Alfred Hitchcock Presents
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Alfred Hitchcock Presents was a half-hour anthology television series hosted by Alfred Hitchcock. The series featured both mysteries and melodramas. By the premiere of the show on October 2, 1955, Hitchcock had been directing films for over three decades.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents is well known for its title sequence. The camera fades in on a simple line-drawing caricature of Hitchcock's rotund profile. As the program's theme music -- Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette -- plays, Hitchcock himself appears in silhouette from the right edge of the screen, and then walks to centre screen to eclipse the caricature. The drawing was the work of Hitchcock himself. He'd begun his career as an illustrator for silent movie title cards. The sequence has been parodied countless times in films and on television, and the caricature and Funeral March of a Marionette music have become indelibly associated with Hitchcock in popular culture.
Hitchcock appears again after the title sequence and drolly introduces the story from a mostly-empty studio or from the set of the current episode. At least two versions of the opening were shot for every episode. A version intended for the American audience would often spoof a recent popular commercial or poke fun at the sponsor, leading into the commercial. An alternative version for European audiences would instead include jokes at the expense of Americans in general.
Hitchcock would close the show in much the same way as it was opened, but now to tie up loose ends rather than joke. He told TV Guide that his reassurances that the criminal had been apprehended were "a necessary gesture to morality..."
For later seasons, opening remarks were also filmed with Hitchcock speaking in French and German for the show's international presentations, reflecting his real-life fluency in both languages.
The episodes were characterized by their suspense and surprise endings. The seminal episode is considered to have been "Lamb to the Slaughter," (from a story by Roald Dahl) the tale of a housewife (Barbara Bel Geddes) who kills her cheating husband by bludgeoning him to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooking and feeding the murder weapon to investigating police. Roald Dahl wrote so many episodes that the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City offered a special program of Dahl-Hitchcock collaborations. (A list of notable shows and actors follows this article.)
Originally 30 minutes per episode, in 1962 the show was extended to a full hour and retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Hitchcock himself only directed 17 of the 270 filmed episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Hitchcock also directed three other TV films, one each for the TV series "Suspicion" (1957), "Ford Startime" (1960), and for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1963).)
The last new episode aired on June 26, 1965, but the series continued to be popular in syndication for decades. Recently it has become available for purchase through the iTunes Music Store. Universal released the first two seasons on DVD in 2006.
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[edit] 1985 revival
In 1985, the National Broadcasting Company aired a new TV-movie based upon the series, combining newly-filmed stories with colorized footage of Hitchcock from the original series introducing each segment. The movie was a huge ratings success, and sparked a brief revival of the anthology series genre that included a new version of The Twilight Zone amongst others. A new Alfred Hitchcock Presents series debuted in the fall of 1985 and retained the same format as the movie - newly filmed stories (a mixture of original works and updated remakes of original series episodes) with colorized introductions by Hitchcock. The new series lasted only two seasons before NBC cancelled it, but it was then produced for two more years by USA Network (which is now co-owned with NBC under NBC Universal).
[edit] Notable guest stars
- Hitchcock himself would occasionally put in a cameo appearance, although not as often as he did in his movies.
- Barbara Baxley, six appearances
- Barbara Bel Geddes, four appearances
- Patricia Collinge, six appearances
- Mildred Dunnock, four appearances
- Robert H. Harris, eight appearances
- Paul Hartman, five appearances
- Robert Horton, seven appearances
- Henry Jones, four appearances
- Brian Keith, five appearances
- Cloris Leachman ("Premonition", October 9, 1955)
- Hugh Marlowe, four appearances
- Art Carney
- Leslie Nielsen
- Bette Davis
- Dick Van Dyke
- Steve McQueen
- Peter Lorre (with Steve McQueen)
- Robert Redford
- Ed Asner
- William Shatner
- Charles Bronson
- John Williams
- Lorne Greene
- Claude Rains
- Joanne Woodward
- Vera Miles
- Robert Newton
- Patricia Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock's daughter)
- Mildred Natwick
- Charles Herbert
[edit] Episodes
See List of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes and List of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes for more details.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 30 minutes long, aired weekly at 9:30 on CBS on Sunday nights from 1955 to 1960, and then at 8:30 on NBC on Tuesday nights from 1960 to 1962. It was followed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which lasted for three seasons, September 1962 to June 1965, adding another 93 episodes to the 270 already produced for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Two episodes, both directed by Hitchcock himself, were nominated for Emmy Awards: "The Case of Mr. Pelham" with Tom Ewell, 1955, and "Lamb to the Slaughter" with Barbara Bel Geddes, 1958. An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "An Unlocked Window", earned an Edgar Award for writer James Bridges in 1966.
One 1963 episode ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice") was not initially broadcast by NBC because the FCC felt that the ending was too gruesome. The plot has a magician's assistant performing a "sawing a woman in half" trick, not knowing it's a gimmick, and he cuts the unconscious woman in half. The episode has since been shown in syndication.
