I cannot really complain that Wendell Corey played so few heavies. Especially with his start in noir, his pale-eyed cat-looks could have typed him trivially as a hood or a psycho and it took a few years instead for his bread and butter of attractive second-stringers to circle around to the weirder, edgier roles intimated by his queer debut, though a shark-hearted studio fixer remained more of an outlier in his ambivalent gallery than even a resentfully racist chiseler or a grief-tranced murderer. The studio system of classical Hollywood has obstinately refused to take my memos that his gift for wry vulnerability should have lined him up for more romances. He's so good in "Poison" (1958) as a heel without the hint of a face turn, any moral alignment he felt like should have been lining up for him.
The best Iago I ever saw was the most convivial of his cast, a barrack-room lawyer of such irrepressible sarcasm and incorrigible sweet talk, it seemed paranoid until he started soliloquizing to suspect him of any successfully concealed enmity and if you were only watching his face, you still wouldn't believe it. So Corey's Timber Woods, rolling up to this hothouse half-hour of Malayan night like a lifeline for a man in the position of James Donald's Harry Pope, namely petrified for hours by the lethal weight of a krait on his stomach, scarcely daring to whisper or loosen his grip on the book he was reading when his uninvited bedmate slithered in. DTs and malaria ruled out after a reflective look at his partner's sweat-soaked face, Timber promises, "Okay, kiddie, I'll think of something." If he seems a little obtuse, a little distractible as he goes about the tightly beseeched business of hunting up the phone book and ringing the district doctor—718, he corrects himself apologetically now that he's got his glasses on—surely it's encouraging that he hasn't caught the piano-wire nerves of his partner, an implicit reassurance in his loose-jointed bonhomie that the man already stiffened in shallow-breathed corpse-imitation isn't in such fearful danger after all. It would be more reassuring if it weren't flecked with red flags like the dubious inspection of a knife, the genial concurrence on krait-related fatalities, the solicitous bending to soothe his partner's brow in a swirl of cigarette smoke that induces a tiny, choked, terrified cough. "Harry, be calm!" Timber shushes as virtuously as a nursemaid, as if he hadn't pushed for exactly that suppressed buck of a reaction from his providentially captive audience. If only he would drop the mask honestly, it would be easier to take than this Loki-drip of amiable malice. The more inflammatory his provocations, the more nonchalantly he smiles over them, some jokes or club stories he's recollecting to pass the time until the arrival of the doctor, who could always be too late: "You're not supposed to talk, remember?"
In the source material of Roald Dahl's "Poison" (1950), the title indicates the racism of colonial relations which springs out as venomously as a krait when at least the white reader is least primed to expect it. At once closely and inversely adapted by Casey Robinson for the fourth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62), the teleplay transfers the toxicity to the partnership of its two expatriates, once evidently a friendship as well as a business venture, now some kind of Sartrean hell. Its history is not particularly illuminated, but then it doesn't sound particularly unique—the never-seen girl who has come to favor one man over the other, the profits of the plantation which are worth a case of negligent homicide—some imperceptible point of resentment flipped over into real hatred, which is all that matters by this stage. Timber's is the more obvious, most impressively in his offhand boast that he started his partner on the drinking that with or without Schrödinger's krait could wreck his chances in business and love, but the suspicious impatience that grates through Harry's hoarse-clipped self-control suggests there may not have been so much love left to lose from his side to start with. Directed by Hitchcock himself, the episode is a near two-hander which sweats itself out in almost real time, claustrophobically pressed by the snake-breeding jungle outside the bungalow as by the human-thrown shadows within it. Everyone is fantastically hard-lit by John L. Russell, the veteran noir DP who shot most of the series and would garner his only Oscar nomination for Psycho (1960). Donald in frozen or grimacing profile is coated with a barbed glitter of stubble and perspiration, introduced with the constricted, serpentine gesture of one hand twisted suddenly into frame in tortured appeal. Corey wherever he roams with his ostentatious freedom is caught with his eyes transparent, as spooky an effect as orthochromatic film, the ice in the veins of his man-to-man jocularity. Spines of rattan, roof-ribs of corrugated tin, and joints of bamboo encourage the tropical production design without tipping into tiki cliché, especially the central set of the bedside with its pinion of crumpled sheets. A medico responsible enough to postpone his holiday in Singapore for this house call which is starting to feel like a head game, Arnold Moss as Dr. Ganderbai practically glows in his ice cream suit. Corey, of course, had worked previously with Hitchcock on Rear Window (1954) and feels at times like an entertainingly low-rent variation on one of his director's charm-surfaced villains. It's fun to watch his tricks of self-deprecation deployed disingenuously, as when he feints at dropping a syringe of antivenin and whips on the chagrin at a sharp look from Dr. Ganderbai; then safely out of sight over the doctor's shoulder, he can let his face break into a diabolically whimsical smile at the disclosure that the shot was more placebo than protection. His no-brows flicker like photogravure in their fine expressive lines, tilted merrily even when he's just admitted to something despicable. "So? So what now? And this little krait may yet turn into—what's the expression? A hand of God? Oh, in a very amusing disguise, of course."
The sting of the ending can be seen coming by all the laws of irony, but it gives a hell of a close-up shock, not even so much because it finally snaps the tension as because it is the first time all story that Timber looks what he mocked in his quondam victim—helpless, human—a glisten like sweat on his face from the drink thrown in it, the crash-zoom in on his ghost-eyes showing their agate of wide and terrified, translucent blue. We have observed Harry at just this merciless distance, but not his tormentor. Their voices have even turned tables, distorted against cool. The reversal lingers even after Hitchcock has closed out the episode on his host's customary, macabrely humorous note, past the punch of the obvious proverb. I am glad that adaptations more faithful to Dahl have been made since, but in its own right this one makes a hard little chamber piece. It made me superfluously happy to see Joan Harrison in the credits as producer and Norman Lloyd as associate producer. I hope it's considered one of the famous episodes. I worry it may not, since for reasons impenetrable to me and obnoxious, "Poison" is not currently available on any of the services legally streaming Alfred Hitchcock Presents, meaning I tracked it down on old-fashioned physical media thanks to the good offices of the Minuteman Library Network. The occasion was the hundred and eleventh birthday of Wendell Corey, notwithstanding that I already yelled at a dry stone wall for his sake. I had not seen quite this person in his movies and his radio voice gets the full workout, from a snicker to a shriek. If anyone ever promises to get you out of a predicament with his laissez-faire delivery of "Shake of a lamb's tail now, chop-chop," just risk the snakebite and rescue yourself. This amusement brought to you by my calm backers at Patreon.
The best Iago I ever saw was the most convivial of his cast, a barrack-room lawyer of such irrepressible sarcasm and incorrigible sweet talk, it seemed paranoid until he started soliloquizing to suspect him of any successfully concealed enmity and if you were only watching his face, you still wouldn't believe it. So Corey's Timber Woods, rolling up to this hothouse half-hour of Malayan night like a lifeline for a man in the position of James Donald's Harry Pope, namely petrified for hours by the lethal weight of a krait on his stomach, scarcely daring to whisper or loosen his grip on the book he was reading when his uninvited bedmate slithered in. DTs and malaria ruled out after a reflective look at his partner's sweat-soaked face, Timber promises, "Okay, kiddie, I'll think of something." If he seems a little obtuse, a little distractible as he goes about the tightly beseeched business of hunting up the phone book and ringing the district doctor—718, he corrects himself apologetically now that he's got his glasses on—surely it's encouraging that he hasn't caught the piano-wire nerves of his partner, an implicit reassurance in his loose-jointed bonhomie that the man already stiffened in shallow-breathed corpse-imitation isn't in such fearful danger after all. It would be more reassuring if it weren't flecked with red flags like the dubious inspection of a knife, the genial concurrence on krait-related fatalities, the solicitous bending to soothe his partner's brow in a swirl of cigarette smoke that induces a tiny, choked, terrified cough. "Harry, be calm!" Timber shushes as virtuously as a nursemaid, as if he hadn't pushed for exactly that suppressed buck of a reaction from his providentially captive audience. If only he would drop the mask honestly, it would be easier to take than this Loki-drip of amiable malice. The more inflammatory his provocations, the more nonchalantly he smiles over them, some jokes or club stories he's recollecting to pass the time until the arrival of the doctor, who could always be too late: "You're not supposed to talk, remember?"
In the source material of Roald Dahl's "Poison" (1950), the title indicates the racism of colonial relations which springs out as venomously as a krait when at least the white reader is least primed to expect it. At once closely and inversely adapted by Casey Robinson for the fourth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62), the teleplay transfers the toxicity to the partnership of its two expatriates, once evidently a friendship as well as a business venture, now some kind of Sartrean hell. Its history is not particularly illuminated, but then it doesn't sound particularly unique—the never-seen girl who has come to favor one man over the other, the profits of the plantation which are worth a case of negligent homicide—some imperceptible point of resentment flipped over into real hatred, which is all that matters by this stage. Timber's is the more obvious, most impressively in his offhand boast that he started his partner on the drinking that with or without Schrödinger's krait could wreck his chances in business and love, but the suspicious impatience that grates through Harry's hoarse-clipped self-control suggests there may not have been so much love left to lose from his side to start with. Directed by Hitchcock himself, the episode is a near two-hander which sweats itself out in almost real time, claustrophobically pressed by the snake-breeding jungle outside the bungalow as by the human-thrown shadows within it. Everyone is fantastically hard-lit by John L. Russell, the veteran noir DP who shot most of the series and would garner his only Oscar nomination for Psycho (1960). Donald in frozen or grimacing profile is coated with a barbed glitter of stubble and perspiration, introduced with the constricted, serpentine gesture of one hand twisted suddenly into frame in tortured appeal. Corey wherever he roams with his ostentatious freedom is caught with his eyes transparent, as spooky an effect as orthochromatic film, the ice in the veins of his man-to-man jocularity. Spines of rattan, roof-ribs of corrugated tin, and joints of bamboo encourage the tropical production design without tipping into tiki cliché, especially the central set of the bedside with its pinion of crumpled sheets. A medico responsible enough to postpone his holiday in Singapore for this house call which is starting to feel like a head game, Arnold Moss as Dr. Ganderbai practically glows in his ice cream suit. Corey, of course, had worked previously with Hitchcock on Rear Window (1954) and feels at times like an entertainingly low-rent variation on one of his director's charm-surfaced villains. It's fun to watch his tricks of self-deprecation deployed disingenuously, as when he feints at dropping a syringe of antivenin and whips on the chagrin at a sharp look from Dr. Ganderbai; then safely out of sight over the doctor's shoulder, he can let his face break into a diabolically whimsical smile at the disclosure that the shot was more placebo than protection. His no-brows flicker like photogravure in their fine expressive lines, tilted merrily even when he's just admitted to something despicable. "So? So what now? And this little krait may yet turn into—what's the expression? A hand of God? Oh, in a very amusing disguise, of course."
The sting of the ending can be seen coming by all the laws of irony, but it gives a hell of a close-up shock, not even so much because it finally snaps the tension as because it is the first time all story that Timber looks what he mocked in his quondam victim—helpless, human—a glisten like sweat on his face from the drink thrown in it, the crash-zoom in on his ghost-eyes showing their agate of wide and terrified, translucent blue. We have observed Harry at just this merciless distance, but not his tormentor. Their voices have even turned tables, distorted against cool. The reversal lingers even after Hitchcock has closed out the episode on his host's customary, macabrely humorous note, past the punch of the obvious proverb. I am glad that adaptations more faithful to Dahl have been made since, but in its own right this one makes a hard little chamber piece. It made me superfluously happy to see Joan Harrison in the credits as producer and Norman Lloyd as associate producer. I hope it's considered one of the famous episodes. I worry it may not, since for reasons impenetrable to me and obnoxious, "Poison" is not currently available on any of the services legally streaming Alfred Hitchcock Presents, meaning I tracked it down on old-fashioned physical media thanks to the good offices of the Minuteman Library Network. The occasion was the hundred and eleventh birthday of Wendell Corey, notwithstanding that I already yelled at a dry stone wall for his sake. I had not seen quite this person in his movies and his radio voice gets the full workout, from a snicker to a shriek. If anyone ever promises to get you out of a predicament with his laissez-faire delivery of "Shake of a lamb's tail now, chop-chop," just risk the snakebite and rescue yourself. This amusement brought to you by my calm backers at Patreon.
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