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Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Coyote Moon (1959)
Motoring back to California, with a slight hitch on the way
Hitchcock's personal favorite among his own films, Shadow of a Doubt, intersects in this episode with TV's "Petticoat Junction," insofar as the secondary male lead of the film, MacDonald Carey, matches wits against a very scrubby cigarette-bumming Edgar Buchanan here. A full-time career can be had just trying to track which Hitchcock film actors appear in which, if any, episodes of both this series and the shorter-lived but more cinematic "Alfred Hitchcock Hour" which followed it. Try a second career at comparing the similar settings of various episodes, for example, this one with another set on the sandy highways of the Southwest, "Escape to Sonoita," starring the very young Burt Reynolds, who faces more dangerous strangers than the freeloading "tramps" of this episode.
If you find yourself as annoyed and bored as the traveling professor (Carey) is with the excesses of the hitchhikers the supposedly pregnant daughter, the menacing son, and the old father (Buchanan), then just wait for the payoff of the ending. The coyote in the protagonist's nature emerges just when it's most needed!
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: And the Desert Shall Blossom (1958)
A mini-Western with a twist à la Hitch
Somewhere in Nevada two old codgers eke out a living, but they face their greatest challenge when a stranger from the East shows up in a broken-down car. The local sheriff advises them to abandon their digs in favor of what we would called "assisted living." But, one of the old men dismisses the notion of being among a bunch of old folks, "just sitting around waiting to die." The other man is none other than "Uncle Charley" (actor William Demarest) seven years prior to his My Three Sons run.
The stranger is played by actor Mike Kellin, who was featured on the New York stage in Rodgers' & Hammerstein's often-overlooked Pipe Dream.
The usual Hitchcock ingredients are here, especially humor, colorful dialog, and serviceable scene music which has been recycled from other similarly light-hearted episodes. And, as per usual, someone meets death.
The Counterfeit Traitor (1962)
Top-drawer postwar thriller boasts behind-the-scenes genius
Thanks to cable TV, I have seen this one a few times now, and I can at least begin to explain its unflagging charms...
Aside from the lead, played with great subtlety by William Holden, who seems to have inherited the mantle of mature-all-American-trustworthy hero from Gary Cooper, this film offers pure cinematic eye-candy as well as delights in sound effects and background music. But why, I wondered, do I love it enough to weigh in here? There are, after all, plenty of other good or even better war films peppered with those ultimate sinister players, the Nazis (although this film does excel in casting mostly German actors in those roles, yielding a chilling verisimilitude).
The answer: this film looks and sounds so much like the work of Alfred Hitchcock, whom I hold in highest esteem. And sure enough, IMDb makes it possible to learn the name of the set decorator, Samuel Comer, responsible for both To Catch a Thief and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Composer Alfred Newman apparently collaborated with Hitchcock only once, on Foreign Correspondent, but his music captures the tension-laden sweep of any of "Hitch's" more frequent musicians. Above all, perhaps, the script for The Counterfeit Traitor provides the best reason for re-watching it. Well into the story, Holden and Lilli Palmer, playing a German woman full of surprises, are forced to take stock of what they are thinking... in the battle of Good versus Evil, the Good, as Holden's character argues, must often choose an evil to vanquish the greater Evil. Timely talk for 2001!