Alfred Hitchcock Presents was a very successful decade long (1955-1965) television series that gave Hitch a chance to tinker with ideas, techniques and conventions that may have lacked the substance to be translated into feature films. Each episode was bracketed by the drip-dry Steven Wright-ish delivery of Mr. Hitchcock, which underscored the darkness of Hitch’s sense of humour, which contemporary audiences will no doubt find delightfully modern.
The premiere episode of his television series, Revenge, sports a slightly askew view of reality that neatly anticipates Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. Vera Miles plays a lovely newlywed who, after becoming the victim of a mysterious attack, retreats into a near-catatonic state. Her husband, played with a nice balance of sensitivity and rage by Ralph Meeker, is determined to find the brute who has reduced his wife to repeating “then he killed me” when she talks of the attack. Such touches, combined with Hitchcock’s just slightly asymmetrical, off-centred camera angles and claustrophobic scene compositions, create an increasingly disturbing mood, leading to a disturbing finale.
Wet Saturday is a droll send up of British drawing room dramas, as a family of silly upper class twits (to borrow a phrase from the Monty Python boys) is faced with the challenge of covering up the murder of a man at the hands of their romantically spurned and intellectually challenged daughter. As the family struggles to maintain that stiff upper lip, the father uncoils a devilish plan that seems doomed to succeed regardless of the fact that he’s surrounded by family members whose combined IQ barely approximates an anorexic’s goal weight.
It’s easy to see why Hitchcock took the reins of Mr. Blanchard’s Secret, as it afforded him a chance to have plenty of fun at his own expense. The segment takes a writer with a vivid imagination (Meg Mundy), and gives her an opportunity to see murder in her neighbour’s peculiar behaviour. Here Hitchcock takes the role of the audience, as we start off, like the husband, questioning the writer’s overripe imagination, then – slowly but surely – we are drawn to take her side. It’s a neat piece of manipulation by Hitchcock.
The most compelling work in this package is Breakdown, which features Joseph Cotton in a nightmare scenario. Cotton plays a cool and aloof man suddenly unable to move at all – not even the twitch of an eyelid – because he has been in a car accident. Trapped behind his car’s wheel, which is wedged under his throat for most of the episode, all he can do is watch as vandals strip his car and his rescuers work nonchalantly at freeing him because they assume he is dead. Hitch’s use of the subjective camera is vital to our sense of powerlessness and frustration, and adds potency to the morbid piece’s neat little moral bow that’s tied onto the ending.
Despite the overt tidiness of each episode’s epilogues, this is a set of Hitchcock-directed works that stand the test of time, and comfortably bear multiple viewing.
