A while ago I ranked and reviewed the entire Alfred Hitchcock filmography, something I’d been meaning to do for many years. But recently something began to niggle me about that project, as if I’d missed something out. It occurred to me recently that alongside his vast catalogue of features, Hitchcock also directed many well regarded TV shorts. So I finally decided to watch, rank and review the TV work of the Master of Suspense. Running the gamut from bleak thrillers to light comedies, Hitchcock’s TV films are a delight and the perfect supplement for those who feel bereft on reaching the end of his theatrical filmography. The majority of these shorts are episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents but Hitchcock also directed episodes for several other anthology shows. I have noted the names of these series next to their respective episodes.
PLEASE NOTE: ALL ENTRIES CONTAIN SPOILERS.
20.Revenge
I’ve always found Revenge, the very first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to be a deeply uncomfortable experience. Obviously launching the show bearing Hitchcock’s name with an episode directed by the man himself was a shrewd move, but Revenge is so bleak and unpleasant that it starts the series on an off-putting note. Based on a short story by Samuel Blas adapted by regular Alfred Hitchcock Presents writer Francis M. Cockerell, Revenge tells the story of newlyweds Carl and Elsa, a young couple who have moved to a California trailer park after Elsa suffered a stress-induced breakdown. Happy with her new lot, Elsa waves her husband off to work and decides to make him a cake while he’s away. But when Carl arrives home, he finds the cake burning in the oven and a near catatonic Elsa, beaten and raped by an unknown attacker. His decision to take the law into his own hands has devastating consequences.
There was a requirement by the censors that any episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that ended with a crime as yet unpunished must include a summation by Hitchcock on how the perpetrator was eventually brought to justice. Although Hitchcock’s tongue-in-cheek compliances with this rule are easily disregarded as canon, it’s notable that in the case of Revenge it only applies to the murderous husband. Given that Carl kills the wrong man, the unseen rapist presumably gets off scot-free, which seems a-ok with the censors. Hitchcock’s flippancy would be used to great comic effect in many of the series’ bumpers but here it feels tasteless, with his disingenuous promise of a “sweet little story” and his final summation that “they were a pathetic couple” sitting uncomfortably with the content about sexual assault. The later season 1 episode Never Again, which tackled the subject of alcoholism, prompted a rare straight-faced conclusion from Hitchcock, which showed that there were certain issues he or his collaborators deemed inappropriate to joke about. It speaks volumes about the era’s attitudes to women that rape was not one of them.
Even if we divorce Revenge from all that surrounds it, it still doesn’t really stand up as a strong episode. It’s interesting and even more menacing that we don’t see any sign at all of Elsa’s attacker, when most series of the time would doubtless have included melodramatic shots of a faceless interloper lurking in the shadows. But Vera Miles’ performance as Elsa after the assault is so eerily distant that the final twist is blatantly obvious from the moment she identifies her supposed attacker (Miles would give a much better performance of a woman suffering a breakdown in Hitchcock’s feature The Wrong Man, a role that ought to have got her an Oscar nomination). It’s clear that Revenge is meant to be a powerful cautionary tale but it is so luridly executed that its ending plays more like a misjudged punchline, an impression exacerbated by Hitchcock’s subsequent tomfoolery.
19.The Perfect Crime
The credentials of The Perfect Crime are impeccable. By all accounts, the short story by Ben Ray Redman on which it is based is considered a classic of the genre, and it has been adapted here by In the Heat of the Night scribe Stirling Silliphant. The cast of what is essentially a two-hander is topped by James Gregory and Vincent Price, and of course Hitchcock is in the director’s chair. I’m not entirely sure how such a flaccid episode emerged from these ingredients. Presumably the short story is very well written because it’s tale, in which an egotistical detective is confronted by a lawyer who intends to prove he convicted an innocent man to death, is straightforward and unsurprising to the point of tedium. The climactic murder is inevitable and yet it hardly fits the requirements of the title as we are set up to expect. And Silliphant appends a frankly weird coda in which it is implied that the detective has turned the lawyer’s body into a vase. The performances are everything here, making the viewer wish that Gregory and Price had been given better material, especially since this was the one and only occasion that Hitchcock directed either of them.
18.Banquo’s Chair
Banquo’s Chair is another of the rare supernatural Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, although it’s actually a spoiler to say so. This is that old chestnut about a pretend ghost that turns out to be real. It is based on a play that was then adapted into a short story, both by Rupert Croft-Crooke, in which a retired detective plans an unorthodox method to catch the suspect in his one last unclosed case. He has set up a meal during which a vision of the man’s murdered aunt will appear to him, apparently unseen by everyone else. In this way he hopes to force a confession through a mixture of fear and guilt. The plan works but as the murderer is taken away the fake ghost arrives, apologising for being late and asking if she can still give her performance. Whether this twist was as well-worn back in 1959 as it is now I’m not sure. Perhaps this story was the initiator but unfortunately it’s been redone so many times since then that it has about as much impact as the “it was all a dream” ending. Hitchcock’s direction is fair here but the stage origins of the story are very apparent and the episode’s thin premise leads to it running short, necessitating an unusually lengthy and unfunny summation from Hitchcock. Banquo’s Chair is perhaps most notable for being the final bow for two regular Alfred Hitchcock Presents alumni: John Williams, who stars as the detective, and Francis M. Cockrell, who contributed several better teleplays including many of those directed by Hitchcock.
17.Mr. Blanchard’s Secret
Based on a short story by Emily Neff and adapted by Sarett Tobias, Mr. Blanchard’s Secret is one of the weaker Hitchcock directed entries in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series. Often compared with Hitchcock classic Rear Window, it follows the story of Babs Fenton, a crime fiction writer whose imagination gets the better of her when she begins spying on her neighbour, Mr. Blanchard. Convinced he has done away with his wife, Babs pursues the “case” much to the chagrin of her mild-mannered husband who just wants a quiet life. Also scuppering Babs’ investigation is Mrs. Blanchard herself, who has a nasty habit of repeatedly turning up alive. A mild, not particularly amusing comedic mystery, Mr. Blanchard’s Secret features a likeable turn by the elfin Mary Scott, whose wide-eyed affability makes her potentially annoying character more palatable. Tobias’s screenplay relies on a lot of expositional internal dialogue and Babs talking aloud to herself, which feels both lazy and nonsensical (why, for instance, does Babs feel the need to recite her husband’s name and job in an internal monologue?!). When the episode was remade in 1989 for the updated Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Tobias, who wrote the screenplay again under the new title Murder in Mind, went the whole hog and just had the lead character break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience.
Apparently there were numerous endings considered for Mr. Blanchard’s Secret. In Neff’s short story, the revelation that Mrs. Blanchard is a kleptomaniac was the end point. The original teleplay appended the reports of a body being discovered that seemed to confirm that Mr. Blanchard was indeed a murderer. By the time it reached the screen however, the final twist was added in which the body is not Mrs. Blanchard’s and she arrives to return the lighter she apparently stole from Babs, nixing both previous twists and replacing them with the revelation that… Mr. Blanchard is good at fixing things but doesn’t like to admit it. It’s a flat conclusion to a merely tolerable episode but at least they stopped there. Any of these conclusions are preferable to the one Tobias appended to the 80s version, in which the husband who has spent most of the narrative trying to sleep suddenly reveals himself to be a murderer, knifing his wife to death presumably based on nothing more than her constant talking. It’s another example of the 80s version of the series overreaching for the sake of shock value.
16.Startime – Incident at a Corner
Startime was an anthology series that ran for one season of 33 episodes in 1959-1960. Unusual in that it combined dramas, comedies and variety shows, it was also one of the first American TV shows broadcast in colour. Startime was packaged by the Music Corporation of America, run by Lew Wasserman, who also happened to be the agent of one Alfred Hitchcock. And so, the Startime episode Incident at a Corner became the only colour TV episode of Hitchcock’s career. He was fresh off Psycho which had wrapped a month before and many of the same crew members were used for Incident at a Corner, including star Vera Miles.
Adapted by Charlotte Armstrong from her own novel, Incident at a Corner is the tale of a school crossing guard who, after reprimanding an important public figure for careless driving, finds himself anonymously accused of paedophilia, for which he is laid off from his job. His granddaughter and her boyfriend begin investigating the origin of the accusatory note but their assumptions may prove to be as misguided and potentially damaging as the ire of the townsfolk.
Incident at a Corner is just about involving enough to support its 45 minute runtime but its confrontations in various drawing rooms and offices rarely amount to much more than an adequately produced play. Hitchcock mines a few moments of typically playful humour from the material. The opening shows the same inciting incident from three different angles, complete with drolly matter-of-fact captions. Later, immediately after he is informed of the accusations against him, the devastated crossing guard re-enters his house to an ill-timed chorus of Happy Birthday from his assembled family, which proceeds to deflate like a whoopee cushion as they witness his demeanour. These moments aside, however, Incident at a Corner is a trifle stiff, with a young George Peppard giving a flat performance as the determined but bullish boyfriend who never quite seems to acknowledge his own part in exacerbating the damaging accusations. He’s far too handsome for that, after all. With a TV budget and reduced runtime, Hitchcock just can’t find that vein of small town rot that the story needs to play effectively. Instead it ends on a frivolously happy note that seems to shrug off the darker implications. Incident at a Corner aired almost exactly one month after the classic Twilight Zone episode The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, which examines similar themes of neighbour turning on neighbour to much greater effect and in half the time.
15.Poison
In considering Poison, Hitchcock’s third Roald Dahl adaptation, we must first take it for what it is, in this case a tense, suspenseful story of a man pinned down in his bed by a deadly snake. Adapted by Casey Robinson, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Captain Blood, Poison places the spotlight on the tensions between two men in Malaya as they try to figure out the best way to free one of them from a snake he believes has fallen asleep on his chest as he lies in bed. With the help of Dr. Ganderbai, an Indian medic who is called in to assist, the snake is discovered to have disappeared and the victim’s sanity is called into question. But when the snake reappears and bites the other man, his “friend” is not so eager to help. Directed with a powerful level of tension by Hitchcock, Poison is a nicely entertaining opener to season 4 of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It is only when you go back to the source text that your realise how much is lacking here.
Dahl was famously resistant to changes being made to his stories so it’s surprising that across the numerous versions of Poison, it took until 2023 for a really faithful adaptation to be made, in the shape of Wes Anderson’s excellent short. The original story is set in Bengal rather than Malaya, an important detail given that Dahl was commenting on the deadly influence of the British Empire in India. While the doctor remains Indian in Hitchcock’s version, the change of setting to Southeast Asia erases the more pointed political subtext. What’s more, the key climactic detail of Dahl’s story is a racist outburst by Harry, the snake’s supposed target, after he is revealed to be in the clear. The snake never appears in the story, making the title’s metaphorical nature more obvious. Dahl’s well documented racism in later life, including self-professed anti-semitism, has somewhat altered how this revelation hits, but the intention was clearly to identify racism itself as the titular poison. While the Hitchcock version erases the racism altogether, a couple of other adaptations played it up too much. A 1950 radio version made Harry’s racism clear from the start, with his racist epithets throughout undermining the power of the isolated final outburst in Dahl’s story. The 1980 TV version for Dahl’s show Tales of the Unexpected included that climactic revelation but took it too far, having Harry attempt to choke the doctor. Then, showing the characteristic restraint of the 80s, it also had the snake reappear and bite Harry, muddying the metaphorical waters once again.
While Anderson’s adaptation may be the best version of Poison, Hitchcock’s version succeeds perfectly well on its own terms and for those who do not know anything about the source text it probably plays better. But without the political subtext and metaphorical implications, Poison is reduced to a basic suspense tale that seems to be crying out for a better conclusion.
14.Dip in the Pool
Hitchcock’s second Roald Dahl adaptation, though not as strong as Lamb to the Slaughter, was continued evidence of what a good match Dahl’s blackly comic ideas were for Hitchcock’s playful cruelty. Adapted by prolific TV writer Robert C. Dennis, whose work included thirty episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dip in the Pool features one of Dahl’s most wicked punchlines which Hitchcock is able to deliver beautifully. The problem with the rest of the episode is that the set-up involves a fairly complex betting pool about how many miles a cruise ship will travel, which takes quite a bit of explaining, a task that is much easier to achieve on paper than on screen. Still, there are ample compensations in the amusing central performances by Keenan Wynne and Louise Platt as an obnoxious but not wholly unlikeable couple, a fact which gives the sting in the tail an even greater impact. Look out too for Fay Wray in a small part as a passenger on the same cruise ship.
13.Hitchcock Hour – I Saw the Whole Thing
When the half-hour format of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was extended into the newly retitled The Hitchcock Hour, opinion was divided as to whether the longer runtimes improved the depth of storytelling or increased the level of padding. While The Twilight Zone’s fourth season switch to the hour long format only lasted for that one season, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour continued with longer episodes for three seasons. Of the series’ 93 episodes, Hitchcock himself only directed one, episode 4 of Season 1, I Saw the Whole Thing. A light but high stakes courtroom drama, its reasonably static style affords Hitchcock little opportunity for visual innovation but the interesting notion of a hit-and-run driver trying to discredit the apparently untrue accounts of five eyewitnesses does allow for some nice character sketches and a neatly plotted series of scenes. Perhaps what attracted Hitchcock to this particular episode was that it was based on a novel by Henry Cecil, one of Hitch’s favourite authors and provider of the source material for the excellent Boulting Brothers comedy Brothers in Law from several years earlier. In any event, I Saw the Whole Thing emerges as a pleasing, involving story with a neat resolution, providing a convincing case for the hour-long format.
12.The Case of Mr. Pelham
A Francis M. Cockerell script based on a famous short story by Anthony Armstrong, who had previously worked with Hitchcock on the Young and Innocent screenplay, The Case of Mr. Pelham is a rare supernatural episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that could have made a convincing Twilight Zone episode. While some have expressed frustration at how the intriguing plot is never quite explained, this is indicative of a type of viewer who comes to anthology shows looking only for plot twists and thus misses out on the satisfaction of the other facets of good storytelling. The Case of Mr. Pelham is an exercise in unease, asking the viewer to consider how they would respond to being gradually usurped by an unseen double. Tom Ewell gives a fine, paranoid performance as Pelham, who begins hearing reports of how he has been seen in places he never went and doing things he doesn’t remember doing. At first he suspects some kind of prank but as it becomes apparent that this doppelgänger has access to his home, his workplace and information that only he could possibly know about himself, he fears for both his sanity and his safety. While a neat conclusion to this story might have proved satisfying for some, the ambiguous ending makes it all the more chilling and open to various interpretations. Hitchcock’s appropriately restrained direction emphasises the dread and humour of the situation, and earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Director.
11.Wet Saturday
Wet Saturday opened the second season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a cursory glance at online reviews suggests it is not one of the more popular episodes. This may be due to the fact that it is not so much a tale of suspense as a comedic take on a family’s attempts to clean up after a murder. The scenario plays out exactly as you might expect but the entertainment value comes from the stuffy, matter-of-fact way in which the family patriarch instructs his offspring and wife to carry out various moral atrocities. Adapted by Marian B. Cockrell from a story by British writer John Collier, much of the humour is rooted in the British class system and the high premium placed on family reputation above all else, which may also explain why it doesn’t play as well with American audiences. For my part, I thought Wet Saturday was rather delicious. Cedric Hardwicke is perfect as the blandly psychotic father and John Williams is credibly bewildered as the family friend on which he intends to pin his daughter’s crime. The children, played by Tita Purdom and Jered Barclay, are broadly painted grotesques, he a snickering dunderhead and she a hysterical nitwit, both exuding the entitlement of inherited privilege. Kathryn Givney’s matriarch, meanwhile, does little but serve tea and wonder why such a terrible thing as a man having his head beaten in with a croquet mallet could possibly happen to her. Wet Saturday is funny in the driest way imaginable and its quintessential Britishness is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s great pre-Hollywood period. The effectiveness of the narrative, of course, depends on justice being evaded, so Hitchcock’s lengthy concession to the censors in his closing monologue can safely be ignored.
10.One More Mile to Go
Adapted by James P. Cavanagh from a story by F. J. Smith, One More Mile to Go is one of the best directed Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. Its tale of a man trying to get rid of the body of his wife following a crime of passion takes place in long stretches without dialogue. Even the crime itself is witnessed from the other side of a window so we see the tempers flaring but are not privy to the subject matter. Loading the body into the trunk of his car, the husband sets out on a journey to dispose of it. Cavanagh and Hitchcock wisely refrain from taking the easy route of voiceover narration to let the audience in on the protagonist’s thoughts. Part of what makes the episode so effective is the urgency of the matter and the man’s focused desperation. What begins as a thriller gradually becomes slightly comic as the triviality of a broken taillight leaves the murderer unable to shake off a dogged, presumably bored cop who keeps turning up again and again. Hitchcock is able to squeeze every drop of tension out of the audiences awareness of the body in the trunk in much the same way he did with the body in the chest in Rope. We can’t see it once it is locked inside but we’re terribly aware of its presence throughout. There’s no big twist in this story, just the inevitability of justice creeping ever closer and the viewer’s complicity in wanting the criminal to escape.
9.Arthur
The first episode of season five of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was this oddity based on a story by Arthur Williams and adapted by series stalwart James P. Cavanagh. Arthur is a chicken farmer whose fiancée abruptly leaves him for another man. Finding he prefers the bachelor lifestyle, he is mortified when she returns and his rigid moral code will not allow him to turn her out. That moral code doesn’t extend to forbidding more drastic actions though. While there is a twist of sorts involving the disappearance of the girlfriend’s body, it’s not hard to guess the significance of the industrial chicken feed grinder that is casually introduced half way through the story. But Arthur isn’t about the twist so much as the performances and Cavanagh’s droll writing.
Hazel Court is wonderfully cold and manipulative as Arthur’s on-and-off fiancée, but this episode undoubtedly belongs to Laurence Harvey, then receiving much acclaim for his Oscar-nominated performance in Room at the Top. Arthur gives him a very different acting challenge from that film’s social realism, instead allowing him to get his teeth into a luridly comic psychopath. Arthur breaks the fourth wall, drawing the audience into his grimly fastidious world with a monologue about his successful crime. Anyone expecting this smug but captivating address to be undercut by a comeuppance will be very much wrong-footed. Part of the appeal of Arthur is in the fact that it shows a remorseless man getting away with a crime, the magnitude of which he equates with breaking the neck of one of his chickens. Hitchcock’s understanding of this is further underlined by his concessionary epilogue, which rambles vaguely about implausible killer mega-chickens.
8.Bang! You’re Dead
The final Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode directed by Hitchcock himself, Bang! You’re Dead is an incredibly tense story that still resonates today. Written by Harold Swanton and based on a story by Margery Vosper, it tells the story of 5 year old Jackie, who loves nothing more than his toy gun and resents being left out of the war games played by the older neighbourhood kids. When Jackie’s Uncle Rick, recently returned from Africa, comes to visit, Jackie discovers a real firearm in his suitcase and, switching it for his toy gun, heads out into town with his cowboy hat and a box of shells. When they realise what has happened, Jackie’s family is in hot pursuit, but where can they find their boy who has no idea of the danger he holds in his hands?
While primarily remembered as an exercise in mounting tension (something it achieves extremely well), Bang! You’re Dead is also loaded with themes of race, colonialism and the impact of gun culture on children. While I’ve predictably encountered amateur critics with NRA memberships dismissing it as a glorified anti-gun PSA, Bang! You’re Dead is far more than that. While it is a plea for adults to exercise due care when it comes to firearms and children, it also suggests that the issue runs deeper as regards societal influences, something a contemporary audience in an era when westerns were the dominant TV genre would surely have understood. Uncle Rick’s trip to Africa, the tribal mask he brings back, and the fact that Jackie’s final target in the story is the family’s black maid are also oft-ignored details which would also have stood out to a 1961 audience in the context of the Civil Rights movement’s growing prominence. Bang! You’re Dead was remade in the 80s for the new Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, with all the racial subtext removed but the gun safety message playing as powerfully as ever. The seriousness of this message is recognised in the original, with Hitchcock eschewing his usual flippancy in order to highlight the moral.
7.The Horseplayer
While the most popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes tend to be the memorably horrific ones, sometimes the sweet-natured, murder-free stories are just as effective. So it is with The Horseplayer, a smart, funny and warm tale which benefits from Hitchcock leaning into his oft-overlooked sentimental side. Written by Henry Slesar, who contributed over thirty stories and teleplays to the series, The Horseplayer supplements its delightfully funny script with a tremendous cast, including Claude Rains as the priest Father Amion who desperately needs money to fix his church roof and Ed Gardner as Sheridan, the man who begins donating suspiciously large amounts of money in the collection plate. When it turns out that Sheridan has misconstrued Amion’s sermons on the power of prayer and attributed a winning streak at the races to the same, Amion first tries to correct the problem and then gets drawn into the opportunity to win the money he needs for the church. When he panics after having handed over his life savings to place on a horse, he is instructed that he must pray for the horse not to win, pitting his financial needs against his spiritual needs. But God works in mysterious ways. The twist is clever and satisfying and The Horseplayer is a splendidly lighthearted, beautifully performed anecdote that makes for a welcome break from murder and mayhem.
6.Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat
The last of Hitchcock’s Roald Dahl adaptations, written for the screen by Halsted Welles, who wrote the classic Western 3:10 to Yuma, Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat is one of Dahl’s most cleverly structured stories. Telling the tale of a woman who is cheating on her dentist husband with a wealthy colonel, the charming mechanics of the plot are offset by the brutally remorseless adultery and the eventual revelation that pretty much everyone in the story is as bad as each other. The plot involves an expensive fur coat that is gifted to Mrs. Bixby by her lover, which she then must find a way of keeping without raising suspicions about her adultery. She resolves to pawn the coat and then pretend she found the corresponding ticket by chance. When her husband volunteers to pick up the mystery item, Mrs. Bixby doesn’t get quite what she expected. Watching this adaptation for the first time, I already knew the story quite well having read it and seen it adapted for an episode of Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected series. But even knowing the secret, Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat is such a charmingly clever little tale that it’s impossible not to enjoy it. Hitchcock has done a good job in establishing the tone of a sitcom gone rancid and Audrey Meadows, renowned as The Honeymooners’ Alice Kramden, is absolutely wonderful as the calculating wife who finagles herself into a humiliating stalemate.
5.Lamb to the Slaughter
Roald Dahl contributed six stories to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and wrote the teleplay for the first and possibly the most famous, Lamb to the Slaughter (its competition in that respect would be Man from the South, one of the few Dahl episodes not directed by Hitchcock). A fiendishly clever premise in its comparative simplicity, Lamb to the Slaughter tells the story of Mary Maloney, a sweet and adoring housewife who is heavily pregnant with her first child. When her police officer husband returns one evening and coldly announces that he is leaving her for another woman, she takes a frozen leg of lamb from the freezer and, in a moment of rage, whacks him over the head with it. Realising she has killed him, she sets up the house to appear ransacked and calls the police. While the police ponder over what exactly happened, Mary calmly proceeds to feed them the murder weapon.
Since the beauty of Lamb to the Slaughter is in its simplicity, the main issue presented to potential adapters is that of retaining that trait. The original short story is only a few pages long so stretching it even to a half hour runtime poses a problem. Having Dahl himself write the teleplay was a smart move, as he protects the story’s straightforward narrative and resists adding any further wrinkles. The final image of Mary sitting alone against a blank wall and breaking into a giggle is the perfect ending. It is the decisive full stop that comes several paragraphs after the twist has been announced. We know what she plans to do but our satisfying conclusion is in that moment when she realises she has gotten away with it. Hitchcock’s censor-mandated conclusion also protects this moment by being so flippantly ridiculous that there’s no danger of ever assuming that Mary didn’t get away clean. Decades later, when the story was again adapted for Dahl’s own anthology series Tales of the Unexpected, there was an added comedic moment in which the police officer has a sudden moment of epiphany as he is leaving, turns around, picks up the large lamb bone left on the plate and then politely throws it in the rubbish. It’s an amusing topper but it takes away from the impact of the conclusion which, by rights, should end with the mirth of the murderer.
The impact of Lamb to the Slaughter may depend on the viewer’s familiarity with the story. Having already read Dahl’s short story and seen the Tales of the Unexpected version, I knew it well enough that the Hitchcock version didn’t have the element of surprise that is likely a strong factor in seeing it ranked among so many people’s best Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. Still, there is another masterstroke that helps in that respect, the casting of Barbara Bel Geddes as Mary. So wonderful in the supporting role of Midge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo that same year, Bel Geddes imbues Mary with the exact amount of instant lovability for the audience to root for her following her crime of passion. Her decisive actions hint at a more complex hidden side beneath the sweet facade she has presented to the world, perhaps a factor that made Lamb to the Slaughter resonate with many 50s American housewives.
4.Suspicion – Four O’Clock
Suspicion, aside from being the title of one of Hitchcock’s early Hollywood films, was also the title of a one season anthology series that aired from 1957-1958, on which Hitchcock worked as an executive producer. He also lent his directorial skills to the very first episode of the series, Four O’Clock, and what a debut it was! Starring E.G. Marshall, best known as the analytical Juror number 4 in Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, Four O’Clock features a twenty-five minute set-up that could serve as its own stand-alone episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A watch repairman who suspects his wife is cheating on him uses his technical expertise to rig up a bomb in his basement that will go off at exactly the time he expects her lover to be in the house. But after setting up the explosive device, he encounters a couple of burglars as he leaves the basement. The burglars knock him out cold, gag and bind him in the basement and leave, unaware of the worse fate to which they are exposing him.
You could leave the story right there and Four O’Clock would work very nicely but instead the story goes to deeper psychological depths as the protagonist is forced to endure a series of dashed hopes and the unbearable mental pressure of witnessing the countdown to his own death. Based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote the short story on which Hitchcock classic Rear Window is based, and adapted by regular Alfred Hitchcock Presents writer Francis M. Cockrell, Four O’Clock is a showcase for Hitchcock’s well-documented knack for suspense. It makes the most of its 50 minute runtime by allowing the early scenes of the bomb being created to play out as slow, dialogue-free sequences, emphasising the audience’s awareness of the passing of time that will become such a crucial factor in the story. Aside from a few scenes with Nancy Kelly as his wife, Marshall’s performance is largely physical, his thoughts delivered in voiceover. Crucially, he doesn’t overplay, allowing his mounting panic to be portrayed in a hauntingly real manner evoked as much through stillness as anything else. Hitchcock balances this realism with a dose of his distinctive black comedy in a scene involving a small boy watching a beetle through the basement window, but even then the tension continues to mount, alongside the ever-present sound of the ticking clock.
Hitchcock aficionados will likely link Four O’Clock’s countdown to a big bang to his earlier film Sabotage, in which a boy unknowingly carried an bomb with him through the streets, and those who are aware of the regrets Hitchcock felt about that sequence’s explosive climax will no doubt be ahead of the fact that Four O’Clock takes a different route. The ending here, however, is more satisfying and in some ways darker than if the bomb had actually gone off. It asks the question, How well could anyone’s psyche hold up against the process of witnessing their own prolonged demise.
3.The Crystal Trench
Some of the best Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes manage to pack the experience of a full movie into a half-hour runtime. The Crystal Trench is just such a mini-epic. Based on a story by A.E.W. Mason, the author of one of the great adventure yarns The Four Feathers, and adapted by future Oscar-winner Stirling Silliphant, The Crystal Trench is a period drama filled with romance, adventure and tragic irony. It involves the death from exposure of a young newlywed while holidaying in the Austrian Alps. While a team of climbers attempt to recover his body, it slips out of their grasp and into the icy crevasse of the glacier. Mark Cavendish, a fellow British holidaymaker, is left with the terribly duty of breaking the news to Stella, the dead man’s wife. While a close friendship forms between Cavendish and Stella, he finds his growing love rebuffed due to Stella’s dedication to her frozen husband. With the help of an expert, she discovers that it will take approximately 40 years for the body to be found and determines to remain faithful to her husband’s memory as she awaits that day.
The unusual plot of The Crystal Trench is offset by its classic storytelling. Hitchcock delivers a tragic romance in time honoured style, emphasising the themes of ageing, time and the preciousness of life. The twist is devastating but could scarcely be more effective in highlighting the cautionary attitudes towards living in the past and dedicating your life to something that may not be quite as sacred as you built it up to be. A lovely, heartbreaking, resonant piece of work.
2.Breakdown
Justifiably one of the most famous episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Breakdown is a masterclass in mining genuine horror from the most minimal action. Written by Francis M. Cockrell and Louis Pollock, adapted from Pollock’s story, Breakdown tells the tale of ruthless businessman William Callew who abruptly fires a long-time employee. Callew is subsequently involved in a car crash which leaves him completely paralysed, unable to move, speak or even blink. Trapped alone in the wreckage of his car, he awaits assistance but everyone who comes by assumes he is dead, a fact that becomes especially problematic when he is taken to the morgue to be readied for burial.
The threat of live burial has long been a staple of horror and suspense anthologies but Breakdown draws it out in an almost unbearably slow manner. The role of William Callew provides an interesting challenge for Joseph Cotten, who is tasked with lying still for the majority of his performance. His thoughts are heard in voiceover, making for a similar experience to Hitchcock’s Startime episode Four O’Clock, but in that story the protagonist was merely gagged and bound. When Callew is finally able to communicate his consciousness in Breakdown, the question of whether he will ever regain any mobility is left wide open. Could it be that he will be locked in his body for the rest of his life, a sort of living burial within his own skin? There’s also an interesting layer to Breakdown regarding masculinity and restraint. Callew finds the tears shed by his fired employee pathetic and when Callew finds himself in a terrible predicament he makes a concerted effort not to let emotion get the better of him. Eventually though, it is a single tear that he sheds, indicating that he is still alive, that saves him. In this respect, Breakdown becomes a plea for emotional honesty and against keeping emotions all locked inside, as it were.
I actually first encountered Breakdown as a remake, an episode of the 1985 Alfred Hitchcock Presents series for which many original episodes were reimagined. In the case of Breakdown, the remake overreached in an effort to create a more shocking ending. The protagonist, played by John Heard, was a drug-dealing scumbag who set up his drug trafficking business partner to take the fall for his illegal activities, only to encounter him again while laying on the autopsy table. While it provided quite a jolt, this grisly ending is not nearly as effective as the original’s sympathetic approach. Its harsh lesson in humanity resonates more strongly than the momentary terror of bloody revenge.
1.Back for Christmas
While it is often the more horrific tales that get all the attention in anthology series, Back for Christmas is one of the most naturally suited stories for the half hour suspense format that I’ve ever seen. Adapted by Francis M. Cockerell from a short story by John Collier, who contributed several stories to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Back for Christmas is perfect material for Hitchcock in that it blends the macabre with the humorous and tops it all off with a fantastic twist. For those with a nose for these things, it’s quite possible to get ahead of the ending here but that’s because the clues are so neatly laid out through the brilliant establishment of character. John Williams and Isobel Elsom are superb as an old married British couple about to embark on a trip to America. While he tells friends that they may well stay permanently, she insists that they will be back from Christmas at the latest. What she doesn’t know is that her husband doesn’t intend on taking her and that hole he’s digging in the basement is not really for a wine cellar at all.
Back for Christmas does a great job of establishing the character dynamic between the two leads. She is a domineering fusspot who doesn’t trust anyone to do anything right, while he is a naturally slovenly man forced into rigid compliance by his own weak-willed inability to stand up for himself. Of course murder seems like the easier option for him. Williams’ mumbling cowardice is frequently hilarious, while Elsom carefully portrays the wife as irritating rather than monstrous, so as not to direct us towards sympathising with her husband. The evocation of British domesticity is delightfully claustrophobic so as to contrast sharply with the escape into the American dream that Williams’ character comes so close to perpetrating successfully. But then the twist arrives and the significance of that opening shot of Williams digging a trench becomes apparent. This is the only piece of work around the house that his wife has allowed him to carry out unharrassed. Why? Because she plans to take over it herself, of course. It’s rare to find a mystery story so neatly and perfectly plotted around character beats as this one and Hitchcock directs with enormous relish.