A TV Review by MIKE TOONEY:


HITCHCOCK HOUR Black Curtain

“The Black Curtain.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 9). First air date: 15 November 1962. Richard Basehart, Lola Albright, Harold J. Stone, Gail Kobe, James Farentino, Lee Philips, Celia Lovsky. Teleplay: Joel Murcott. Based on the novel The Black Curtain (1941) by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Sydney Pollack.

   During the course of getting mugged by some street punks, Phillip Townsend (Richard Basehart) gets conked on the noggin; when he comes to, he has an entirely different identity. What he’s forgotten is his criminal past, which soon catches up with him when a man tries to kill him in the park ….

   You can hardly go wrong with a Cornell Woolrich story; just about everything he wrote had cinematic potential. This particular narrative had already been dramatized on radio and even filmed as Street of Chance (1942) with Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor, except a building had to fall on the protagonist to induce his personality change.

   Richard Basehart made quite a splash with his psycho cop killer in He Walked by Night (1948). He also appeared in Tension (1949), Fourteen Hours (1951), The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), The Intimate Stranger (1956), Portrait in Black (1960), The Paradine Case (1962, live TV), The Satan Bug (1965), 110 episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68), and The Great Bank Hoax (1978).

   Lola Albright appeared in The Good Humor Man (1950), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), five appearances on Burke’s Law, one episode each of McMillan & Wife and Columbo, and 81 episodes of Peter Gunn (1958-61) as Pete’s girlfriend Edie.

Hulu:   http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi836239385/