Forgotten Television: Alfred Hitchcock Presents 1985

In the 1980s, a slew of anthology series hit the airwaves and one of the longer lasting was a re-launch of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  The new series started as a television movie on NBC based on the original series that ran from 1962 to 1965.  The movie remade four stories done during the original run of the show and then used colorized footage of Alfred Hitchcock to introduce each segment.  The series ran for one season on NBC and then for three additional seasons on the USA Network.  Throughout the production, the series saw many illustrious guest directors like Tim Burton, David Chase, Burt Reynolds, Atom Egoyan, Joan Tewkesbury, and Thomas Carter.  Maybe even more impressive is the star power that starred in episodes.  With actors like Ned Beatty, John Huston, Melanie Griffith, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Annette O’Toole, and  Bruce Davision, and those are just the actors from the pilot movie.  Many big-name stars made guest appearances throughout the four-season run.

The stories presented often involve a hook or twist at the end that put the events of the rest of the episode into perspective and shift the initial point of view.  In Man from the South for example, Steven Bauer plays a Gambler in Vegas who makes a bet with an older man, Carlos (John Huston) that the gambler’s dependable cigarette lighter will light ten times in a row.  If he wins, he gets a car, if he loses the man chops off one of his fingers.  But in the end, the old man isn’t exactly what he seems, which we find out from his wife, Rosa (Kim Novak).

Similarly, in Incident in a Small Jail, we meet Larry Broome (Ned Beatty), a traveling salesman who had a great prior day, but his current day isn’t going so well.  He picks up a hitchhiker played by Lee Ving who earlier we saw standing over a dead girl’s body, he is shady and acting suspicious.  Luckily Larry is able to get rid of him at a gas station, but is pulled over by the sheriff for running a red light.  He is being questioned at the jail due to a computer glitch when the hitchhiker is arrested for the murder of the girl, which has caused the men of the town to form a lynching party.  Larry is almost dispatched by the mob, before being saved at the last minute and finally released.  Larry was hiding his own secrets that the police never suspected!

Few of the episodes involved the actual supernatural, but there were a couple, like Night Creatures which comes near the end of the series late in season four.  A journalist, Holly (Stevie Louise Valllance) who has a reoccurring nightmare of being taken by a mysterious horseman is tasked with covering a rock star who is doing a show at a new night club called “Night Creatures”.  Her boyfriend joins her along with her occult obsessed photographer.  But when they find out that the Rock Star who poses as a vampire as a gimmick, really is a vampire and believes Holly to be the reincarnation of his true love, a fight for life ensues. Holly is saved, but then just like her dream, is taken by a mysterious rider.  Leaving her boyfriend and coworker to vow to never stop looking for her.  The episode didn’t really have a twist ending and was constructed as a backdoor pilot but was not picked up probably because it lacked the same sense of quality that other episodes had.

The new series combined both original work with reimaginings of older episodes.  And most had that iconic Hitchcockian twist to them.  The format for the two series remained the same with Alfred Hitchcock introducing each one in a morbidly humorous way.  For new episodes they used archive footage since the man had passed away in 1980 at the age of 80.  Overall, the series was well done with some great performances and gloriously macabre stories with a perfect balance of humor and terror.