SEASON 7 EPISODE 34 remastered Universal dvd box set. Newland and Hitch had a lot in common when it came to unusual stories and characters. Solid direction from John Newland, one of the best tv directors, also host of ONE STEP BEYOND. Swanton has some fun with the characters names York plays Herbert Wiggam? Popular character actor Gage Clarke plays a guy called Frisbee? Interesting. He also wrote for PERRY MASON, without too much surprise. Excellent writing on the part of Harold Swanton, who wrote 10 episodes for Hitch. A prelude, sort of, to MISSION IMPOSSIBLE with an intricate timetable. In today's money market, that would amount to a cool five million dollars! His plan is quite clever, and you have to watch it all in sequence. What to do? Rob the company blind - to the tune of a half million dollars in bonds. The reward he receives is seeing someone else being promoted to a job he is entitled to. He's somewhere in between here, playing a dedicated, but neglected employee of a securities company. He could be one funny guy, or a very crafty villain. Hitch chose York for so many productions because he just had that face, the look, that smile -which could go both ways. His blind outrage over this leads to a bizarre tragedy. Unstable, mousy wife of a good, caring man becomes the victim of an unsolved assault. An imprisoned lifer breaks out of prison to meet the pen pal he has fallen in love with, but finds only her middle-aged aunt at home. These programmes are fun, pithy and entertaining and still worth watching today.This is one of those "would you like to be in this guy's shoes" episodes, and with Dick York as the anti-hero. With Alfred Hitchcock, Linda Purl, David Clennon, Herbert Jefferson Jr. With Alfred Hitchcock, Katherine Squire, Clu Gulager, Stanley Adams. A man who has a theory that murders committed without a motive are very rarely solved is then coaxed by his friend into killing someone. A mans attractive mistress tells him she will handle the killing of his wife, but he wants to hire someone to do it, and a miscommunication results. With Alfred Hitchcock, Skip Homeier, William Redfield, Carl Betz. I think it's great that a top Hollywood director in his prime could make time to adapt so well to the TV market as Hitchcock did here. With Alfred Hitchcock, Patricia Breslin, Vivienne Segal, Mark Miller. All the episodes benefit from acerbic intros and outros by the man himself, playing up to his curmudgeonly persona while the sinisterly jocular theme music still conjures up that famous pencil-profile image which he would fill over the titles. The production values are high as is the acting talent involved famously this is how Hitch discovered Vera Miles, who was to feature in two of his features in the years ahead as well as a penchant for a low budget, black and white shoot which would result in a certain movie centring on a psychologically disturbed motel owner, the title of which escapes me. Snappily scripted, plotted and edited, these short programmes prefigure the likes of "Twilight Zone" in the 60's and "Tales Of The Unexpected" in the 70's. A nurse who suspects her very rich husband of killing his first wife seeks advice from a lawyer instead of going to the police. Of the first four episodes I've watched from series 1, I've been impressed by their coherence, consistency and diversity, for instance one was set in the wild west, a genre you can hardly imagine the Master covering in his own work. With Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Greer, Kent Smith, Robert Webber. I am a massive Hitchcock fan and would argue that his creative peak in features was in the mid-late 50's, ironically just at the time he commenced production of this short-form series bearing his imprimatur, even if he only had time to personally direct a handful of episodes.
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