Alfred Hitchcock Presents (and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) - NO SPOILERS, please!*

and I just remembered an episode from the Twilight Zone from 1962 called The Dummy starring Cliff Robertson that also fits into this genre....

 

Really? I thought she was good in that episode. Used to watch Dragnet once in a while too. I wonder how many different version of that show that there were. And wasn't the creator/star also married to some famous actress....? I can't remember....

 

image from 1978 movie....

 

'Breakdown' remains my favourite, about a man who is in a car accident and completely paralyzed and presumed dead, taken to the morgue, etc.

 

jack webb. i know he was married to julie london for a time. as far as i know there was a radio version, a 50s tv version and then the 60s version in color. not to go off topic or anything.

 

Yes, KevinP, that's an excellent one. Stars Joseph Cotten, who was in the Hitchcock films Shadow of a Doubt and Under Capricorn. It was one of the rare episodes directed by Hitch himself. I think it was maybe even the very first episode of the show that was filmed, but ended up being the seventh one to be broadcast:

13-Nov-55 1x07 Breakdown

A cruel businessman is left for dead after a car accident renders him completely paralyzed.
Joseph Cotten
Raymond Bailey
Murray Alper
Aaron Spelling Francis Cockrell (Teleplay)
Louis Pollock (Teleplay & Story)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Here's a pic...

 

Thanks il pleut. Julie London. That's it. Who was later on Emergency! What a strange pairing...

 

Thanks for the link to this site. I'm going to watch this later, but "The Jar" really got to me as a kid. I'm interested to see if it has the same effect on me now:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/13941/alfred-hitchcock-hour-the-jar#x-0,vepisode,1

dave

 

The Wal Mart set for five bucks has a couple of the TV shows in with the early movies that went into public domain... I don't have my copy with me, and I can't remember the name of the company.

 

I just did a google search, and here it is at amazon... my local Wal Mart always has several of these in the five dollar bins.
http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Legend-Begins-Classics/dp/B000UVV25Q/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

 

There was also a weak late '80s version as well as the one a few years ago starring Ed O'Neill.

 

That episode was quite rare for a long time as for some reason Universal had pulled it out of the syndication package.

 

Thanks very much thxdave for the recommendation for this episode The Jar, as well as the link. I watched it when I woke up in the middle of the night and had trouble getting back to sleep. After this episode, not surprisingly, I had even more trouble getting back to sleep1 This was a very strong episode-- imho one of the best in the whole show. It's adapted from a story by the great Ray Bradbury. I met him long ago when I was in high school, in c.1983. He was the nicest guy you could possibly imagine for someone so famous. Really liked him.

It was a great practically all-star cast for this episode, including a couple of actors who I think who became fairly famous in shows like Green Acres a few years later. It was directed by one of the producers, Norman Lloyd, who played the bad guy in the early Hitch film Saboteur. The music is by Bernard Hermann himself. It's low budget tv, not a big budget Hitchcock epic, but I thought it was effective and moody and in its own way a mini epic.

The first pic I'm trying to attach on this episode shows Bradbury, Lloyd, and the main star Pat Buttram. The second pic shows the decayed prop of the jar as it appears today in someone's collection.

Here's some info on the episode from tv.com:

"* Director: Norman Lloyd
* Main Cast: Pat Buttram, Collin Wilcox, James Best, Slim Pickens, William Marshall
* Release Year: 1964
* Run Time: 60 minutes

Plot
Pat Buttram (he was Mr. Haney on Green Acres) brings a macabre twist to his standard country-bumpkin characterization in this bone-chilling episode. Visiting a traveling carnival, farmer Charlie Hill (Buttram) is fascinated by one of the exhibits: a huge jar, filled with water and mysterious floating objects. Convinced that the jar possesses magical qualities, Charlie purchases the object and brings it home, putting it on display for his friends and neighbors -- who are equally fascinated, even mesmerized, by the jar's eerie "properties." All of this brouhaha annoys Charlie's promiscuous young wife, Thedy Sue (Collin Wilcox), who plans to expose the jar as a fake and humiliate Charlie in public just before running off with her current boyfriend. James Bridges earned an Emmy nomination for his adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story The Jar, which also boasts an appropriately eerie minimalist musical score by frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide"

 

Strange, bencasey. I wonder why? And how is it you came to find out about what surely is a rather obscure piece of trivia. Like many others I enjoy your avatar! She sure brings back memories of Star Trek and other shows from the 60s...

 

Good point, MLuttans. And how does this site called DVDinc get away with selling Alfred Hitchcock and all sorts of other shows. Is it technically legal because the copyright expired? I wonder what the picture quality is like. There is no official release, as far as I know, of the Hitchcock Hour beyond what's available online at hulu/nbc.com

http://www.dvdinc.tv/details.php?pid=656

 

That's the one I remember most. Used to watch reruns as a kid at about 11 o'clock at nite. I was always watching alone and they were a bit creepy.

 

I've been working my way through the first two season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on DVD. The content is great (although the audio and video quality vary greatly), but what irritates me is that before each episode, there is a synopsis which, if read, will completely spoil the episode you're about to watch. While I just don't look at the synopsis before watching, the even more annoying part is that so many of them are just plain incorrect. They state things about the episodes which anybody that has watched them would know are not correct. Sometimes it's small things, but other times the description of the plot is just wrong. The person(s) responsible for the synopses should be ashamed of the poor job they've done.

 

They were showing the "Alfred Hitchcock Hour" on the CHILLER channel 257 on DIRECTV for quite awhile a year or so ago. I recorded many of them on the DVR so have a small library of about 50 of the episodes on it. Between Alfred, "The Twilight Zone" Classics and 80's episodes and a few other odds & ends my Hard Drive is almost filled on my DVR. I think I have about 23% free space available currently. I love being able to pull down an old Hitchock Hour Classic anyime and watch it, so I won't be purging them for awhile anyway.

 

Unfortunately my cable company added Chiller last December and I only got to record around 10-15 of them before they pulled the show off.

 

There are bootleggers all over the internet. As to how they get away with it, major companies just don't have the resources or inclination to track down and go after every crook who is selling this stuff. It's just not a big enough deal to them and not worth their time and energy. They might send a cease and desist letter but they aren't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to take these people to court. No, the copyrights haven't expired. As for the picture quality, you take your chances with gray market product. I've gotten some stuff that looks fantastic, recorded right to DVD from off cable and I've gotten shows that look like 5th generation VHS dubs or worse. If you really have an inkling to pursue such purchases, I would suggest you try IOffer. That's where I had the most luck.

 

Because I've been collecting TV shows for going on 30 years now. And when I was getting AHP back in the 80s, there were several episodes which were always skipped over, regardless of what market you were getting them recorded from. Hence you realized that certain episodes were not in the syndication package.

 

The Open Window was a short story by Saki.

The Open Window

 

Robert Bloch on working on AH Presents

a few quotes from the foreword by Bloch to the book Alfred Hitchcock Presents, by John McCarty and Brian Kelleher, St. Martin's Press, 1985:

"My Hitch with Hitchcock

What was it like to work on the Hitchcock show? Come behind the scenes with me and I'll tell you.

I started out on the program in 1959, just about midway in its long run. Two of my published stories had been bought for the series and adapted by others before my own arrival in Hollywood late that year. Although Mr. Hitchcock was filming my novel Psycho, it wouldn't be released until the following summer, and no one seemed excited about the project. I had no personal contact with him at all..."

It then goes on to say how he'd admired H's work since he was a lad way back in 1934. When Shamley Productions invited him to write a script, he was pleased but also worried he wouldn't live up to what was needed. But his script was adequate and soon he got more assignments. Bloch writes that it was a pleasure to work with Joan Harrison, Norman Lloyd, and the other people on the AH Presents team:

"...rattling off a list of their professional credits doesn't begin to describe what made working with these people a pleasurable experience. It goes without saying that I admired such ability and found immediate reassurance in knowing I could rely on their judgment. Unlike all too many of television's production groups then and now, they were knowledgeable, literate, witty. They didn't play games to impress lowly writers with their own superiority, didn't revise scripts to steal writing credits....

Hitchcock himself was generally absent in the all-too-solid flesh but he was nonetheless a palpable presence. When script decisions were made there was always a reference to his taste and standards—would 'Hitch' like this, would he disagree with that?

Oftentimes these judgments evolved over cups and cakes, for the British custom of four o'clock tea was scrupulously and sumptuously observed in Joan Harrison's private office. It was a far cry from the usual producer's offer of instant coffee in a paper cup, and somehow it summed up and symbolized the style of the show itself...."

 

Update: Fourth Seasons coming in November -

http://www.creepyclassics.com/categ...4161FABB4C1823DDEA.qscstrfrnt03?categoryId=35


Also Paramount Studios is releasing One Step Beyond Season 1.