The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Did You Know?

• In 1985, NBC aired a new TV movie pilot based upon the series, combining four newly filmed stories with colorized footage of Hitchcock from the original series to introduce each segment.
• American rapper Eminem used the theme song in his song "Alfred's Theme" from his album Music to Be Murdered By – Side B (2020).

History

In 1962, the show expanded from 25 to 50 minutes and was renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Of its 93 longer episodes, Hitchcock directed just one: the fourth, "I Saw the Whole Thing," starring John Forsythe. The final new episode aired on June 26, 1965, but the series has remained popular in syndication for decades, airing in the UK on Sky Arts.

Guest stars and other actors

The series featured a core group of frequent performers, including Patricia Hitchcock, Dick York, Robert Horton, James Gleason, John Williams, Robert H. Harris, Russell Collins, Barbara Baxley, Ray Teal, Percy Helton, Phyllis Thaxter, Carmen Mathews, Mildred Dunnock, Alan Napier, Robert Vaughn, and Vincent Price. A vast array of other well-known actors also made appearances, such as Clint Eastwood, Peter Lawford, Robert Redford, Inger Stevens, Cedric Hardwicke, Steve McQueen, Audrey Meadows, Bruce Dern, Robert Duvall, Walter Matthau, Robert Loggia, George Segal, Laurence Harvey, Claude Rains, Joan Fontaine, Thelma Ritter, Sam Reese, Dennis Morgan, Joseph Cotten, Burt Reynolds, Vera Miles, Tom Ewell, Peter Lorre, Bette Davis, Dean Stockwell, Jessica Tandy, John Gavin, Charles Bronson, Michael Rennie, Roger Moore, John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Teresa Wright, Leslie Nielsen, Ricardo Montalbán, Henry Silva, Harry Dean Stanton, John Forsythe, Cloris Leachman, and Barbara Bel Geddes, among many others.

Episodes

The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ran for three seasons from September 1962 to June 1965, bringing the total number of episodes from its predecessor, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to 361. One of its episodes, "An Unlocked Window" from 1965, won an Edgar Award in 1966 for writer James Bridges. The 1962 episode "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was kept off NBC by the sponsor, who found the ending too gruesome. In it, a magician's helper, unaware the sawing-a-woman-in-half trick is an illusion, actually cuts a woman in half. This episode later entered syndication and is now in the public domain.

In other media

The theme music for Alfred Hitchcock Presents was Charles Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette," a piece from 1872 that Hitchcock first encountered in F. W. Murnau's 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Remembering its impact, he chose it for his television show, which gave the composition its largest audience. To ride the show's popularity, a series of literary anthologies under the Alfred Hitchcock Presents banner was released. One such collection, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV, gathered tales deemed too controversial for broadcast, though some were later adapted. In 1958, Imperial Records put out Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Music to Be Murdered By, where Hitchcock introduces each story while humorously describing his own failed attempts to fix a leaky faucet, culminating in his "drowning." The ghost stories are narrated by John Allen, who also wrote four of them, including adaptations of Saki's "The Open Window" and works by Walter R. Brooks. On August 1, 2024, a stage musical adaptation was announced for a March 2025 world premiere at the Theatre Royal, Bath, with music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak, a book by Jay Dyer, and direction by John Doyle.