![]() ![]() And some of them have a comic surreality that match the best of Ernie Kovacs, such as when Hitchcock attempts to fix viewers’ TV sets from the inside, but only succeeds in shattering the picture tube or when the silhouette of a woman with an enormous hat takes up most of the TV screen. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you what happened.”) His skits saved the screenwriters from having to pad out stories to fit the show’s running time, at least until it was extended to an hour in 1962 and renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (“You needn’t sit there staring,” he says after a Ray Bradbury-related episode. However, Hitchcock’s hosting duties have uses other than further baffling viewers. After one man seems to get away with killing his wife, Hitchcock explains that “his dog… was a detective in disguise and turned him in.” In reality, his concessions toward Standards And Practices are either perfunctory (“Of course, he got caught”) or ludicrous. Some of the episodes are pure malice (the successful framing of someone for a murder, for example), and that’s when it falls to Hitchcock the host to reassure viewers that justice has been done in the end. (After one such tale, Hitchcock reels off a bunch of possible morals and shrugs, “One of them is bound to fit.”) The first story of the series, “Revenge,” is a lesson against vigilantism-or, like most episodes, can be enjoyed as a warning that the universe will screw things up and there’s no avoiding that. Other episodes are grimmer, but can still be seen as morality tales in which some sinner gets his or her just desserts. Especially in early episodes, the violence might be off-screen and tongue-in-cheek, making Hitchcock seem no more subversive than a revival of Arsenic And Old Lace. ![]() ![]() Then there was the slippery point of view in the series. ![]()
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