Triumph

The only reason I watched this one through was because I like to watch Jeanette Nolan give her dark, atmospheric performances. The screen's black and white Lady Macbeth to Orson Welles plays her part with the usual vocal mocking menace. Despite all this even a great character actress with a scalpel cant pull off the operation of saving this story.

The young missionaries are just too saintly. The plot is wearisome and the ending is exasperating as it asks the viewer to review so much of what is seemed to be known and fill in with highly implausible conclusions.

Ed Begley has several scenes here as an impassioned lover type at heart. He actually handles this pretty well despite severe miscasting. The Jungle atmosphere is well done and especially well photographed. There is a long early sequence on a boat at night that is beautiful to look at.

But it's true the twists don't really hold up once you know what is going on and the final fade out is almost totally baffling despite some repeated shots and off camera lines to try to help it. It's kind of a mess this episode really, starting with the title that seems to have nothing to do with the show, and a lot of it is slow melodrama. It doesn't feel like a Hitchcock episode, to its credit it feels like a feature, but one that doesn't add up. The sum is less than the total of the parts.

I gotta tell you that I watch this episode nightly!!

I love the intrigue and undertow of desire and emotions that the players evoke. I LOVE this episode and give it all stars!!

I am addicted to watching it every night!

Brenda Easter.

I don't know where to begin. To start with, Jeanette Nolan is a vicious beast. She has no kindness in her. I guess, discussion makes her out to be quite a good doctor, but she has no compassion for anyone and reputation is everyone. Ed Begley is her husband. They are missionaries in a jungle in India. When a young couple show up to help them, she sees the young woman as the devil. But what happens next is so obtuse as to ruin anything. If the older lady went in with the scalpel....? What was in the grave? Couldn't Begley have yelled out that it's not his wife? And what the hell is going on in that place. How could the two of them stand to be around each other. She offers him nothing but criticism. Not well written and only put together for shock value.

Often, I have noticed that many of the one hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock's show simply didn't have enough story to justify the 60 minute time slot. As a result, a few of the episodes really drag. "Triumph", however, is quite the opposite...an episode which might have worked as a 90 or even 120 minute program but didn't work at 60 minutes because so much of the story seemed missing. As a result, some of the story just didn't make sense...as if important parts were edited out of the story.

The Fitzgibbons (Ed Begley and Jeanette Nolan) are medical missionaries to some far off country (it seems like India but they never mentioned the place by name)....much like the famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer. However, unlike Schweitzer, Mr. Fitzgibbons is an incompetent doctor and his wife often works to hide this. This part of the story is completely unnecessary and really confuses the story.

The Spragues are missionaries who have come to visit the Fitzgibbons family. However, Mrs. Fitzgibbons is an angry, strange woman who thinks the Spragues are there to 'steal' their mission for themselves. This is confusing, since Mrs. Fitzgibbons is very possessive of the mission...yet she seems to hate her husband and even the work they do.

Where does all this go? Well, to very strange places indeed. I'd like to say it made a lot of sense...but it didn't. What was really confusing was Begley's actions late in the show...as well as Mrs. Sprague's. Overall, a very confusing episode that left me feeling a bit unsatisfied because the story simply didn't work and seemed to need a big re-write.