor guy in and try to strong-arm him into moving into their dead brother’s room. The guy flees from the house in terror after Diedre starts chasing him with the meat cleaver. This little vignette isn’t relevant to the larger plot, but it was a funny diversion.

Anyway, Maynard then takes the fake head from earlier, pops it on a dressmaker’s dummy his wife was making a blouse on, and puts it in the passenger seat of the car in the garage. He also places his wife’s body in the trunk. He then pulls out of his driveway, fully aware that the nosy Pennaroyd sisters are watching him. He even gives them a little bit of theater, stopping in front of the house and getting out of the car, pretending to talk to his wife, then going back into the house to fetch her umbrella. It’s pretty genius, actually.

He pulls off the road in a remote area and puts the fake Mrs. Thispin in the trunk next to the body, then drives to the train station. He boards the train and puts his wife’s carry-on bag in the storage rack over her assigned seat, then gets off. Fortuitously, an elderly woman arrives on the platform with a bunch of bags, and he chivalrously helps her get them onto the train, making sure the porter sees him doing so. After he gets her settled, he talks to the porter extensively, giving him a big tip and telling him how glad he is to be rid of his wife for a while. He then waves to the old woman on the train as though she was his wife, she waves back, and Maynard goes smirkingly back to his car, knowing he’s established a tight alibi. On the way home, he dumps his wife’s body in a ravine not far from the train station, and when he gets home, he burns the fake head in the fireplace. A perfect crime, or so it would seem.

A little while later (I believe it’s about two weeks), a police detective (Ken Lynch) is at Maynard’s house, questioning him about his wife’s death. It seems that someone called in an anonymous tip that led authorities to the body (it’s never made clear who the tipster was), but since the remains had been outside for so long, there was no way the coroner could determine time of death. Maynard, perhaps unwisely, is making absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that he’s glad his wife is dead; she was a stingy old harridan, he tells them, and he obviously had a great deal to gain from killing her. In fact, he says, he’s going to have a blast spending his dead wife’s money, using it to buy things for his many mistresses. He even goes so far as to tell the detective that he HAD been planning on killing Mrs. Thispin, but someone else got to her first; lucky him! His plan was to strangle her, though, and the woman was actually bludgeoned to death, so it’s clear that he isn’t responsible.

The detective still suspects Maynard, obviously, but Maynard’s willingness to acknowledge how guilty he looks seems to be kinda throwing the cop off his game a bit. The detective concedes that it’s possible someone on the train saw Mrs. Thispin waving her wads of cash around and bumped her off to rob her, but he still wants a better alibi for Maynard. Is there anyone who might have seen Maynard and his (living) wife together before she left, perhaps on the way to the train station?

Of course Maynard knows that the Pennaroyd sisters saw him from across the street, but he plays dumb at first, saying he can’t think of anyone. When the detective suggests the neighbors, Maynard admits that the dotty sisters might have been watching through the window, because they’re busybodies like that.

The cop and Maynard then go to the sisters’ house, and they confirm that they saw Maynard and his wife in the car together on the way to the train station. The detective, defeated, seems to accept that Maynard didn’t kill Mrs. Thispin.

Triumphant, Maynard calls Babs later that evening, essentially breaking up with her and telling her he isn’t going to buy her jack shit, because he met a hot redhead and he’s taking her down to Mexico with his inheritance money. It seems for a moment that Maynard actually got away with it, but of course you know that can’t be allowed, so there’s a bit of an ironic twist.

After he hangs up after talking to Babs, the phone rings again. This time it’s Melba Pennaroyd, and she says that Maynard needs to come over to their house immediately. Annoyed but also a little worried, he goes over there. The ladies have set up a game of pinochle and ask him to play with them; ever since their brother died, they say, they’ve had only two players and pinochle is more fun with three (I wouldn’t know; I can play a lot of card games, but pinochle isn’t one of them).

Maynard plays with them for several hours and then tells them he’s gotta scoot, but at that point, the sisters drop the bombshell: they know goddamn well that it was a dummy in the car with him, because they have high-powered binoculars. They covered his ass for the police, but they’re gonna narc on him unless he moves in with them and becomes their eternal third for pinochle (title drop). And their pinochle games are like marathon sessions, man, going all day and night; sometimes they even forget to eat! Maynard, knowing he’s cooked, gives a “fuck my life” face, and we fade to black.

Boris Karloff then returns and explains that two weeks later, a crazed, exhausted Maynard stumbled into the police station and freely confessed to killing his wife, eventually being sentenced to life in prison. The sisters were shipped off to a mental hospital, where they had their choice of 400 other patients to play pinochle with.

This episode was actually a lot of fun; it was over the top, of course, but that was part of what made it hilarious to me. The acting performances were all really entertaining, and though there wasn’t much mystery or suspense, it was still a good time watching Maynard put his (admittedly kinda clever) plan into motion. If you’re more into Thriller for the crime or horror stories, you might not vibe with this one as much because it’s a black comedy, but I had a ball with it, so maybe you will too.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.