Fri 21 May 2010
A TV Review by Mike Tooney: THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR “I’ll Be Judge — I’ll Be Jury.”
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[4] Comments
“I’ll Be Judge — I’ll Be Jury.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 21). First air date: 15 February 1963. Peter Graves, Albert Salmi, Ed Nelson, Sarah Marshall, Rodolfo Hoyos. Teleplay: Lukas Heller, based on the novel by Elizabeth Hely (Scribner, 1959). Director: James Sheldon.
Mark Needham (Peter Graves) is in Mexico with his wife Laura (Eileen O’Neill) when tragedy strikes. They get temporarily separated while on a picnic, and Laura is murdered. Much later, when Mark goes to the local authorities about finding her killer, Inspector Ortiz (Rodolfo Hoyos) not only indicates that he’s certain he knows who the killer is but also enlists Mark’s help in trying to get the murderer to tip his hand.
The prime suspect, Theodore Bond (Albert Salmi), lives and works in the same village, and Mark endeavors to ingratiate himself with Bond in a game of cat and mouse. Unfortunately, even a mouse that’s been backed into a corner can be very dangerous indeed ….
The two leads act very differently from their usual screen personas: Peter Graves, normally a level-headed responsible type, crosses over into barely contained rage at times, while Albert Salmi, whose villains were usually over the top, underplays his character as a craven coward barely able to maintain his pretense at being respectable.
Halfway through the story, the plot resets itself, with Ed Nelson and Sarah Marshall assuming greater prominence.
Peter Graves (1926-2010) had an extensive career in Hollywood, sometimes in crime dramas: Stalag 17 (1953), Black Tuesday (1954), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Naked Street (1955), 23 episodes of the TV series Court Martial (1965-66), 143 installments of Mission: Impossible (1967-73), The Underground Man (1974, as Lew Archer), Number One with a Bullet (1987), and 35 additional episodes of the new Mission: Impossible redux (1988-90).
Albert Salmi (1928-90) spent most of his career on television, with occasional forays into films: The Ambushers (1967), Night Games, the pilot plus 45 episodes of Petrocelli (1974-76), one Ellery Queen (1976), Love and Bullets (1979), and one of the best Murder, She Wrote segments, “Murder Takes the Bus” (1985).
You can see this episode on Hulu here.
Editorial Comments: Author Elizabeth Hely has four books including in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, three of them featuring Commissaire Antoine Cirret as detective, including I’ll Be Judge — I’ll Be Jury, the original title of which was Dominant Third in England.
Besides changing the detective’s name, the Hitchcock TV version also moved the locale from France to Mexico. Other changes to the story may also have been made, but these are the more obvious ones.
One of Hely’s other novels was made into a TV movie, The Smugglers, based on Package Deal (Robert Hale, UK, 1965). In it Donnelly Rhodes plays Antoine Cirret, while Shirley Booth is an American tourist in Europe who unwisely agrees to transport a religious statue from one country to another.
May 21st, 2010 at 8:25 pm
I don’t know where I was between 1988 and 1990, but I don’t remember seeing a single episode of the second series of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.
The reviews weren’t great, as I recall, but reading bad or indifferent reviews never stopped me from watching something I wanted to.
I loved the first series and tried to make sure that I never missed one, but I’m sure I did. I watched some of the first season on DVD recently, and while some of the magic was gone, I have to admit, I still enjoyed them immensely.
— Steve
May 22nd, 2010 at 12:49 am
Steve
We must have both been in the TWILIGHT ZONE. I don’t recall seeing this one either. I barely recall it even existed until someone mentions it.
May 26th, 2010 at 10:43 am
I’m a little late getting to this one, but a couple of odd coincidences occurred to me as I read this, and I pass them along here:
– The 1988 MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE revival was a reaction to a Writers Guild strike that year. The idea was to reuse scripts from the original show, rewritten as needed (sort of like the work of “W. Hermanos” on Warner Bros shows in a similar situation back in the 60s). Filming was done entirely in Australia, where Peter Graves had once headlined an early TV show called WHIPLASH. Other regulars included Greg Morris’s son Phil in his dad’s old slot, and a couple of Australian actors, Tony Hamilton and Thaao Penghlis, who’d had some success in US TV. They didn’t spend much on big-name guest stars; I seem to recall that the best-known one they ever got was (wait for it) Albert Salmi, who turned up as a really unpleasant neo-Nazi.
ABC kept the new M:I going through two production cycles before giving up on it in 1990.
– Back briefly to Albert Salmi: When he made his M:I appearance, his career had sort of withered. He’d moved away from Hollywood to Washington state, only returning for brief roles here and there. One such role was in the mini-series FATAL VISION, about the Jeffrey McDonald murder trial; Salmi played the presiding judge at the trial of the Army doctor accused of slaughtering his wife and children.
Not long after FATAL VISION aired, Albert Salmi shot his wife to death at their home, and then took his own life.
Coincidence. (More than you wanted to know, maybe?)
May 26th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I’d forgotten about that Writers Guild strike. It certainly explains why I don’t remember watching anything on TV around that time.
I also think my TV viewing habits were disrupted so much that I never went back to watching as much TV as I did before then, especially network TV.
I’m sure there were other factors involved, such as American Movie Classics and TCM, and VCR’s, but I’m sure the strike had a lot to do with it.
Albert Salmi, I regret to say, is one of those names I cannot put a face to, though I’m sure I’ve seen his face many times over. What a tragic death!