Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Alfred Hitchcock Hour Mar 17, 2017 15:28:01 GMT mikef6 likes this

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Post by Salzmank on Mar 17, 2017 15:28:01 GMT

Mar 6, 2017 14:08:21 GMT Richard Kimble said:

While there are some excellent AHPs, I believe Hitchcock, like Serling, was more comfortable with the half hour format.

Most of my favorite episodes have been listed already, so I'll mention one that is sometimes overlooked: "Arthur", starring Laurence Harvey as a New Zealand chicken farmer who has a problem with his fiancee, and comes up with a wickedly clever way to resolve that problem. Hitchcock himself directed (there's a very effective use of sound effects) but it's Harvey who steals the honors. Those who think of him as cold and dour will be surprised at how amusingly theatrical he is here. It's probably my favorite Harvey performance.

I haven't seen many episodes of either Hitchcock show, but Arthur has always been one of my favorites of the few I have seen. In several ways it's a dry run for Psycho, with a number of elements in common. (In fact, another, albeit personal, element in common--I have a younger cousin who typically despises black-and-white and "old movies." I eventually got her to watch Psycho once, though, and she loved it--and she also liked Arthur!)

Harvey's performance is superb. In fact, the whole thing could be a first-class Hitchcock feature film; it is very Hitchcockian (that overused term Doghouse and I were discussing on the "Hitchcock Films" thread), a quality that many of even the Hitch-directed episodes of the series are not.