“The Master of Suspense,” Alfred Hitchcock, was born on this day in 1899. He directed some of Hollywood’s greatest films including The Birds, North By Northwest, Suspicion, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Rear Window – Just to name a few. Recently, I found that there is an Alfred Hitchcock Presents channel on Roku. It plays back to back episodes of the series and it is fantastic.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents had a total of seven seasons. The show was expanded to an hour long and it was retitled the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. There were a total of three seasons of that show. In total, ten seasons of amazing stories filled with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. I could spend the rest of this blog naming all of the stars who appeared on the show. Instead, I’ll just list a few:
Vincent Price, Robert Vaughn, Clint Eastwood, Peter Lawford, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Audrey Meadows, Robert Duvall, Thelma Ritter, Robert Loggia, Joan Fontaine, Walter Matthau, Joseph Cotten, Burt Reynolds, Vera Miles, Peter Lorre, Bette Davis, Charles Bronson, Peter Falk, Roger Moore, Cloris Leachman, and SO many more!
The show was created, produced, and hosted by Alfred Hitchcock. It debuted in October of 1955. By the time the show aired, he had been directing films for over 30 years. The show opened with a profile of Hitch (that he drew) and the real Hitch walking into the profile. The theme was Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette.” After the title sequence, Hitchcock almost always greets his audience with, “Good evening,” and proceed to dryly introduce the story from an empty studio or from the set of the current episode.
The show has been compare to the Twilight Zone in that the stories often have a surprise ending. Many of the Twilight Zone guests also guest starred on Hitchcock. You would think that as a famous director, Alfred would have directed a lot of the episodes of the series. That is not this case. Hitchcock only directed 17 of the 267 filmed episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents — four during the first season and one or two per season thereafter.
In 2001, Time magazine named Alfred Hitchcock Presents as one of “The 100 Best TV Shows of All Time.”
This show falls into my “must see” classic TV shows. It is SO good!
Happy Heavenly Birthday, Hitch!
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 
Great classic TV for sure!
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fantastic move-maker. ‘Rear Window’, ‘North by Northwest’, ‘Dial M for Murder’ ,’Strangers on a train’,among my favorites of the pre-70s era. Not sure if I’ve seen any of his TV show though. Here’s a random fact I picked up last week – GEorge Martin’s ideas for the string sounds on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ were largely inspired by the ‘Psycho’ score.
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