I found Fog Closing In a disappointing early second season entry of Hitchcock Presents. The story concerns a woman afraid of being alone, accustomed to living with her parents even years after marriage, now relocated to the west coast, she appears to be in a fearful state much of the time for the first part of the episode, as her husband is preparing for a business trip.
When she finds an intruder in the house,--an escaped mental patient--he draws out her empathy, and there appears for a few minutes some genuine hope for these two, maybe even a relationship down the road, as he responds to her with a genuine understanding her husband never showed. There's no real hint of a blossoming romance, as the home intruder, while fearful, even likable, none the less appears unstable.
In a short period of time the once anxious woman comes to achieve a measure of equipoise she had not previously displayed due to the strange man's eliciting a strong emotional response in her. After he exits the scene when there's a knock on the door the house is searched by two men from the mental hospital, who then depart, after which the viewer might expect serenity to prevail and healing to begin.
The woman is once again alone, lies down on her bed, hears the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs,--sounds she had previously related as part of a recurring nightmare, this time for real--and what she does is totally out of character: she shoots her husband, who had unexpectedly returned home. What had begun as an interesting character study, then turned into a suspense story, ended up as a psycho-drama with a sensational ending.
It's too bad the story wasn't better thought out. The actors were good, Phyllis Thaxter especially, in the leading role; and the set-up seemed promising at first. Even the intrusion of the escaped madman who turns out to be harmless was promising, if not well developed. This is the kind of story the later Alfred Hitchcock Hour handled much better. The mix of serious psychology and what ended as a tale of murder doesn't quite come off.
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