Main cast: Edward Albert (Arthur Brown), Michael Madsen (John Hampton), Penelope Milford (Diane Hampton), Belinda Montgomery (Carla Magnuson), Vlasta Vrana (Mark Greenburg), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Christopher Leitch
Edward Albert looks really good here in a pair of jeans that hugs everything. Let’s just say that his character climbs the stairs quite a bit in Man at the Window, and the camera takes it all in from the rear to my great appreciation.
I also get to see Michael Madsen’s naked rear end, but that is a disappointment. It is so flat that I can balance a tray of glasses on it! Why can’t he do more squats to get ready for this scene? Method acting is a lost art, I tell you.
Mr Albert plays Arthur Brown, a sleazy screenwriter (is there any other kind?) that has this ugly device that allows him to amplify, eavesdrop on, and record conversations of people within a certain distance. Wow, this episode predicts mobile phones by at least two decades! He stalks Diane Hampton, who sports bruises around her eyes, to get a scoop on what is really happening to her behind closed doors. He realizes that Diane is also seeing a woman named Carla, although I guess same sex love scenes are still taboo for this show back in those days, because the two women never go beyond smooches on the forehead, shoulder massages, and hugs.
Arthur does all this because he uses these situations and the conversations he overhear as materials for his scripts. His latest script is predictably enough about a woman cheating on her husband with another woman. However, there is no third act to the script yet, and he needs to a conclusion in order to sell the script. What does he do? Well, he’ll just speed things up with his guinea pigs, so to speak, by letting the husband know about the wife’s extra-curricular activities, as well as engineer a rift between Diane and Carla.
There isn’t much sex in this episode (folks looking for the usual stuff in this show may be disappointed, heh), as this one is more of a third-rate suspense thing. Unfortunately, the premise itself is pretty dumb. Arthur is going through way too much effort to write a script, and I can only wonder whether it’d be cheaper to just hire a ghostwriter. Also, the whole mess at the end could have been avoided if he had been content to remain an asshole and he hadn’t been so super dumb toward the end of the episode. It’s hard to be care for an episode that comes to be only because the main character is so stupid. I can get behind evil, but dumb dumb is a no no.
It’s a shame, really, that an episode with more plot than a typical The Hitchhiker episode ends up also being on the absurd side. Thank goodness for Mr Albert’s rear end, really, or else the whole thing would have been a complete snooze.
