Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Three

For one of the greatest filmmakers to have undertaken a primetime television show as early as 1955 testifies to Alfred Hitchcock’s prescience. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran from 1955 to 1962 (first on CBS, then on NBC), presented weekly half-hour vignettes in a similar vein to Hitchcock’s feature length work. Familiar themes such as the crisis in white male identity, doubling, misogyny, the oppressive weight of life under modern conditions, racism and sexism, were treated extensively throughout the show’s run. The recently-released third season has no extra features but includes all 39 episodes, several of which are outstanding, while a few are throw-aways and most lie somewhere in-between. Only three episodes are directed by Hitchcock, two others – surprisingly – by Robert Altman. The season is full of other treats: actors Joseph Cotton, Vincent Price, Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, George Peppard and William Shatner make appearances, and two episodes are written by Roald Dahl. Despite his absence behind the camera Hitchcock seems always present, addressing the audience at the beginning and end of each episode. These hilarious monologues are the most consistently entertaining part of the show, with Hitchcock reveling in stiff-upper-lip sarcasm – though often making explicit the misogynist and xenophobic tendencies that remain just below the surface in so much of his work.

As always with Hitchcock, the misogyny of this show isn’t wholeheartedly endorsed, but instead presented as casual and problematic. In many cases the violence perpetrated against female characters is a direct result of the dishonesty, insecurity and immaturity of the male characters. In the excellent episode “Silent Witness,” for example, a male professor kills the young female student with whom he’s had an affair after she demands that he leave his wife. Though the episode is told from the professor’s point of view, his exploitation of a gendered power dynamic is clearly presented as monstrous. The episode goes a step further by staging the murder in front of a 14-month-old baby girl: the title’s silent witness. As she develops the ability to speak, the professor turns his attention to keeping her quiet. Becoming an adult, the episode shows, means entering into a set of uneven power relations more often mapped onto sexual difference than any other category. Allowing the episode’s witness to overcome her silence means undoing this profound intertwining of gender and power.

Cultural and racial stereotypes are almost as all-pervasive as fragile gender relations in Hitchcock’s work, and this goes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents as well. Unfortunately, xenophobia is too often indulged without being reprimanded to let Hitchcock off the moral hook on this issue. In several episodes the show’s use of national stereotypes is parodic and self-deprecating. British condescension and disrespect towards all other nationalities is played for laughs when outmoded and silly social conventions are juxtaposed to the flexible lifestyles of Europeans and Americans. In other episodes, however, humor dealing in national and ethnic stereotypes gives way to overt racism. In an episode entitled “The Diplomatic Corpse,” a young American couple navigates a series of misadventures in Mexico. Racist stereotypes proliferate, frustrations over the locals’ “ten-hour lunch breaks” abound, and Hitchcock’s regular any-“other” actor Peter Lorre (actually Austrio-Hungarian) plays Mexican private investigator Tomas Salgado. Parody, in this episode, does not outdo racism.

With highly politicized topics bubbling to the surface of every episode, Alfred Hitchcock Presents may be more interesting to today’s hyper-media-literate audience than it was when it began in 1955. Like the most successful TV shows today, the aesthetics and generic conventions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents more closely resemble those of cinema than other TV shows of its time. That said, the dominant themes of each episode recall many of Hitchcock’s own films, and, likewise, have remained very relevant despite the long-outdated aesthetics of the show. Certainly, the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is uneven from one episode to the next, but the most interesting far outweigh the boring and conventional.

A completely different review of the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is in the October 17 issue of the New York Press, and can be found here.