Breakdown

A "water-cooler" entry-- I expect people all over the country were talking about this tense 30 minutes the next day. Big-wig executive Joseph Cotton is mistaken for dead, and he better figure out a way to let the authorities know before they begin the slice and dice of the coroner's table. Trouble is that he's totally paralyzed except for gradual movement in a little finger. Will that be enough? We suffer bucket-loads with him as the gurney edges ever closer to the coroner's scalpel.

Really off-beat and well-thought-out premise with fine ironical ending. Don't overlook the first five minutes even though it's an uneventful set-up for what follows. Because there we understand that Cotton really does deserve to suffer some poetic justice, extreme though it is. If you think about it, there's a moral here. Anyway this is one of the initial episodes that really put the series on the TV map and continues to pack a wallop fifty years later.

This has to be one of the creepiest films I've ever seen. It's a good thing that Hitchcock had his TV series where he could direct this episode. To run this story any longer than the 25 minutes would have seemed to drawn out but this story fits just perfectly in the allotted time. It's a chilling and suspenseful story that is imaginatively shot from one person's perspective. I won't say more; just see it.

(Even being a big Hitch fan I had never seen any of his TV shows; now it's so easy to see just the episodes he directed through iTunes. This was the first episode I've seen and it definitely lives up to the Hitchcock brand.)

Exceptional episode, directed by Hitchcock himself and starring an old Hitchcock familiar (Cotton), about a businessman on his way back from a vacation. He ends up in a terrible accident and essentially is left for dead. When his body is finally retrieved from the wreck, he is taken to the nearest county morgue. There's only one problem: he isn't dead, just paralyzed, the result of the steering wheel crushing his chest (remember those days?) and the force of the impact breaking his neck. Cotton spends most of the episode with eyes open, unblinking and mouth agape, as we listen to his anguished thoughts via voice-over. This is an absolutely unnerving episode, and has to be among the 10 best from this series.

"Breakdown" is a famous but very, very, very disturbing installment of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". It also received an Emmy Award for its editing.

When the story begins, you see that Willam Callew (Joseph Cotten) is a rich but very hard man. He's humorless and when he has an older employee fired, he complains to his friend that the man should essentially take it and stop whining...and not be so emotional.

A bit later, Callew is driving home and a horrible accident occurs. Many folks are killed and he's completely paralyzed from head to toe. He cannot talk nor close his eyes and by all appearances he is dead. But he is alive and you hear Callew's voice as he talks to himself. This continues for about 80% of the episode...and when they wheel him into the morgue, it's quite disturbing! Does he stand a chance of anyone noticing that he isn't dead....just very, very badly injured.

This is well made...no doubt about it. But it's also very disturbing and something that some might just want to pass on because of it.

All you need to know about this episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show going in are these three things: 1) Hitchcock directed it, 2) Joseph Cotten is the star (formerly of Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt), and 3) most of this episode takes place after a car crash, which has left Cotten's character for all intents and purposes dead... but not really. What happens in this tale of mortal desperation is that Cotten's character - kind of unlikable at the start but not an awful person - is in a tight spot inasmuch that he's paralyzed, but not dead. Hitchcock and his editor make great use of narration here, which is a tricky aspect in a visual medium but works here because it's all about the intensity of this man's thoughts, which are lucid. It's a really tragic tale, when you think about it, but made absolutely gripping by the stakes and danger of life vs death.

How it finally gets resolved is kind of touching, if, for some, may seem kind of sappy. But Cotten really sells it with his voice and even his face and eyes, frozen as they are, because of how his character is set up and the follow-up happens. This is the kind of material that the Twilight Zone would go for years later, and I mean that as a compliment. It's among Hitch's best work in the 50's, for TV or film.