Revenge

Well the series starts out with a bang. Very good ending.

When Carl Spann (Ralph Meeker)'s wife Elsa (Vera Miles) is assaulted by an unknown attacker, he drives his still-incoherent wife around town, hoping she can point him out, so he can kill him.

As the debut episode, this is definitely a strong one. When you only have twenty minutes to tell a whole story, you have to be good. Hitchcock himself directs this one, and it has a nice plot with solid characters and better than average actors.

In many ways, this show is more like a series of mini-movies. And a little bit darker than "Twilight Zone". Well, maybe not darker. But set in more realistic settings than some of the "Twilight Zone" episodes. They are great companions.

I used to think this episode was highly original but I just discovered that the story is a copy from the first story in the first edition of the Crime Suspenstories Magazine, from 5 years early. The story is practically the same, except the victim on the magazine is the protagonist's father. Even so, it's a good episode. I think it's even better tham the original story from wich this derives. It has a tense atmosphere and is well directed. For those curious about it, I recomend to search for a copy of the first Crime Suspenstories edition to see how similar the stories are.

For the very first episode broadcast of his anthology TV series, Alfred Hitchcock directed this deceptively simple, powerfully subtle suspense drama, starring two leading movie actors: Ralph Meeker and Vera Miles.

The set-up is a normal situation: a newly married couple in a trailer park where Vera is convalescing after a nervous breakdown and Ralph is an engineer recently transferred to California and a new job.

The mood is so serene that it comes as a great shock when Ralph gets home from his first day at work and finds his wife unconscious, victim of an intruder's attack. The police have very little to go on, just the vague description of a man in a grey coat, and he's left with the overwhelming urge to get revenge on the culprit.

Hitch builds quiet but unrelenting suspense until violence leadsh to a surprise ending, all of it making perfect sense. Miles' acting of terror and shock is excellent, and Meeker's underplaying adds to the vignette's power.

Cameraman John Russell would later shoot Hitchcock's feature "The Wrong Man", and he does a fine job of executing the auteur's vision here, too.

A married couple played by Ralph Meeker and Vera Miles have moved into a trailer park in California, after she apparently suffered a nervous breakdown. She is adjusting well to a more mellow life, after her strict schooling as a ballerina. Meeker sees Miles' ballet dancing as fantasy and playing, wehre he is a practical work force type, an engineer.

But then he comes home from work to find her terror-stricken and mortified after, evidently, a man assaulted her in the trailer. The police investigate, but find but a few generic details to go on. Meeker spirals into swelling rage about what has happened, and he is obstinate in his resolution to kill the man accountable, if he can find him. Yet this story is not only playing on the violent in the mind of the spectator, us, pertaining to the murder, but in the assault on his wife, too.

The exposition not directly heading to the story's turning point, Alfred Hitchcock knew how to tell a story without having to tell us anything. Rape. Murder. Uncertainty. The dialogue is never corroborated or denied by the visual text, which is why there is such great tension owing to the incomprehensible eyewitness testimony of Miles, who pre-Psycho here shows us how riveting she can be in terrified close-up. There is even an interesting moment of fleeting lesbian undertones, yet the moment is not placed for such reasons.

The first episode ever of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, directed by the master himself, half an hour long, aired at 9:30 on CBS on a 1955 Sunday night, is not just a little thriller yarn watered down for the new medium; it is an indictment of the human belief that we can ever be certain of anything, ever. It is a commentary on appearance profiling in a decade when that probably was not something of which your average viewer could claim to be innocent.