For this 1955 episode of TV's "Climax!', writer James Cavanagh opts for cliches of a B-movie melodrama, rather than addressing some important real-life issues inherent in the story. Result is fine acting in support of a tired case of audience manipulation.
Casting Vincent Price as an utterly convincing, pure villain sets the show on an unsubtle path -actions and motivations are the most basic here. He's always playing with his rifles and is intent on abusing both wife (Nina Foch) and cute 10-year-old son. Price was mistreated by his dad, and he's determined that his son has to be as heartless, cold and violent as he is. Script is deterministic -characters make decisions but every element here is a result of fate, out of one's control.
The undeniable enjoyment of watching Vincent act up a storm as such a heartless character abruptly ends 1/2 way through the show when Foch murders him with a rifle, the only way to protect her son. By this point it is crystal clear that the society's treatment of women, subjugated to the will of their husbands, gave her character no other way out, as his insistence that she leave but not take her boy or ever see him again (a threat backed up by the law and his powerful status in society) left her no choice. That fact, different but not fully changed today especially with right-wing attitudes opposing women's rights gaining headway, starting with the Supreme Court, should be a central issue in the script but instead is relied upon as a given.
Plot twists in the second half are all contrived and based upon hopelessness -the inability to effect change. "Climax!" is designed here to divert our attention from real problems and instead escape into melodramatic stories right out of previous centuries.
Harry Bellaver, famous from his continuing role on "Naked City", is fine as Price & Foch's gardener, whose subsidiary story takes over for the second half of the show, a story that is not believable at all, just there to keep the tired plot's pot boiling.