Later, the show’s victims were not as likely to be given the merciful end of a quick blow to the head, and the knives (Eek! Eek! Eek!) came out more often, bringing to mind Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Frenzy (1972). The early seasons lean more on dark comedies recalling Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955) or the dry Robert Hamer movie about mass murder with Alec Guinness, Kind Hearts And Coronets (1950). When a character played by Hitchcock favorite John Williams kills his wife and buries her in the basement in “Back For Christmas,” it’s easy to figure out what’s going to happen, but it’s worth sticking around to see his face in the final shot.Īlfred Hitchcock Presents never tinkered much with its premise of “situation tragedies,” as its host put it, but it gradually evolved in a manner paralleling Hitchcock’s film career. But if the protagonist is compelling, viewers get a double dose of enjoyment: the fate of the character and the reaction. ![]() ![]() If they don’t work, there’s too much pressure on a surprise ending to save the episode. So the lead performances often determine the quality of a Hitchcock installment. In some cases, there really isn’t a twist at the end of the story, but instead an ironic line. Presumably, some of the stories work better on the page because of the author’s descriptive style or ability to have viewers see things from the point of view of the protagonist. The most problematic aspect of the series may be that where The Twilight Zone has mostly original scripts, Alfred Hitchcock Presents generally features adaptations of short stories (including several from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which is still being published). “Would you mind?” asks Hitchcock, whereupon she takes her entire head off. And some of them have a comic surreality that match the best of Ernie Kovacs, such as when Hitchcock attempts to fix viewers’ TV sets from the inside, but only succeeds in shattering the picture tube or when the silhouette of a woman with an enormous hat takes up most of the TV screen. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you what happened.”) His skits saved the screenwriters from having to pad out stories to fit the show’s running time, at least until it was extended to an hour in 1962 and renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (“You needn’t sit there staring,” he says after a Ray Bradbury-related episode. However, Hitchcock’s hosting duties have uses other than further baffling viewers. After one man seems to get away with killing his wife, Hitchcock explains that “his dog… was a detective in disguise and turned him in.” In reality, his concessions toward Standards And Practices are either perfunctory (“Of course, he got caught”) or ludicrous. ![]() Some of the episodes are pure malice (the successful framing of someone for a murder, for example), and that’s when it falls to Hitchcock the host to reassure viewers that justice has been done in the end. (After one such tale, Hitchcock reels off a bunch of possible morals and shrugs, “One of them is bound to fit.”) The first story of the series, “Revenge,” is a lesson against vigilantism-or, like most episodes, can be enjoyed as a warning that the universe will screw things up and there’s no avoiding that. Other episodes are grimmer, but can still be seen as morality tales in which some sinner gets his or her just desserts. Especially in early episodes, the violence might be off-screen and tongue-in-cheek, making Hitchcock seem no more subversive than a revival of Arsenic And Old Lace. Then there was the slippery point of view in the series.
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