Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season 6 [DVD]

We love Hitchie’s stuff, amusing, ham and thoroughly good.

Great DVDs. Classic, well worth the money

good product shipped poorly.

These dramas, thrillers and mysteries were incredibly popular back when I first saw them in the sixties. They were shot on 35mm black and white film and still look terrific. This was always a show to look forward to. Since then its popularity has endured - Time Magazine named ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ one of ‘The 100 Best TV Shows of all time’ and the Writers Guild of America ranked it #79 on their list of the 101 Best Written TV Series tying it with ‘Monty Python's Flying Circus’, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’.Aside from its incredibly starry cast list, it also attracted top directing talent including Robert Altman (M*A*S*H), Arthur Hiller (Love Story) and William Friedkin (The Exorcist). Plus, the writers were also absolutely top notch and included Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Roald Dahl (You Only Live Twice, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids) and Eric Ambler (The Cruel Sea).You get 38 episodes of about 25 minutes each here in Season Six, which is a whopping 16 hours of top notch telly. In this season, Alfred Hitchcock actually directed the episodes ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’ (written by Roald Dahl) and ‘The Horseplayer’ starring Claude Rains (Casablanca). And Paul Heinreid (Casablanca, actor) directed several of the episodes including "The Landlady' written by Roald Dahl and starring Dean Stockwell (Best Actor, Cannes Film Festival, 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'). 5 stars.

For those who like classic television, it doesn't come any better than Alfred Hitchcock Presents (and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour). The master of suspense had droll, dryly sardonic opening and closing appearances, in this ten year anthology.Perhaps the most subversive change lay in the series treatment of wrong-doers. Americas Morale Guardians, otherwise known as the Department of Standards and Practices, insisted that criminals be apprehended and punished on screen to teach the audience that crime does not pay.This made for a predictable and boring climax, as it was impossible for the bad guy to win. What this show did was to transpose this comeuppance from the story to Hitchcock's humorous epilogues. This allowed the viewer to take what Hitchock was saying with a pinch of salt, as he blatantly thumbed his nose to the censors.In one example, he "reassures" the viewer (with a nod and a wink), that the killer did not get away with it because, "His dog, Cassandra, was really a detective in disguise and turned him in at the next town. It's getting so a man can't even trust his best friend."As justice had prevailed, this was enough to keep the censors at bay. This allowed the story-lines to end on screen with a grotesque twist, while transferring the deadening element of predictability to the easily ignored epilogue.There is a terrific variety of episodes. You never know whether a given episode will be serious or light-hearted, or whether there will be a happy ending or a tragic one. Each one keeps you guessing, and most have a memorable twist at the end.