For ten seasons, across both NBC and CBS, Alfred Hitchcock hosted 361 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with the final three seasons billed as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as the show’s time slot was extended. This was an anthology series that, in the director’s own words in the introduction to the sixth season premiere, told “homey little stories of an unusual nature,” often about “crime as practiced by ordinary people, like the people next door.” For the most part, I would describe each episode as a two-act play with a twist (two twists if you’re lucky), with about three cast members and two sets, not counting the opening and closing segments with Hitchcock himself. Over the course of my many years on this earth, I’ve probably seen most of the half hour episodes; Hour was not as widely syndicated, although I have seen it pop up from time to time on MeTV late at night, since that channel usually programs an hour long block of Presents anyway. As you can imagine, there are only so many stories that can be told in this format, and many of them start to run together—I can’t tell you how many of them revolve around a nephew with debts learning he’s set to inherit some money and coming up with a murderous scheme—but there are still a lot of original ideas and concepts. Hitchcock’s onscreen involvement in every episode, as he introduces and closes out each one, led many to believe that he was very involved behind the scenes, but this wasn’t really the case. Over the decade it was on air, Hitchcock directed a total of eighteen episodes, and like the show as a whole, they run the gamut from awful to excellent. I rewatched them all to see which ones would be worth recommending to fans of his work in the lead-up to my ranking of his features, and for each, I’ve also recommended a film from his catalog that best pairs with the episode, for thematic, casting, or narrative reasons.
“Revenge” – 3.5 stars
Season One, Episode One, aired October 2, 1955
Synopsis: The premiere episode. Ralph Meeker (who would later appear in The Night Stalker alongside Psycho alum Simon Oakland) plays a man who comes home one day to discover that his provocative new wife, played by Vera Miles, has been sexually assaulted. The police offer little help or reassurance, so the couple leaves the area. Husband slays the man his wife points out as her attacker, only for her to point to another man and make the same claim, clearly traumatized to the point that she sees her assailant in every man.
Pairing: The Vera Miles connection might lend itself to pairing this with Psycho, but there’s a later episode that’s better suited; as such, the “Vera Miles has a breakdown” element is best reflected in The Wrong Man.
“Breakdown” – 4 stars
Season One, Episode Seven, aired November 13, 1955
Synopsis: Joseph Cotten (who had previously collaborated with Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and Under Capricorn) portrays a callous business executive who finds himself paralyzed but completely conscious following a car accident. Originally unmoved and even disgusted by an employee’s tearful reaction to being laid off, the man is only able to alert the morgue attendant that he is alive by shedding a tear, after several unfortunate things happen to his presumed-dead body.
Pairing: I’d joke that this one would pair well with Under Capricorn, as Cotten is only slightly less wooden here as an apparent corpse than he is in that stinker, but I cannot recommend that film in good conscience, or even in jest. Instead, I’ll provide a “Further Reading” instead and direct you to the audio version of Stephen King’s short story “Autopsy Room Four,” which references this episode and is very well narrated by Oliver Platt.
“The Case of Mr. Pelham” – 1 star
Season One, Episode Ten, aired December 4, 1955
Synopsis: Feels more like a (boring) Twilight Zone than an episode of AHP, as this is more of an existential story of terror with a seemingly supernatural twist. Tom Ewell (the titular Mr. Pelham) finds that everywhere he goes, people tell him that he just left, and that he was a good hang. Pelham eventually starts wearing an outlandish tie to differentiate him from his doppelganger, only for no one to believe him because he would never wear such a thing. Can you hear the sad trombone noise?
Pairing: Vertigo, given the overall theme of double identity.
“Back for Christmas” – 3 stars
Season One, Episode Twenty-Three, aired March 4, 1956
Synopsis: British Herbert Carpenter (John Williams) and his overly fussy wife Hermione (Isobel Elsom) promise their friends they’ll be back from America for the holidays, but then Herbert kills her and buries her in the basement he has been excavating under the guise of digging himself a wine cellar. Stateside, he establishes a cover story about the two separating and prepares to settle into a new life, until he receives a letter indicating that his wife has hired someone to finish the wine cellar as a Christmas gift while he’s away; the discovery of her body now inevitable.
Pairing: With Dial M for Murder, where Williams plays the magnetic detective rather than the killer.
“Wet Saturday” – 3.5 stars
Season Two, Episode One, aired September 30, 1956
Synopsis: Mr. Princey (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) is a well-to-do patriarch whose daughter has just slain the local schoolmaster in a fit of rage because he’s marrying someone else. Luckily, John Williams stumbles into the house at just the right time to be framed for it, comically.
Pairing: With Rope, where Hardwicke gets a strong turn as the father of the victim rather than the perpetrator.
“Mr. Blanchard’s Secret” – 1.5 stars
Season Two, Episode Thirteen, aired December 23, 1956
Synopsis: Amateur mystery writer Babs Fenton (Mary Scott) annoys the hell out of her long-suffering husband when she concludes that their neighbor has murdered his wife. Her insistence on creating bizarre fictions about the neighbors continues even after she meets the (living) Mrs. Blanchard. One of the more frustrating episodes: the comedy isn’t funny, and the mystery, such as it is, has no real resolution.
Pairing: The episode is clearly a parodic homage to Rear Window, which this would pair well with, but I would recommend avoiding this entry altogether. Mary Scott appeared in three other episodes of the series, all of which are top tier: “Crackpot,” directed by TV stalwart John Meredyth Lucas and featuring a genuinely frightening performance from Robert Emhardt; “Safety for the Witness,” directed by Norman Lloyd and starring Art Carney; and “The Diplomatic Corpse,” directed by Paul Henreid (Dead Ringer) and starring Peter Lorre. Any one of them is a better time than “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret.”
“One More Mile to Go” – 5 stars
Season Two, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 7, 1957
Synopsis: David Wayne (who starred in the 1951 Americanization of Fritz Lang’s M and portrayed the Mad Hatter on the Adam West Batman series) who impulsively kills his wife; his attempts to get rid of the body are hampered by a broken tail light and an overly helpful motorcycle cop. Possibly the best episode of the series, the first half is entirely without dialogue and relies solely on the image for suspense. The clearest demonstration of Hitchcock using the series as a proving ground for things he would include in later films, as the movie presages Psycho in many ways.
Pairing: With Psycho, naturally.
“The Perfect Crime” – 2 stars
Season Three, Episode Three, aired October 20, 1957
Synopsis: Stars Vincent Price as an expert homicide detective who keeps a memento from each of his great cases on display, reserving the center spot for “the perfect crime.” He receives a visit from a defense attorney (James Gregory) who claims he can prove that Price sent an innocent man to the electric chair. It’s fine if you want to see a fun Price performance in an otherwise boring package, but you don’t need this episode for that; we have it in abundance elsewhere.
Pairing: Rebecca, although not for any thematic reasons. Price kills the attorney and uses his remains to create a ceramic vase, with Hitch’s closing narration performing its standard censor-addressing concerns by saying that the crime was discovered when a charwoman knocked the piece over, and cites this as the reason why cleaning women are always breaking vases. That a piece of the late Mrs. de Winter’s ceramic decor was broken (and a housekeeper blamed) is a plot element in Rebecca. I admit this is a stretch, but my other nomination was Marnie based solely on the fact that James Gregory appeared in the original series Star Trek episode “Dagger of the Mind” and that Marnie actress Mariette Hartley was in “All Our Yesterdays,” which is even more belabored.
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – 5 stars
Season Three, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 13, 1958
Synopsis: Pregnant Mary Maloney (Barbara Bel Geddes) is in a state of shock when her policeman husband comes home and tells her he intends to leave her. She knocks him out with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks it; when the police come to investigate, they eat the murder weapon. This is perhaps the most well known episode of the show; when the series came to TV Land when I was a young teenager, there was a weekend long marathon that began not with the premiere, but with “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The narrative is also well known because the short story, written by Raold Dahl, is frequently anthologized. An absolute master work from start to finish.
Pairing: Bel Geddes’s only Hitchcock film was Vertigo and that’s already taken, as is Rope, the other big “evidence in plain sight” narrative from the director. Given the dearth of Hitchcock/Bel Geddes feature content, I’d instead recommend that you just do a marathon of all four AHP episodes she appeared in, although I would place them in a different order than release date (and only this one was directed by Hitchcock). Start with the Arthur Hiller-directed “The Morning of the Bride” from season four, a kind of Bluebeard story in which Bel Geddes learns an awful truth about her new husband, then watch “Slaughter.” Follow that up with “The Foghorn” from season three, based on the Gertrude Atherton short story, and close out with “Sybilla” from season six, directed by Ida Lupino.
“Dip in the Pool” – 4 stars
Season Three, Episode Thirty-Five, aired June 1, 1958
Synopsis: Hitch’s second Roald Dahl adaptation. Keenan Wynn (Dr. Strangelove) plays boorish American William Botibol who is on a cruise with his wife to a tightly budgeted European tour. He learns from stock broker Renshaw (Philip Bourneuf) about a shipboard lottery that revolves around the daily distance the ship travels and wagers too much when he believes he has insider information. When he’s poised to lose it all, he resolves to juke the odds by “accidentally” falling off of the ship so that it has to stop and retrieve him. Unfortunately, he makes the wrong choice of eyewitness. Fay Wray has a minor role as Renshaw’s wife. Doreen Lang plays the woman whose nurse disbelieves her about Botibol going overboard; one wishes she had been similarly disbelieved when she falsely identified Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man. (She’s also the hysterical woman in the diner in The Birds.)
Pairing: Pair with Lifeboat for a fully on-the-seas adventure.
“Poison” – 4.5 stars
Season Four, Episode One, aired October 5, 1958
Synopsis: Another Roald Dahl adaptation, this time of a story that served as an allegory about the venomous effect the Raj had on India. The episode opens on James Donald as Harry Pope, a man paralyzed with fear when Timber Woods (Wendell Corey, who played Jimmy Stewart’s cop buddy in Rear Window) arrives to find him in bed, claiming that there is a venomous krait snake asleep on his chest, beneath the sheets. Effectively tense as Woods menaces the helpless, sweaty Pope, who is shot in glorious chiaroscuro, even though the conflict itself is less than satisfactory.
Pairing: Visually evocative of Shadow of a Doubt and shares the film’s air of menace and sense of feeling trapped. For further viewing, the story was also adapted in the Wes Anderson anthology film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More.
“Banquo’s Chair” – 3 stars
Season Four, Episode Twenty-Nine, aired May 3, 1959
Synopsis: John Williams is a retired detective who has arranged to gaslight a suspect in a murder he could never solve, who happens to be the old AHP archetype of the nephew who killed his rich aunt. On the anniversary of her death, the detective gathers a few friends and makes the nephew believe he is witnessing his aunt’s ghost, but after he confesses, the actress hired to play her arrives, implying the ghost was real. Conceptually fun, but the spectral element drags on in order to reach the minimum run time.
Pairing: Family Plot, which also involves some phoney paranormal phenomena that may be more real than believed.
“Arthur” – 3.5 stars
Season Five, Episode One, aired September 27, 1959
Synopsis: New Zealand poultry farmer Arthur (The Manchurian Candidate himself Laurence Harvey) addresses the audience directly and tells us about how he murdered his ex-fiance (frequent “Poe Cycle” Roger Corman collaborator Hazel Court) when she tried to come back to him after a failed marriage. Slyly funny, especially with Harvey camping it up and breaking the fourth wall. Improves in the second half once the cat-and-mouse games with the police begin.
Pairing: With The Birds, given Hazel Court’s unfortunate fate.
“The Crystal Trench” – 1.5 stars
Season Five, Episode Two, aired October 4, 1959
Synopsis: A story of wasted obsession: Mark Cavendish (James Donald) spends decades waiting for a woman (Patricia Owens, The Fly) whose husband dies on a mountain climbing expedition and who resolves to wait forty years until his body emerges from the ice. When it finally does, Mark discovers a locket around the corpse’s neck, which contains a photo of a different woman. Conceptually interesting and traffics in Hitchcock’s frequent theme of fixations, but the overwrought dialogue about “preserving the roses of summer” paired with a preposterous plot make for a late-in-the-game miss.
Pairing: The Alpine setting calls to mind the original The Man Who Knew Too Much.
“Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” – 3.5
Season Six, Episode One, aired September 27, 1960
Synopsis: Mrs. Bixby (Audrey Meadows, aka “Straight to the moon” Alice from The Honeymooners) gets dumped by the retired colonel with whom she’s been having an affair while claiming to visit her elderly aunt. As a parting gift, he gives her a mink coat that she’ll never be able to explain to her husband; she schemes to pawn the coat temporarily and pretend to find the ticket for it in a cab. Her husband goes to claim it and comes back with a cheap stole, and Mrs. Bixby spots her coat on Dr. Bixby’s secretary.
Pairing: With Marnie, as the scheme Mrs. Bixby concocts reminds one of Marnie’s complex plans to hide the money that she’s stolen.
“The Horseplayer” – 4
Season Six, Episode 22, aired March 14, 1961
Synopsis: Father Amion (Claude Rains)’s church’s roof needs extensive repair. Parishioner Sheridan is on a winning streak at the horse races and attributes his success to his newfound interest in prayer, and shows his appreciation when the collection basket comes around. Amion resists the temptation to follow Sheridan’s lead for a time but finally makes a bet himself, leading to a crisis of faith. Admonished by the bishop, he is told to pray that his horse will not win; the prayer is answered, but in an unlikely way. Cinematically on par with the director’s film work, elevated by Rains’s performance.
Pairing: With I Confess!, which also follows a priest struggling to navigate his spiritual and personal needs.
“Bang! You’re Dead” – 5 stars
Season Seven, Episode Two, aired October 17, 1961
Synopsis: Most like The Wrong Man in that this episode takes the form of an “issue” picture. Billy Mumy’s uncle comes to visit and leaves his revolver laying about carelessly, where the cowboy-obsessed little boy finds it and carries it with him all over town, pointing the gun at passersby who play along with him, completely unaware that they’re staring down the barrel of a real deadly weapon. It’s fantastically tense, with a standout sequence where the boy follows the family’s domestic help Cleo (Juanita Moore of Imitation of Life fame) with the gun in first person perspective. Haunting!
Pairing: With Sabotage, for the real and present danger to a child.
“I Saw the Whole Thing” – 2.5 stars
Season Eight (now The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), Episode Four, aired October 11, 1962
Synopsis: On the day following a hit and run accident, Michael Barnes (John Forsythe, thankfully much less obnoxious here than in The Trouble With Harry) goes to a police station and tells the officer on duty that it was his car that was involved. Five eyewitnesses claim the car never stopped before colliding with a motorcycle, and Barnes fears that if his wife learns about the trial she will miscarry, for the third time. Like most episodes of Hour that I have seen, the plot is a bit belabored; by the end of the scene in which Barnes has broken down the testimony of the first witness called to the stand, you already know that you’re going to have to watch this same thing happen four more times. The twist (that it was Barnes’s wife driving) is fine, and a concise version of this story in half an hour on Presents would likely have been quite good. I may have simply been out of patience by the time we got here, but this is a forgettable hour of television.
Pairing: With Murder!, Hitch’s first film to include elements of the courtroom drama.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
