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Reviews
Perry Mason: The Case of the Caretaker's Cat (1959)
Weird and wacky
As the other reviews make clear, this has to be one of the craziest and most convoluted episodes in the entire PM series. A rich old man who's seriously ill - confined to his bed, in fact - plots to fake his death by having his caretaker burn down his house with another body inside, just to see how his heirs react.
There are only 99 things that can go wrong with this goofball scheme. Sure enough, the wealthy geezer croaks for real in the fire...or maybe he croaks before the fire. Stay tuned for all the nutty twists and turns, and you'll have to smile at the sheer silliness of it all.
There is an actual cat in the episode but fortunately he doesn't go up in flames with the geezer's mansion. At least no animals were harmed in the making of this program.
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Body in the Barn (1964)
Not bad
Like everybody else, I loved Lillian Gish's performance as the annoying busybody who sets off a crazy chain of fatal consequences in a bucolic bit of the American countryside. The two-wrongs-make-a-right plot is bitterly ironic, as befits the bitterly ironic lady played by Miss Lillian.
The problem, as one reviewer sourly notes, is that the plot turns on a ridiculously mistaken identification of, yes, the body in the barn. I know this was before the days of DNA analysis, but a glance at dental records would have easily confirmed that the corpse couldn't be the hen-pecked husband. There's some hand-waving about "quicklime," but that would have had no effect on those pesky little teeth. What can you say? Sometimes you really do have to suspend disbelief.
Meanwhile, the body count piles up pretty high for such a cozy drama, which in a way is also appropriate to bring out the nastiness underlying the pastoral surroundings. Lillian Gish easily dominates the proceedings, though the other actors also turn in fine performances. And thanks to one reviewer for reminding me of who Maggie McNamara resembled. Audrey Hepburn! Just couldn't quite put my finger on the resemblance as I watched the episode. Sorry to hear from other reviewers that she committed suicide.
Hitch as the scarecrow was also a funny bit. I wonder how he would have contributed to The Wizard of Oz.
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: The Second Verdict (1964)
Talk talk talk
I'm not as enthusiastic as other reviewers about this installment. I like action and suspense from my Hitchcock episodes, not talky disquisitions on legal ethics.
To be honest, the ethical issues hardly seem clear-cut to me. Are defense attorneys only supposed to defend innocent clients? Perry Mason had that luxury, but in the real world most criminal defendants are guilty, guilty, guilty. And their lawyers know that they are guilty, guilty, guilty. Does that mean the lawyers should run to the prosecutors with evidence against their clients? Then why bother with defense attorneys in the first place?
Beyond the legalities, the episode dawdles along with way too much talking and agonizing over the ethical conundrum. Things finally start to move at the end, but the padding is excessive throughout the middle half of the show.
I still give the episode five stars for Frank Gorshin's crazily over-the-top performance as the perp. He could genuinely scare any audience with his barely controlled psycho act. Speaking of Psycho, maybe we should have heard shrieking strings every time Gorshin appeared onscreen. Martin Landau chips in a solid performance as the tormented lawyer, though Gorshin overshadows him and everybody else in the episode.
The Twilight Zone: Young Man's Fancy (1962)
A boy's best friend is his mother
MeTV is running Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour back-to-back in late night, and I've gotten hooked on the black-and-white oldies. So when I watched Young Man's Fancy on TZ, I couldn't help thinking of Hitchcock's most famous protagonist, Norman Bates.
The TZ ep isn't nearly as violent as Psycho, of course. Nobody gets slashed in the shower, and Mom doesn't get mummified (mommified?) in the basement. In fact, there's no violence at all in the TZ ep, which pokes along rather sleepily.
The plot is simple: a mommy's boy husband wants to return to his (dead) mother's not-so-healthful embrace despite the pleas of his long-suffering bride. The twist ending is easy to guess, and the appeal of the episode is in the acting and overall mood of doleful desperation. It's an okay psychological study, though the lack of action has hurt the episode in the eyes of TZ fans.
The Twilight Zone: Four O'Clock (1962)
Heavy-handed even for Rod
As a number of other commenters have noted, Rod Serling was never known for subtlety. This episode scores political points with a baseball bat over the viewer's cranium. The preaching almost makes you want to disagree just for the sake of disagreeing. It would have been fun to get Solzhenitsyn's take on Serling's high-decibel crusade against anti-communists.
Leaving politics aside, Theodore Bikel's performance is hilariously over the top. I'm not sure if he was chewing the scenery as a consciously ironic comment on Serling's loud sermon. Or maybe he was just having so much fun he couldn't stop. Either way, his performance is the only thing that makes the episode worth watching. And it gets all five of the stars I awarded.
The twist ending is telegraphed from the start and can't possibly surprise anybody who doesn't doze off during the episode. Unfortunately, Rod was too busy yelling politics to plot a less predictable conclusion.
The Twilight Zone: A Quality of Mercy (1961)
Preach, Rod
Caught this episode last night on MeTV. As another commenter notes, Rod Serling and Twilight Zone are not known for subtlety. In this World War II installment, Serling pounds home the antiwar message with a sledgehammer. Others have recounted the plot, so I won't repeat it here.
Right from the start Serling telegraphs the resolution by giving the August 6, 1945 date. That's the day of the Hiroshima bombing, of course, and the beginning of Japan's surrender. So the viewer knows that, with the war almost over, the Americans will eventually hold back rather than risk a skirmish.
The role reversal with Dean Stockwell turning Japanese for a while is mildly surprising, though Stockwell's accent does come and go in the scene. The rest of the actors are competent enough, and the glimpse of Mr. Spock (without the pointy ears) is a fun moment.
Otherwise, it's a normal pulpit-pounding sermon from Serling on the horrors of war. I assume the "quality of mercy" speech from Rod right after news of the Hiroshima bombing is more heavy-handed irony. Serling does tend to lay on his effects with a very large trowel. If you like being preached at, you'll like this episode more than I did.
The House of Seven Corpses (1974)
They all looked pretty dead to begin with
Sometimes it's hard to tell the living from the dead, like when hammy actors are stuck in a slowly oozing wreck of a horror flick. For almost all of this godawful mess, we're treated to the filming of a horror-movie-within-a-horror-movie at some dump of a mansion. I don't know which is worse, the outside movie or the inside movie.
Finally, to end the insufferable boredom, a zombie or two - it's tough to keep track - wanders into the mansion at molasses speed and finishes everybody off. For good measure one of the zombies - I'm not sure which, and neither was the scriptwriter - hauls the blonde and freshly deceased ingénue off to the grave with him. They live coldly ever after. The other zombie apparently doesn't get any nookie for his efforts.
A few particularly hammy bits, especially from the movie-with-a-movie's dictatorial director John Ireland, are so goofy that they save this hunk of junk from the dreaded one-rating. But it's a long slow wait between the sort of entertaining bits. Any decent zombie would tell you to avoid the waste of time.