![]() His two friends arrive and make themselves at home, reading his newspaper and drinking his coffee. Rankin struggles with a heavy bag of concrete and takes it down to his cellar to begin mixing, all set to ominous music. "De Mortuis" was adapted for television by Francis Cockrell, who had also adapted "Back for Christmas" and whose wife Marion adapted "Wet Saturday." Unlike the two earlier episodes, which followed the stories closely, the televised version of "De Mortuis" takes a rather different approach to its source material. Rankin, whose eyes are dead to Irene's deception Bud and Buck, whose emotions are dead to the sensitivity of their friend Irene, whose heart is dead to the harm caused by her behavior. A more shaded explanation might suggest that each of the story's characters is already dead in some way: Dr. A simple explanation of the story's title is that Buck and Bud speak ill of Irene, whom they think is dead, and by doing so inadvertently cause her death. This time, the husband is happy because he does not know his wife's true nature when he finds out, he plans to do exactly that which was suspected of him by his overly imaginative friends. "De Mortuis" is another example of Collier's subtlety, in which he inverts the story of "Back for Christmas," where an unhappy husband murders his wife and buries her body in the basement. After they leave, the doctor sits alone in the cellar, dejected Irene comes home and he invites her downstairs to show her his work, telling her: "I'm afraid I'll have to take it all up again." Rankin that everyone will be on his side and that they will pretend that they were never there in order to bolster his alibi. Like a child," but Bud calls her "the town floozy" no one has said anything to her husband, but she has lately been seen with more men, even "truck drivers." Buck and Bud assure Dr. He angrily denies it but they admit that her behavior must have provoked him-they considered telling him the truth about her prior to their marriage five years before but chose to remain quiet. Rankin has murdered his promiscuous wife and buried her body in the basement. As the three men chat, the visitors begin to suspect that Dr. ![]() They find him in the cellar and he explains that his wife Irene is out visiting and he has repaired the cellar floor where water was coming up. He hears his friends Buck and Bud enter the house upstairs, looking for him to go fishing. Rankin has just finished cementing over a patch on his cellar floor. The title, "De Mortuis ," is taken from the Latin phrase, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum roughly translated, it means "speak no ill of the dead." Ironically, no one in the story is actually dead, at least not physically.Īs the story begins, Dr. ![]() The story upon which it was based, with the same title, had been published first in The New Yorker's issue dated July 18, 1942. Just two weeks after "Wet Saturday" came the next episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents to be adapted from a John Collier story "De Mortuis" was broadcast on October 14, 1956. ![]()
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