Hitchcock Presents

I've had a bad cold for the last couple of days and so have been mostly consigned to bed. One of the gifts I got for Christmas was a set of the first season of Hitchcock's show that ran for about a decade. There are 39 episodes, sans commercials. I was surprised by how good some of them are. They seem to have picked out some big stars of the day as well as some people who would be stars later. John Casavettes was very young when he played an escaped con. Each of the stories ends with a twist. For example, in the Casavettes story, he breaks into a house with a woman alone after breaking out of prison. At one point he forces her to answer the phone and she speaks to her mother. Unfortunately for Casavettes, who is feeding her the responses, she is deaf. So as he is leaving he is caught.

Barry Fitzgerald is also the star of their Christmas story. He gets out of prison as a hard core crimminal but the only job his social worker can get for him is as a santa. He meets a tought kid who covets a toy airplane. Barry has words with the kid - who said he intends to steal it. Barry instead, in a senseless act of kindness, and in an attempt to convert the kid off his own path, steals the plane and delivers it on Christmas eve - only to be caught immediately. But his social worker comes down and covers his tracks for him and gets him out. A nice story.

The best one so far has been the one on Lizzie Borden. Every child knows the song about Lizzie Borden but this one speculates that Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, actually did the crimes. That led me to a web search to find out about the crime. It seems that the story on Hitchcock, included many of the important details of the case. The story became sort of a Doctorowed history. It includes a pushy female reporter who discovers where Lizzie hid the axe. (In the real case the axe seems to have been burned). There is an interesting twist because the reporter is from the Sacramento Record. (Not a paper in Sacramento but one in Stockton).

The series in total is an interesting melange of very good plays with a twist and run of the mill 1950s drama. But what is also interesting is that they get better as you go through the year - they seem to have learned how to work thourgh a thirty minute format. If you like Hitch, the introductions and conclusions are worth seeing on their own. They have a consistently wry sense of irony. One other thing strikes me about the series. As a bonus feature, they have a short presentation on how the series was developed. It seems to have worked on a very small staff. Seems very different from what I understand about today in television.