Television: rediscoveries

If you, too, are a fellow “Mad Men” addict who finds it hard to get from Sunday to Sunday (or Monday to Monday, if like us you download from iTunes), here’s a midweek fix for you, courtesy of Hulu: the half-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” These were done in the late 1950s … you can imagine Don and Betty, pre-kids, kicking back in the evening with a drink and a smoke and enjoying these little tales of deception and intrigue.

They really are quite good, and Mr. Hitchcock’s mini-monologues before the commercial breaks are wonderful. The man had presence. He had issues, but he had presence. I can just imagine Don squirming in his seat and muttering to Betty, “Don’t they understand that without advertising, they wouldn’t get their programs on the air?” (A point that’s frequently made about “Mad Men” is that Sterling Cooper is an unusually behind-the-times ad firm. Even in the early 1960s, there were firms that were hiring and promoting women and Jews, and appealing to youth culture, and using irony. Mr. Hitchcock’s delightfully insulting intros to the commercials were clearly beloved by his advertisers, but I can’t imagine Sterling Cooper allowing this for one of their clients.)

I’ve always been more of a book than a movie person, and my first introduction to Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t as a director, but as an editor of a mystery magazine and subsequent anthologies with titles like “Stories to Stay Awake By” and “Slay Ride.” Nedra Tyre, Henry Slesar, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block … ah, the names bring back happy times. I had a whole stack of those paperback anthologies as a kid. I bought a “Best Of” anthology about a year ago, to take on the train when I was going to New York to meet my publishers, which is probably what led me to start watching his show on Hulu.

One thing that hit me when I was reading the anthology last year, and that is incredibly noticeable in the show: there didn’t used to be no-fault divorce. Which meant that, if your marriage wasn’t working out, you either had to find cause, or if the divorce was agreed upon by both parties, one partner had to take the fall (I think “mental cruelty” was a common out), or else … you got creative. Which of course is where the murder mystery tends to start. It’s really astonishing how many of his stories (magazine and television) are about husbands and wives killing each other. Now, I’m hardly politically correct enough to maintain that a murder-mystery show ought to be providing us with good role models, but is it completely out of the question that, at least once in a while, the husband and wife might not be adversaries but co-conspirators? It is in the world of the Hitch, apparently.

Another thing to pay attention to if you watch the show is how, if the criminal gets away at the end, Mr. Hitchcock’s final monologue always includes the fact that they were ultimately convicted offscreen. He says this with a Severus Snape-like contemptuousness, and although Mr. Hitchcock’s default vocal setting appeared to be “contempt,” it does seem rather special in this case. I think the network, or the advertisers, were pushing him to maintain a certain morality to the show that he didn’t agree with. “But of course, they were cot and brot to jus-tisssssssss,” he spits.

At any rate, do check them out. They’re quite fun. You can start with this one, if your populist rage against bankers hasn’t been assuaged by Ben Bernanke’s assertion that the recession is over. What revenge against bankers looked like in a simpler time …

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