Sam Juliano's shout-out to THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR (1962-65)

Posted by Don Malcolm on 4/18/2018, 11:09 am

Here's a link to a solid little introductory post by Sam Juliano (over at the shared blog site WONDERS IN THE DARK) about THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR:

https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/139-the-alfred-hitchcock-hour-1962-65/

As most of you know, AHH took over from the half-hour ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS in the fall of 1962 and (as I suggest in a brief comment over there) was a kind of continuation of the PSYCHO mindset (black and white, with "high TV" production values and a tilt toward kinkier horror tropes as the "top notes" for noir). I don't think Hitch and company would have done this show in the way it was done without the VERTIGO-PSYCHO nexus: the former for the obsessive dread (thank you, Boileau-Narcejac) and the latter for its kinky violent edge.



Box sets of AHH eps are more plentiful than they were when Carl tipped us off to the Australian set (back in 2010-11, IIRC), but many of the newer ones are more expensive.

The choices for TV noir have been stultifyingly immense (the "streaming page" at the FNF web site makes it clear that you can literally use up all of your waking hours per day for the rest of 2021 and still not exhaust what is being added in real time, but...

...a look back at 60s TV noir as encompassed by the "straggler" anthology shows is an interesting exercise in time-travel, back to a time when characters had only one hour (and sometimes less) to "make their case" as part of dark, often macabre tale. AHH was certainly hit-and miss, but when it hit, it had some great moments. When time permits, I'll cover that in more detail.