Why, yes, this IS a Hitchcock homage. Why do you ask?

One of our finest all-time posts here at the Basket was Miss Darkly’s meditation on the Hitchcock blondes of Mad Men. But no episode has been more rich in Hitchcockian metaphor (yes, Hitchcockian is a word now, deal with it) than The Inheritance.

What floored me was William’s entry into the Hofstadt home through the window. Rebecca, anyone? The scene was visually a near replica of the sinister George Sanders’s first meeting with Joan Fontaine, Hitchcock’s most vulnerable blonde.

Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

In Rebecca, Sanders is an intruder, a former friend of the family who now resorts to uninvited entry. In The Inheritance, Betty feels like an intruder in her own family home. In Rebecca, Fontaine is captivated by a family portrait; a portrait, she later learns, that triggers a profound memory of the dead Rebecca. The entirety of Manderly is filled with these triggers; Rebecca’s belongings, Rebecca’s monograms, and Rebecca’s deranged maid. In The Inheritance, Betty stands before a famiy portrait, the last in the home of her late mother Ruth. The house is being emptied of memories of Ruth, a “birds” ottoman (another Hitchcock reference), and a (really ugly) jardinare.

Fontaine and portrait

As in Rebecca, the tension in the Hofstadt family is in part triggered by a second wife, so that the notion of intrusion and replacement is prominent. Both Hitchcock blondes (Fontaine and Betty) learn that it is ugly to be made over in a dead wife’s image; Fontaine at the tragic costume party, and Betty when groped by her father.

Meanwhile, Bud and Pete are explicit about Rope. They find it funny. I think they’ve found it funny for years; the movie came out when Pete was 14 or so. I think the Campbell boys spent childhood hours fantasizing that they could do better than John Dall and Farley Granger. That they could hide their mother’s body, or that of some annoying classmate, in plain sight, and no Jimmy Stewart would come along and catch them.

(And tell me that Vincent Kartheiser couldn’t play John Dall!)

Granger (left) and Dall in Rope

The final Hitchcock tie-in is the two sisters-in-law named Judy (Bud’s and William’s wives). Judy is the name of Kim Novak’s real character; the brunette hiding behind the blonde Madeline in Vertigo. All of that “Judy” is like a hint that there’s a truth hiding under all the lies. The truth Viola has; that Gene is “very, very sick.”

The Inheritance is our guided tour of the upper classes, with the formerly very rich Campbells, and the not so rich but nearly as snooty Hofstadts. And by strongly suggesting Hitchcock, Weiner is telling us that murderous thoughts lurk under the surface of ice blond(e) repression. There are two things we can know about these people: They do not tell the truth, and they long to harm one another.