Some of the episodes of the Hitchcock series are like little mini-masterpieces and they compare favorably with the gold standard, “The Twilight Zone.” Some seem a little rushed or include a twist for twist’s sake.īut where else can you find Robert Redford and Gig Young as brothers in a high-stakes poker game against gangsters with itchy trigger fingers? Well, in “A Piece of the Action,” the first hour-long episode, from 1962. But instead of Hitchcock behind the camera, it was William Friedkin, who a few years would later direct what might be the best horror movie of all time, “The Exorcist.” The star is John Gavin, who starred in “Psycho.” There’s even a roadside motel and a slightly creepy motel clerk. It’s written by Robert Bloch, the author who created Norman Bates and his mother in a 1959 novel. “Off Season,” an episode from 1965, feels like a “Psycho” reunion. One, “Diagnosis: Danger,” aired in 1963 but seems scarily of this moment, as Los Angeles public health investigators try to track and stop the spread of anthrax in the city. Sydney Pollack, who directed quintessential films like “Tootsie,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “Absence of Malice,” directed two Hitchcock episodes. And “The Jar” is, legendarily, an hour of TV that most people mistakenly believe was an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”īut while the Hitchcock shows were usually more restrained than “The Twilight Zone,” the series did have more than its share of memorable episodes, writers and directors. It’s a 1964 episode of “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” and it’s a much more gruesome story than most that Hitchcock’s writers told. Then everything goes horribly wrong.īut wait … “The Jar” isn’t a “Twilight Zone” episode. Buttram buys the jar and takes it back to his small town, where he becomes the toast of the small burg. Speaking of “The Twilight Zone,” there’s a particularly gruesome episode from 1964 called “The Jar,” in which a country bumpkin played by Pat Buttram becomes obsessed with an unidentifiable but … head-like thing in a jar in a carnival sideshow. The best writers and directors-and young Robert Redford Night Shyamalan’s movies and their soon-to-be-expected twists, Hitchcock’s series built and continually reinforced the director and host’s public persona. Notwithstanding Rod Serling and his “Twilight Zone” series, a contemporary of the Hitchcock show, or M. Hitchcock directed only about a dozen-and-a-half episodes of the series, but his image and droll delivery at the top and bottom of each of the 361 episodes-counting the two series-reinforced his cult status. The series was a bite-size half hour for most of its run, offering smart and fast-moving stories with great casts. Unlike EC, though, the Hitchcock show was not aimed at youngsters. The appearance of the Hitchcock silhouette, set to Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette,” and the director’s witty and often gruesome introductions teased what was to come in every episode: a morality play-an immorality play, really-not unlike what comic book readers saw from EC Comics before they were driven out of the market. A lot of viewers tuned in each week and heard his trademark “Good evening” and his intakes of breath between sentences. The sheer lack of choices helped drive viewers to shows like those Hitchcock produced. In the decades before cable and pay channels like HBO, most viewers tuned into just three networks, CBS included, and one or two local stations. Today, though, a look at the television shows that bore his name and which he hosted with what looks like macabre relish. The details of Hitchcock’s life-at times sordid and awful, especially regarding the reports of his dehumanizing behavior to women, including some who starred in his films-have become the fodder for many biographies. The 60-year-old director, who had always been a familiar figure to some because of his sly cameos in his films, had become a household name through his movies and his TV show, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” The half-hour anthology series began in 1955 and ran for 10 years, including the years when it was expanded and renamed “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.”Īdd to that “Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,” which had begun in 1956 through an agreement to license the director’s name, as well as a series of thriller and suspense story collections, and Hitchcock’s fame as a director was without compare until Steven Spielberg became a household name in the 1970s. One of the director’s genuine masterpieces, “Psycho,” was released that year, on the heels of “North by Northwest” the year before, which had followed “Vertigo” and “The Wrong Man” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” “The Birds” lay ahead of him. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was everywhere.
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