Sunday, July 15, 2012

1961 - BANG YOU'RE DEAD, 1962 - I SAW THE WHOLE THING, a couple of Hitchcock TV films

Bang You're Dead is a Hitchcock directed episode from his half hour anthology series.  The story is about a little boy pretending to be a cowboy who manages to get his hands on a real gun and bullets.  The suspense is created by having the boy walk around his neighborhood pretending to shoot his neighbors.  Will he actually pull the trigger of the real gun?  This is a well done short film from Hitchcock using his Spellbound POV trick, an over sized prop of a hand and a gun pointed at people to ramp up the tension.

I Saw the Whole Thing has Hitchcock working with his Trouble With Harry star John Forsythe again.  Forsythe is a writer involved in a court trial where he as been accused of being a hit and run driver.  This is yet another version of Rashomon with the writer attempting to discredit each of the witnesses by showing how they all saw different versions of the accident.  Hitchcock had done a similar TV show called Incident at a Corner, the nature of truth was obviously a theme that interested him.

However,  I Saw the Whole Thing doesn't really have any special Hitchcock touches and falls back on John Forsythe to carry the film.  This is mostly a standard courtroom drama with the expected twist ending that his TV shows always had.

30 minutes,  Bang You're Dead.

60 minutes,  I Saw the Whole Thing.

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