The Hitchcock Project--An Introduction

by Jack Seabrook

Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ran for ten seasons on CBS and NBC from 1955 to 1965. I was born in 1963 and was thus too young to see it or even be aware of it on its first run. I was also too young to see Hitchcock's Frenzy when it was released in 1972, so my first exposure to a Hitchcock film was his last, Family Plot, which came out in 1976. At some point around that time I discovered reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on local New York TV stations, and I was hooked right away.

Star Trek fans were probably the first to compile and publish detailed episode guides to a TV series, but I first encountered such guides in Don Rosa's Information Center, a regular column that ran in the fanzine, Rocket's Blast Comic Collector (RBCC), beginning in the mid-1970s. These were followed by Gary Gerani's book, Fantastic Television, which was released in 1977. I bought that book and wore it out, combing through the pages and checking off episodes I had seen. As good as Gerani's book was, it was missing one thing--an episode guide to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Undaunted, I began to compile one. I spent hours after school in the public library, poring over microfilm rolls of the New York Times TV listings to collect details about the series. On weekends, I took the train to New York City, where I became a regular visitor to the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts, home to a bound collection of old TV Guides, which provided more details about the shows. One Saturday, as I sat flipping through TV Guide volumes taking notes, Tony Randall sat down across from me and Jerry Stiller sat down next to me. They were there to do research of their own.

It was there that I discovered what I think was the first attempt to study the Hitchcock TV show in a scholarly fashion: an article from the fall 1971 issue of Cinema called "The Television Films of Alfred Hitchcock." This article only discussed the episodes directed by Hitchcock himself. Much to my dismay, the RBCC began to publish an episode guide to the Hitchcock series in 1978 ("based on data submitted by Bob Reed"). I had corresponded with Don Rosa about my intention to complete such a project, and he was kind enough to telephone me about it. I have never forgotten that phone call from someone I greatly respected and who would go on to become a well-known creator of comics himself.

After the initial disappointment of the RBCC episode guide, I decided to continue my work with the intention of publishing a book on the TV series. In the late '70s and early '80s, Alfred Hitchcock Presents could be seen in the middle of the night on New York stations. I would try to stay up, usually falling asleep at some point during The Tonight Show, or else I would set my alarm for 2:30 A.M. On the rare occasions when I actually managed to wake up and turn on my TV, I saw classic episodes like "The Dangerous People" and "A Night With the Boys."

By the early 1980s, publications such as Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine had begun to publish more detailed episode guides of series like The Twilight Zone, and books ("companions") about specific shows began to appear. Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion and David J. Schow's The Outer Limits: The Official Companion were favorite examples. I made a trip into the CBS offices in New York City, where I was given access to their old microfilm files on the Hitchcock series but, once again, I was "scooped" when John McCarty and Brian Kelleher's book, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: An Illustrated Guide to the Ten-Year Television Career of the Master of Suspense, was published in 1985, with a foreword by Robert Bloch.

McCarty and Kelleher's book led me to discard all of the notes on the series that I had compiled over the years. Their volume was a great resource; it lacked air dates and detailed credits and occasionally got plot details wrong, but it was the only place that collected so much information about the series and it made for a very handy checklist. On television, Alfred Hitchcock Presents returned, first on NBC and later on USA, with new episodes that ran on and off from 1985 through 1989. The series used colorized versions of the Hitchcock introductions from the original series and featured new versions of old episodes interspersed with original stories.

My hopes for writing a book on the Hitchcock show appeared dashed but my love for the series continued unabated. My wife and I married in 1988 and moved into an apartment where we spent most nights watching The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in reruns on the USA network. In the 1990s, Alfred Hitchcock Presents began to turn up here and there on emerging cable networks such as Nick at Nite and TV Land. I watched the occasional episode, such as "The Contest for Aaron Gold," but these runs seemed always to start with season one and rerun the same bunch of shows, petering out before reaching the later--and less familiar--seasons.

In 2001, The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion by Martin Grams Jr. and Patrik Wikstrom was published, with a foreword by Patricia Hitchcock. Despite receiving mixed reviews, this massive tome contains more information on the Hitchcock series in one place than any other source and is much more detailed than the 1985 book that preceded it. The most exciting development regarding Alfred Hitchcock Presents occurred in 2005, when Universal released season one on DVD. I am sure I was not the only Hitchcock fan who thought his dreams had come true! After decades of watching the shows on TV in syndicated reruns, I could at last possess all 39 episodes of the 1955-1956 season, to watch and treasure at leisure. The production of this first set was not perfect, since they were burned on two-sided DVDs that sometimes caused problems with quality (my copy of "Breakdown" does just that), but it was a thrill nonetheless, made more exciting by the prospect of future releases of the rest of the series.

In subsequent years, seasons two (2006) and three (2007) were released annually, just in time for Christmas. Then the delays began. It took two years for season four to come out (2009) and over two years for season five to appear (early 2012) Each series was a thrill to see, and I can only hope that the rest of the ten seasons will be released in time.

In the meantime, I had been writing about popular culture. My first book, Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown, came out in 1993, and my third, Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney, was published in 2006. In late 2010, I stumbled across the blog, A Thriller a Day, while looking for online reviews of the TV series Thriller, which was just then being released on DVD. I began following the blog and commenting, and this led to an invitation from Peter Enfantino, one of the authors, to write for another blog, bare bones e-zine. I began with a series of articles on Fredric Brown, supplementing my book with material I had uncovered in the years since it was first published. This led to my first series on classic TV, Fredric Brown on TV, which included Brown's work for Alfred Hitchcock Presents along with other series where his stories had been adapted.

When this series ended, I began a series called Robert Bloch on TV, which focused solely on that author's work as shown on the Hitchcock series. By this time, I had discovered that episodes that were unavailable on commercial DVDs could often be found online on channels such as Hulu or You Tube, placed there by fans. I also discovered that the final five seasons of the Hitchcock series were available from other fans on DVDs whose quality was not up to the Universal standard, but whose rarity made them irresistible.

As the Bloch series continued, I decided that I would finally fulfill a lifelong dream and write about the entire ten-year Hitchcock series, dividing it up not chronologically but rather by subject, whether it be by author or by another creative personality. Bloch was followed by a series on William Shatner's appearances on the show (Shatner Meets Hitchcock), then by a series on the Ray Bradbury episodes (Ray Bradbury on TV) and, most recently, by a series on the John Collier episodes (John Collier on TV). Along the way, I made a few decisions.

1. Enough has been written about the introductions by Alfred Hitchcock. The 2001 Companion transcribed all of Hitchcock's introductions, following the trend set by Zicree back in 1982. Yet next to nothing had been written discussing the actual episodes themselves in detail. I determined to focus on the stories rather than the frames.

2. Detailed cast and crew information is easily available on sites like imdb. I chose not to include detailed credits in my articles, instead focusing on important or interesting contributions and giving background on creative talents of interest.

3. Pictures are important. I chose to illustrate each article with a combination of magazine or book covers and screen grabs from the DVDs themselves. I am confident that this represents a fair use exception to any copyrights that exist. The website Galactic Central is an excellent source for old magazine covers.

4. Title cards are not necessary. After reproducing title cards for my first several articles, I gave up the practice because I don't think it adds anything to the analysis and is visually dull.

5. Links are useful. Whenever possible, I include links to a source to purchase a DVD of the episode being discussed or a place to view it online. This allows interested readers to watch the episode that inspired each article.

6. Read the stories or the books. In preparation for each article, I track down and read the short story or book from which the episode was adapted. This allows for a comparison with the filmed episode.

Now that I am committed to doing the entire series, I have decided to change the umbrella title for these articles to The Hitchcock Project. Articles will appear every other Thursday on the bare bones e-zine website for many years to come, as long as the site remains viable and I remain conscious, until every episode has been discussed. When it is all over, I hope to collect the articles into a book, either paper or an e-book. I offer sincere thanks to Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri, founders of bare bones, for providing a place to publish this work, and to everyone who reads and/or comments on the articles. Suggestions for topics are welcome. Henry Slesar, surely the most prolific writer on the series, will be profiled next, in a group of articles that will take about two years to complete.

Every so often I will update the episode guide, which begins below. I will provide links to the articles I have written on each episode in order of their network airing. The episodes will be coded with two numbers, the first representing the season aired, the second representing the order within that season (for example, the first episode of season one is coded 1.1, etc.). Happy reading!

8/29/22: An updated list of episodes discussed is here.

Shatner Meets Hitchcock Part Two: Alfred Hitchcock Presents "Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?" PLUS Mini Episode Guide to Shatner Meets Hitchcock

by Jack Seabrook

The title of the short story, “Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?” is based on a nursery rhyme, but the story concerns themes that are decidedly adult. Told in the third person by an omniscient narrator, the tale follows John Tuthill Crane, a 36-year-old mama’s boy who is on vacation at a resort hotel in Maine, missing his mother. As he practices the piano in the resort’s large recreation hall, a young woman approaches and asks him why he plays “like an old woman.” She sits down and plays the same piece with virility. Crane, it seems, was stricken with polio at age 18, and his imperfect form is contrasted with that of the young woman, whose beauty “seemed too close, as if a figure in a canvas was leaning out of its frame.” She is an Austrian emigrant who works in the resort’s gift shop.

The young woman, whose name is Lotte Rank, represents the possibility of a life beyond his mother and wants to take him to see a waterfall up a nearby mountain. Afraid to miss his mother’s nightly call at 8:30, he agrees to go later. Together, John and Lotte climb to the waterfall. Crane views everything that happens to him with the perspective of the cultured education that his mother has directed—his looks are almost Byronic, he plays Prokofieff and Debussy, he mentally compares Lotte to a painting by Trepolo or Delacroix, and when he is with her he thinks of her as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, after the poem of the same name by John Keats.

Torn between the safety of his mother and the risk of Lotte, John thinks “how Claire would like this”; he refers to his mother by her first name, demonstrating an uncomfortable level of familiarity. When he tells Lotte about Claire, however, the young woman calls her a “cannibal mother” who eats her young. Lotte leads John into the water, nude, quoting the nursery rhyme of the story's title when she tells him to “hang your clothes on a hickory limb,” but this time, unlike the mother of the rhyme who tells her child to stay away from the water, Lotte draws John into the life-restoring pool.

William Shatner and Gia Scala

The next day, shame causes John to avoid Lotte as he waits for his mother’s telephone call. That night, he and Lotte return to the waterfall and he again thinks of the Keats poem, remembering the line “And then I closed her wild, wild eyes with kisses four” and applying it to his situation. To John, Lotte is the woman from the poem--an enchantress who enthralls a knight--but this flesh and blood woman does not leave John “alone and palely loitering,” as in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Instead, her enchantment is delirious, not evil, and with her even his musical tastes change from the conservative Debussy to the more adventurous Schoenberg. John’s loyalties become divided and he begins to think of his mother as The Enemy. After a week of nights spent with Lotte, he misses his 8:30 PM call for the first time; when he returns to his room and his mother calls at 2 AM, she is angry and hurt. Lotte tells John that she wants to marry him but he fears his mother would disinherit him. Lotte begins to express her wish that Claire were dead; her devotion to John and her hunger for him seem to be prying him away from his mother’s emotional hold.

Claire telegraphs that she is coming to visit and Lotte suggests a trip to the waterfall, where they can push Claire over the precipice and it will look like an accident. Claire arrives the next day and, after dinner, the trio hike up to the waterfall. “For the first time in several days, [John] was reminded of his lameness” as his mother’s presence begins to sap his masculine will. At the waterfall, he pushes one of the women to her death. We only learn which one at the end of the story, as he relaxes in his room after an inquest has concluded that the death was accidental. Unfortunately for John, he killed Lotte and chose to stay with Claire, ensuring that he will never escape his mother’s domination.

Shatner and Jessie Royce Landis

The short story was written by Hugh C. Wheeler and Richard C. Webb and first published in the July 1948 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under the pseudonym of Q. Patrick. James P. Cavanagh adapted it for television and it was broadcast on Alfred Hitchcock Presents on April 10, 1960, during the show’s fifth season. Cavanagh kept the basic plot of the short story but made significant changes in its form in order to build suspense and flesh out characters and details.

The program begins with a framing scene that it will return to at the conclusion, as John Crane sits at the inquest following the death of an unknown person. Unlike the story, the show is narrated in the first person by Crane, and we hear his thoughts as the action unfolds onscreen. He tells the viewer, “I am a murderer,” and the suspense begins as we are left to wonder who he killed and why.

The scene then flashes back to one in Crane’s apartment, which is actually a private section of his mother’s house, where Claire helps John pack for his first trip without her and they share a farewell drink. He and his mother banter and he kisses her cheek with an affection that seems overly loving for a son toward his mother. This scene shows the uncomfortably close relationship between the two but it also portrays John as much more of a vibrant bachelor than in the story, where he is an effete cripple when he first encounters Lotte.

Gia Scala

John meets Lotte in the resort gift shop on his second day there and they flirt; the first trip to the waterfall follows and screenwriter Cavanagh updates Lotte’s history to make it fit the date (1960) and her age—instead of having left Austria in 1938, as in the story, she remained in Germany during and after the war until she could save enough money to emigrate. She talks of the satisfaction of working for what she has, in contrast to John, who gladly takes everything his mother gives him. The teleplay is bereft of the sort of cultural references that pepper the story; John thinks of the waterfall as having “a kind of enchantment,” but there is no reference to the Keats poem. John’s relationship with his mother is once again suspect when he tells Lotte that she is coming to visit and he describes her as young, gay and pretty.

Lotte and John share a dance in the empty dining room at the hotel; he proposes marriage at the waterfall and returns to his room, only to find his mother there waiting for him. There is no angry telephone call, as in the story—in the show, she appears as if by magic. She tells John that she looks forward to meeting his friend Lotte but hides her stricken look behind his back. John returns immediately to the intimate relationship he had shared with Claire before he left on his trip. They share breakfast and he lights two cigarettes, giving one to her. The scene is presented as if they are lovers who have spent the night together.

By the waterfall

In a key scene absent from the story, Claire visits Lotte in the gift shop, knowing full well who the young woman is but not revealing her own identity as she obliquely insults the immigrant by suggesting that she wants to marry John in order to gain American citizenship. Lotte later joins John and Claire for tea and recognizes the woman from the gift shop as her lover’s mother; an awkward scene follows and Lotte excuses herself as Claire chats with John, who has no idea that his mother has already insulted his girlfriend. At the waterfall again, Lotte and John argue and she urges him to tell Claire of their engagement. Back at the hotel, John sits like a dog at Claire’s feet and does not have the nerve to tell her about his plans.

The problem comes to a head as Lotte tells John she intends to go away unless he tells Claire about their decision to marry. She suggests taking Claire to the waterfall to tell her the news; John thinks (in voiceover narration) that Lotte wants Claire killed there, but she does not express this directly. Back at the waterfall, the women lean over the edge to admire the view and John rushes forward to shove one of them to her death. We see a female body fall to its death in a long shot that is surprisingly graphic.

Jessie Royce Landis

The show then returns to the present and the frame story of the inquest; as the death is ruled accidental, the camera pulls back to reveal Claire comforting John as they head for home, his disabling limp more noticeable than ever before.

Despite a strong cast and crew, “Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?” is not terribly suspenseful because its ending is never in doubt. John is so weak and so devoted to Claire that it is hardly surprising when he chooses to murder Lotte.

Writer James P. Cavanagh (1922-1971) wrote 15 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and also adapted the first episode of Thriller,  “The Twisted Image.” “Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?” was directed by Alfred Hitchcock Presents regular Herschel Daugherty, who directed 24 episodes of the half-hour series (including “The Cream of the Jest” and “The Cure”) and three episodes of the hour series (including “A Home Away From Home”).

Hugh C. Wheeler (1912-1987) and Richard W. Webb (1901-1966), who wrote the story on which the show was based, used the pseudonyms Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge. They wrote many novels together and won an Edgar Award for The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow (1961), a collection of stories in which this one was included. Although the story had been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine under the name of Q. Patrick, the collection was published under the name of Patrick Quentin. Wheeler also wrote the books for Broadway shows, winning Tony Awards for A Little Night Music (1973), Candide (1974), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). “The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow,” the story that lent its title to the authors’ collection, was adapted for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and was broadcast on April 14, 1964.


The cast of “Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?” included William Shatner, who was born in March 1931 and was likely 28 years old when this show was filmed (the character of John Crane was 36 in the story). A look at Shatner’s hair (or lack thereof) in this episode can be found here, were the author posits that this is one of the first shows where Shatner wore a toupee. In Shatner’s autobiography, he mentions this episode, commenting that “On Alfred Hitchcock Presents I pushed my wife off a cliff instead of my mother-in-law,” a summary that is not entirely accurate. Shatner's performance in this episode does not fit the character very well; he is too much of the bon vivant/young bachelor and not enough of the sheltered young man. Lotte should bring him out of his shell, but his personality does not evolve in the course of the episode. His final thrust toward the women at the waterfall features the sort of overacting that would later become his trademark.

The lovely Gia Scala (1934-1972) appeared twice on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and once on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, in “The Sign of Satan.” She was in movies and on TV from 1955-1969 and she died tragically at a young age. Read more about Gia Scala here.

Finally, Jessie Royce Landis (1896-1972) plays Claire, John Crane’s mother. Landis was a delightful actress who is best remembered for her roles in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959). She was in movies from 1930, on TV from 1951, and on stage for much of her career. In “Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?” she plays a role that is very similar to the one she played as the mother of Cary Grant’s character in North By Northwest, which had been released to great acclaim the year before. She did not appear in any other episodes of the Hitchcock TV series.

“Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?” is available on DVD or can be viewed online.

Shatner Meets Hitchcock Mini Episode Guide:

Episode title-“The Glass Eye”
Series-Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Broadcast date- 6 October 1957
Teleplay by- Stirling Silliphant
Based on-“The Glass Eye” by John Keir Cross
First print appearance-The Other Passenger: Eighteen Strange Stories (1944)
Notes
Watch episode
Available on DVD?-Yes

Episode title-“Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?”
Series-Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Broadcast date- 10 April 1960
Teleplay by- James P. Cavanagh
Based on-“ Mother, May I Go Out To Swim” by Q. Patrick
First print appearance-Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (July 1948)
Notes-see above
Watch episode
Available on DVD?-Yes

COMING IN TWO WEEKS: An eight-part series on Ray Bradbury’s contributions to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour!

Sources:

"The FictionMags Index." The FictionMags Index. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 July 2012. <http://www.philsp.com/homeville/FMI/0start.htm>.

"Galactic Central." Galactic Central. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 July 2012. <http://philsp.com/>.

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.

IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 23 July 2012. <http://www.imdb.com/>.

Keats, John. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The Oxford Book of English Verse. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 400-01. Print.

"'Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?'" Alfred Hitchcock Presents. CBS. 10 Apr. 1960. Television.

Quentin, Patrick. "Mother, May I Go Out To Swim?" Twentieth Century Detective Stories. New York: Popular Library, 1964. 112-26. Print.

Shatner, William, and David Fisher. Up till Now: The Autobiography. New York: St. Martin's, 2008. Print.

Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 23 July 2012. <http://www.wikipedia.org/>.

Shatner Meets Hitchcock Part One: Alfred Hitchcock Presents "The Glass Eye"

by Jack Seabrook

Early in his career as a television actor, William Shatner had a co-starring role in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, “The Glass Eye,” which was the first episode of the series’ third season. Broadcast on Sunday, October 6, 1957, at 9:30 PM over the CBS network, “The Glass Eye” was adapted by Stirling Silliphant from a short story of the same name by John Keir Cross. The story was first published in Cross’s collection, The Other Passenger: Eighteen Strange Stories (1944).

This little tale of horror is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator who relates the story of a woman named Julia: “gaunt,” with a long nose and an “uncanny genius for saying the wrong thing”—a spinster at age 42. She lives in a “little flat in West Kensington”—a section of London—and on her mantelpiece is a glass eye on a bed of black velvet. Five years ago, she lived in a small room in a house between West Kensington and Fulham (another part of London); her room had “yellow wallpaper” and her life was lonely and desolate.

Jessica Tandy

Cross’s brief mention of yellow wallpaper recalls the well-known 1892 story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman titled "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which a woman confined to a room by her husband descends into psychosis. Julia, in “The Glass Eye,” never married, but is trapped in her loveless and lonely life as much as any Victorian woman. She begins to see a way out of her misery one day when she takes her sister’s crippled son to the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham and sees “Max Collodi, The German Ventriloquist, with his amazing Dummy ‘George.’” Julia is captivated by the handsome Max; his act with the grotesque dummy is of little interest to her, but “all the empty years, the acres of desolation, had been leading up to this glorious climax.” She dreams of marrying him and goes to see his act every night for a week.

Max and George

The next week, Julia follows Max from music hall to music hall: “the foolish infatuation of an ageing woman of great ugliness for a Music Hall performer” causes her to quit her job and follow him as he tours England. She begins corresponding with him and sends a blurred snapshot of herself taken fourteen years earlier. He finally agrees to meet her at the Temperance Hotel in Blackpool—it is odd that a music hall performer would stay in a hotel where alcohol was banned, but perhaps this was because he wanted to be apart from other performers due to his secret.

Julia excitedly prepares for and attends the meeting, where Collodi sits facing her “behind a large mahogany table,” his dummy George “lolling grotesquely on a chair to his left.” Overcome by the desire to touch her idol, Julia approaches him and touches his cheek, causing him to fall over sideways from his chair. The dummy, George, screams and stands up on his chair, “his hideous painted face twisted with rage and fear and sorrow.” Julia laughs, screams, and kicks the figure on the floor; a glass eye pops out and rolls toward her. She picks it up and runs from the room, having learned the secret of Max and George—the “dummy” controlled the larger figure “by means of small pneumatic bulb controls.”

William Shatner and Rosemary Harris

As the story ends, the narrator tells us that the “terrible relic” (the glass eye) now sits on her mantelpiece. A year ago, he heard of a small traveling circus in Scotland with a clown named Maximilian, “a sad-faced, large-headed dwarf,” with a beautiful voice, who wears a “black patch over one of his eyes” when not performing.

“The Glass Eye” is a clever tale that asks the question, who is the gentleman and who, the dummy? Julia is described as ugly and she is an aging and lonely spinster. Max, the small man who pretends to be a dummy in order to survive, is intelligent, with a beautiful voice and enough talent to fool the public night after night. Yet when Julia discovers that the object of her affection is a fake, she is unable to see beyond the shallow appearance and into the heart of the man who possesses all of the qualities she truly desires. Why does Max wear an eye patch later on when traveling with the circus in Scotland? Perhaps it is in memory of the chance at love that he lost, when he almost took the bold step of revealing his true self to a woman and was jeered at in return.

George is revealed

To adapt the story for television, screenwriter Stirling Silliphant and director Robert Stevens had several challenges, the most significant of which was in convincing the audience that the figure supposed to be the ventriloquist was not obviously a dummy. This was done by having Tom Conway, who portrays Max, sit very still in his ventriloquist’s chair onstage, with one arm on his thigh and the other hidden behind George, the dummy. Watching the film carefully, one sees that he never moves any part of his body other than his lips and occasionally his head, supporting the notion that he is being controlled by the dummy. The scenes with Max and George are brilliantly conceived; Stevens uses a combination of long shots and medium shots to show the act without giving anything away. The key scene is at the end, in the hotel room, and again the man and dummy are posed together. It is only when the man falls to the floor and Julia crouches next to him that we see that it is clearly a dummy and not Tom Conway the actor.

The expressionistic camera angle shows Julia's inner turmoil.

Other changes made in the transition from story to small screen included strengthening the framing story, in which a man named Jim and a woman named Dorothy clean out Julia’s apartment after her death. Jim shows the woman (his wife?) the glass eye, and later he shows her theatrical programs and posters to illustrate the story he tells. William Shatner gives a great performance as Jim, holding the entire story together with his sensitive acting in the frame and with his narration that accompanies the flashbacks. Much of the narration is taken straight from the story, with phrases and remarks lifted intact.


Jessica Tandy, as Julia, also gives an outstanding performance, dramatizing what Jim’s narration describes. She often acts silently as his voice provides the details; as usual with this series, she is much more attractive than her character as described in the story, but she convincingly portrays a spinster who lives a life of loneliness. The most memorable shot in the episode is of George standing on the table in the hotel room, stamping his feet in anger and shame and yelling at Julia to get out. He then removes his grotesque dummy mask to reveal a small, aging man, with a look of sadness on his face that parallels that of Julia. In an incident absent from the story, he hops off the table and searches for the missing eye on the floor, as the camera fades from a close-up of the dummy’s head back to the framing narrative.

Hitch has a glass eye of his own!

The final shot of the film shows Max in the traveling circus, driving a horse-drawn cart. His head turns toward the camera and we see a black patch over his left eye. The effect is a good one when experienced as a simple twist ending, but without the narrator’s comments that are found in the story it leaves the viewer wondering why the small man wears the eye patch when it was the dummy that lost its eye.


Other pieces of the story left out in the TV version include literary devices such as a four-stanza poem written about Julia and a legend about a philosopher and a beggar; these serve to broaden the tale into one telling a universal truth, while the TV show is more narrowly focused on the story.

1st US edition

John Keir Cross, who wrote the original story, was a Scottish writer who lived from 1914-1967. In addition to the collection of stories where “The Glass Eye” was found, he wrote a science fiction novel called The Angry Planet. He is said to have been an insurance clerk, a hobo, and a traveling busker and ventriloquist, which (if true) gives added resonance to the story. He also wrote for BBC Radio.

Stirling Silliphant (1918-1996), who adapted the story for TV, was a prolific writer of television shows and movies. His credits include co-creating the series Route 66, creating the blind lawyer series Longstreet, and writing or co-writing films such as 5 Against the House (1955--from the Jack Finney novel), Village of the Damned (1960), The Towering Inferno (1974), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and In the Heat of the Night (1967), for which he won an Oscar.

“The Glass Eye” was directed by Robert Stevens (1920-1989), who directed 44 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and five episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as well as two episodes of The Twilight Zone. Previous episodes helmed by Stevens that I have analyzed include The Dangerous People and The Greatest Monster of Them All. On April 15, 1958, he was awarded the Emmy for Best Direction for a Television Series for "The Glass Eye"; this was the only Emmy won by a single episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Hour series in its ten-year run.

Jessica Tandy (1909-1994), who plays Julia, had a long career on stage and screen, appearing three times on Alfred Hitchcock Presents as well as in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). She won an Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

Tom Conway (1904-1967), who portrays Max, was the older brother of George Sanders and shared his mellifluous speaking voice. Born in Russia to English parents, the family moved back to England when the 1917 revolution broke out. Conway had a long and wonderful career in film, playing The Falcon in ten films and appearing in three classic Val Lewton chillers: Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). He can be seen in three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Rosemary Harris (1927- ) has the small role of Jim’s companion in the framing sequence; she also went on to a long career on stage and screen, including three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She appeared in three Spider-Man films as Peter Parker’s Aunt May.

Billy Barty

Patricia Hitchcock     (1928- ), Alfred’s daughter, has a small role as a hat clerk who sells a hat to Julia. Ms. Hitchcock appeared in ten episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including “The Cuckoo Clock.”

Billy Barty (1924-2000) stood three feet, nine inches tall and had a long career as an actor, from 1927 until his death in 2000. He formed The Little People of America, Inc., and also appeared in  “The Jar,” one of the best episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as well as an episode of Thriller. A website is devoted to Mr. Barty.

Paul Playdon, who portrays the boy who Julia takes to the music hall, was a child actor who grew up to write for TV; he penned the teleplay for the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode, “The Werewolf.”

Finally, William Shatner (1931- ) is Our Greatest Living Actor. Born in Montreal, Canada, he has starred in such series as Star Trek, T.J. Hooker, and Boston Legal. A true renaissance man, he has won Emmys for his TV work, written numerous books, and sung on record albums. His movie and TV performances are legendary and he is still performing regularly at age 81. He has an extensive website. I also recommend a visit to this website, which uses “The Glass Eye” as the basis for a study of Shatner’s use of a toupee.

“The Glass Eye” is available on DVD and can also been seen online.

Sources:

Cross, John Keir. "The Glass Eye." Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow. Ed. Ray Bradbury. New

York: Bantam, 1967. 84-99. Print.

"David Drake." Welcome -. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://david-drake.com/>.

"EBay." Electronics, Cars, Fashion, Collectibles, Coupons and More Online Shopping. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 July 2012. <http://www.ebay.com/>.

"Fantastic Fiction." Fantastic Fiction. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/>.

"The Glass Eye." Alfred Hitchcock Presents. CBS. 1957 Oct. 6. Television.

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.

"A Home for Your Books." LibraryThing. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://www.librarything.com/>.

IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://www.imdb.com/>.

"Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase." Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://www.isfdb.org/>.

"Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia." Goodreads. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://www.goodreads.com/>.

Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 8 July 2012. <http://www.wikipedia.org/>.