User Reviews

A woman in early 1800s England is about to marry a man who begins to reveal a side to himself that disturbs her. For one thing, he reveals just days before their weeding that he was married once before, to a woman who died young and was unfaithful. Also, in his study, the bride to be finds a petticoat that clearly belonged to the first missus, and he lies about it. She also discovers he has a thing for pain and suffering, and in fact had his first wife's lover hanged. Then she makes the worst discovery of all. Michael Rennie is the evil groom. For the early 1960s, the period feel is pretty good. The ending is a real shocker.

These Hitchcock stories almost always came up with a novel twist at the end to shock and surprise the viewer, but this one asks you to accept the idea that the austere Sir Humphrey Orford (Michael Rennie) kept his first wife locked up for twenty years after cutting her tongue out so as not to give her presence away. It does come as a lightning bolt to poor Elisa Minden (Antoinette Bower), right after she married the much older man. For me, the set up to the story was somewhat better than the payoff, as Sir Humphrey's character was revealed to be mysterious and sinister, delighting in the idea that instruments of torture could be utilized for pleasure and purification. He had his first wife's lover hanged shortly after their marriage when she proved unfaithful, and proudly displayed a gruesome painting of it in his study. Elisa's instincts about Humphrey were good ones, and why she followed through with the marriage was more a courtesy to her father (Jack Livesey), who was in debt to the man. Taken at face value, the shock ending is a good one, but seems to fall apart when one takes a moment to think about it. Twenty years a recluse with a hidden wife is plenty creepy, and would have been pretty hard to pull off no matter how secretive Humphrey tried to be.

This Hitchcock story, The Silk Petticoat, offers the viewer an intelligent set-up for a mystery that it takes the entire length of the episode to resolve; and the payoff, such as it can be called, is one of the most unexpected and shocking of the entire series even as,--and I suppose this is a spoiler of sorts--there is no actual gore.

On the surface the story is a kind of awkward romance set in pre-Victorian early 19th century England. with handsome, middle aged Michael Rennie seeking the lovely and much younger Antionette Bower's hand in marriage. One can sense a dark side to Rennie's character quite early on; and yet there's no reason for the viewer to see him as any more than a somewhat more formal, lighter seeming hero of the sort familiar to readers of Gothic romance novels.

Yet as the plot thickens, and we learn of the tragic loss of his first wife, many years earlier, and of the odd secrets Rennie seems intent on keeping to himself. He reveals aspects of himself that are morbid and unpleasant even as his actual behavior remains that of (literally) a gentleman and a scholar.

These contrasts in Rennie's character. between the perfect gentleman and the man with many secrets, suggest that he is not only not the sort of man he appears to be but that he holds the dark undercurrents in his soul in check, and that in the long run he shall be consumed by them. There's some strong stuff in this episode. It is not for the faint of heart.