The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

I've always enjoyed anthology shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the Twilight Zone. Overall the all of them had some really great episodes that I love to view over and over. I now have them all on DVD or Blu Ray. My favorite episodes have some humor sprinkled in the the mystery and suspense. Then the twist ending or shock ending that makes them better. Some of my favorites are "Final Vow" with Carol Lynley, "Diagnosis Danger" with Michael Parks, "Last Seen Wearing Blue Jeans" with Katherine Crawford, "Terror at Northfield" with Dick York, "See the Monkey Dance" with Efrem Zimbalist Jr., "A Matter of Murder" with Darren Mcgavin, "The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow" with Patricia Coolidge, "A Home Away From Home" with Ray Milland, "Nothing Ever Happens in Linvale" with Fess Parker(My favorite episode), "The Jar" with Pat Buttram. There are far too many of the shows that don't feel like a Hitchcock show or are down right boring. But the episodes I listed above are well worth watching.

Alfred Hitchock Presents ran half-hour shows, which stuck strictly to whodunits. The Alfred Hitchock hour tended more toward one-hour dramas with twist endings. As usual, each episode boasted a pageant of stars. Stories were not as tightly knit. Some episodes were laconic. This was television's last attempt at the Playhouse 90s, Alcoa/Goodyear TV Playhouses, the Loretta Young Shows and Kraft Mystery Theatres. It was the last of an age of television, which story lines lasted an entire hour, rather than being broken up into various story lines and woven subplots. Here were the the last of the great playwrights, in their eleventh hour, just before Fred Silverman turned television into tedium.

First of all, Alfred Hitchcock's introduction, station brake and wrap up monologues are worth the price of watching those commercials alone — which regularly were humorously ridiculed by Hitchcock himself. Watching these shows these many years later is therapy for the lightening fast world of the 21st century. Lots of husbands killing wives and wives killing husbands. And of course, then, nobody could get away with anything — if not in the story itself then in the ending wrap up by Hitchcock.

AND, it was an era when REAL ACTORS were on TV — not the pretty face empty nothing's on TV today. Living in impossible apartments and working in impossible work places and performing impossible plots.

For Alfred Hitchcock's centennial, Encore has been showing old reruns of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour tv show. I really have been enjoying them. Especially seeing Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield, who co-starred together in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, to team up again! I have only seen 4 but I am begging for more.:-)

I saw "Change of Address" several years ago and it stuck with me because of Arthur Kennedy's fabulous performance - up there with the best acting I've ever seen on television - don't miss it-he is superb, in a rare role in which he portrayed an unambiguously heinous individual (episode 321 - Oct. 64) Also, do not miss this great actor in the film "Too Late for Tears" - (1949) - with Lizabeth Scott as possibly the most repellent femme fatale in the history of the genre - this actor was superb at portraying the halfway decent man whose moral frailties could be uncovered with the scratch of a pin - he deserves to be more well remembered