An elderly woman is locked in an air tight safe with one of her cats by her niece's fiancé when she discovers he is a forger.An elderly woman is locked in an air tight safe with one of her cats by her niece's fiancé when she discovers he is a forger.An elderly woman is locked in an air tight safe with one of her cats by her niece's fiancé when she discovers he is a forger.
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Bert Stevens
- Carl the Butler
- (uncredited)
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Storyline
Did you know
- GoofsBruce gets the idea to forge Adelaide's checks when she is writing one to pay a bill and asks him to mail it for her. The check number is 252 and the date is Feb 25, 1964. Later, when she's looking at the forged checks from her bank, one of them is number 250 with the date Aug 28 of the same year. For this to work out logically, the forged check should have had a number higher than 252, not lower.
Featured review
The Cat's Meow
"The Ordeal Of Mrs. Snow" is a good entry in the AHH series: suspenseful but not overly melodramatic, with interesting character conflicts and believable plot twists resulting from them. And, for animal lovers, it has cats! - two beautiful Siamese felines named Jack and Martha who are introduced at the very start as the pampered pets of wealthy widow Adelaide Snow. Adelaide (or Addie) is allowing her newly-married niece Lorna and nephew-in-law Bruce to live in her ritzy New York townhouse, but the situation is a bit awkward: Lorna is the beneficiary of her late father's will but does not have access to her inheritance for another year, while Bruce is from a humble background and, we learn, came into the marriage with some gambling debts, which Aunt Addie was willing to pay off for him, keeping it a secret from Lorna. Bruce currently works for Addie's financial advisor Hillary, but is anxious to move up in the world, and Lorna is frustrated at seeing him have to prove himself.
That's the initial setup, but things get really sticky when Bruce gets in financial straits again and Addie discovers he has forged her signature on checks in order to pay off his creditors. When she threatens to blow the whistle on him, he takes an impulsive action which puts her in real jeopardy. The subsequent suspense stems from seeing how it all will play out, and whether Addie will survive the life-threatening ordeal of the episode's title.
The writing and direction are very well done. A nice touch is that we experience the pivotal plot turn from Adelaide's POV only, making it more of a shock and heightening her realization of her circumstances. The tension is ratcheted up by cutting back and forth between Adelaide's desperate efforts to cope with her situation, and Bruce and Lorna partying with friends in the Hamptons (Lorna is unaware of her aunt's predicament but gradually begins to suspect that something is amiss back home). Also clever is how the cats' presence, incidental at first, becomes a crucial part of the story. And in a neat reversal, we get the climactic denouement from Bruce's POV. The ending, although fairly expected, still manages to hold a surprise and the resolution is left somewhat up in the air, which I actually like.
The acting is generally up to the series' high standard: Patricia Collinge is excellent as Adelaide, displaying the character's backbone as well as her fragility, and Jessica Walter adeptly navigates Lorna's slowly dawning realizations about her new husband. My one criticism is that Bruce is written a bit one-dimensionally as a villain, and Don Chastain's portrayal doesn't really add much depth. Still, this episode is very effective overall, and it's well worth catching.
That's the initial setup, but things get really sticky when Bruce gets in financial straits again and Addie discovers he has forged her signature on checks in order to pay off his creditors. When she threatens to blow the whistle on him, he takes an impulsive action which puts her in real jeopardy. The subsequent suspense stems from seeing how it all will play out, and whether Addie will survive the life-threatening ordeal of the episode's title.
The writing and direction are very well done. A nice touch is that we experience the pivotal plot turn from Adelaide's POV only, making it more of a shock and heightening her realization of her circumstances. The tension is ratcheted up by cutting back and forth between Adelaide's desperate efforts to cope with her situation, and Bruce and Lorna partying with friends in the Hamptons (Lorna is unaware of her aunt's predicament but gradually begins to suspect that something is amiss back home). Also clever is how the cats' presence, incidental at first, becomes a crucial part of the story. And in a neat reversal, we get the climactic denouement from Bruce's POV. The ending, although fairly expected, still manages to hold a surprise and the resolution is left somewhat up in the air, which I actually like.
The acting is generally up to the series' high standard: Patricia Collinge is excellent as Adelaide, displaying the character's backbone as well as her fragility, and Jessica Walter adeptly navigates Lorna's slowly dawning realizations about her new husband. My one criticism is that Bruce is written a bit one-dimensionally as a villain, and Don Chastain's portrayal doesn't really add much depth. Still, this episode is very effective overall, and it's well worth catching.
helpful•20
- volare12
- Aug 10, 2022
Details
- Runtime48 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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