James Bridges adapted "Death Scene" for the small screen and top talent was used to ensure that it made an engrossing hour of television. The life insurance check is delivered and the Reveres agree that the money will come in handy for Gavin's comeback as a director. As he falls, he sees Monica's face clearly and realizes she is Revere's wife, not his daughter. Monica sits on the wall and Leo moves to keep her from falling, but as he does so Gavin pushes him over the edge and he falls to his death. After the arrangements have been made, Leo, Monica, and Gavin discuss honeymoons on the rear patio, near the crumbling wall that overlooks the precipice.
Leo proposes marriage and Revere agrees, with the condition that Leo purchase a $50,000 insurance policy naming Monica as beneficiary. Bonding with the older man over talk of the expensive car, Leo quickly appeals to his daughter, Monica, and the courtship is rapid and successful, though Monica shuns "popular clubs and bright lights." Leo soon becomes "firmly entrenched at Mon-Vere" and observes that the rear of the property is in disrepair and overlooks "a sheer drop of at least two hundred feet." Leo sets his sights on the valuable property and resolves to seduce the film director's lovely daughter. Revere was injured while playing polo and ended up in a wheelchair his wife divorced him and disappeared. Leo is 30 years old and went to see Monica's movies when he was 11 or 12. A ladies' man, he drives her home to Mon-Vere, the fading Hollywood estate built by her father, film director Gavin Revere, for his bride, Monica Parrish. In Nielsen's short story, which first appeared in the May 1963 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, auto mechanic Leo Manfred is smitten when Monica Revere brings her father's Duesenberg in for repair. Five episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents featured her work as well as a single episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "Death Scene," which aired on NBC on Monday, March 8, 1965. She also wrote teleplays and had some of her works adapted for the screen, mostly on television, from 1959 to 1982. The first of her 18 mystery novels was The Kind Man, published in 1951, and she had about 50 stories published in the digests between 19. Helen Nielsen was an American writer who lived from 1918 to 2002. I have now located that episode, and it's as good as I remembered aspects of the story remind me of the work of Robert Bloch, but "Death Scene" is actually based on a short story of the same name by a mystery writer named Helen Nielsen, and the teleplay is another fine piece of adaptation by James Bridges. The scene involved John Carradine in a wheelchair asking a young man named Dancer to dance for him.
DEATH SCENE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR SERIES
When I wrote my series on Robert Bloch's contributions to the Alfred Hitchcock TV show, I wondered why I did not see an episode with a scene that stuck in my head after I saw it in 1988 when the USA network ran the entire series.
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