Spinsterhood is a gold mine for the horror genre, and the anthology series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" employed a reliable stable of actors who appeared again and again on the show. When the script called for a scheming, calculating old maid who cared for nothing but money and was willing to kill to secure it, Carmen Mathews was the choice. When the storyline told of a faded beauty who had somehow missed out on the love she continued to crave, Jessica Tandy was the one. Thirty years before she won an Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy," she appears in these old black-and-whites as a fragile, delicate thing whose unfulfilled desires have her teetering on the edge of madness. To my mind, the "Toby" episode does only a so-so job of conveying this; "The Glass Eye" does it so well that it functions as a cautionary tale against aloneness and isolation. Tandy's character makes a sad last bid for love, and I disagree that a plain woman would have been more realistic in the role. In her character's time (the 1890s), a woman who had "missed her market" (hadn't married by her mid-twenties or so) could expect to finish her life as a spinster, no matter how pretty she was, and Tandy's luminous prettiness (she was in her late forties, playing a woman "still in her thirties") just makes her character's predicament all the more poignant. She falls in love as only a woman with naught but a fantasy life would: from the audience, with a man whom she has never met, a handsome ventriloquist named Max Collodi. There are holes in the plot. Spoiler alert: I can't buy that a figure made of wood and plaster would have looked so lifelike, even from the stage, let alone from the other side of even a darkened room, that it would have appeared he was a living, strikingly handsome man. Of course, a man of flesh and blood, Tom Conway, plays the role until the crucial moment; the show was cheating there. No matter. When Tandy's character, granted a meeting with Max after a year's pursuit, impulsively grabs Max's hand and he clatters to the floor, she cradles him, so shocked that for the moment she doesn't realize that what she's holding is no man at all. Then the ventriloquist's dummy rises from his chair. He calls to her, "Madame!," and she looks up to see the "dummy" slowly stand upon the table. The dwarf's face is covered by his grotesque mask, so we cannot read his thoughts. What is he appealing for, then? Is he silently imploring, "I overlooked your small deception, about your age; can you not overlook my large deception, and the two of us undertake to find what happiness we can together?" But then "Max's" head slips off its spike and falls to the floor, Tandy's character comprehends what she sees, and all her loathing is contained in her cry to the dwarf, "YOU are Max Collodi!" The dwarf orders her from the room, his feet rattling horridly on the table top as he stamps them in rage, and Tandy's character flees. Alone, the dwarf pulls off his mask and swings down to the floor beside his fallen dummy. It is then that he sees that one of the head's bright glass eyes is missing...It's a great scene, and the reason I still appreciate this episode twenty years after I first saw it.
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