Mon 27 Sep 2010
A TV Review by Mike Tooney: THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR “A Home Away from Home.”
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[6] Comments
“A Home Away from Home.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 2, Episode 1). First air date: 27 September 1963. Ray Milland, Claire Griswold, Mary La Roche, Virginia Gregg, Ben Wright, Connie Gilchrist, Brendan Dillan. Writer: Robert Bloch, based on his short story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1961. Director: Herschel Daugherty.
Young and pretty Natalie Rivers (Claire Griswold) is on her way to visit relatives when she decides to drop in on her uncle, Dr. Howard Fennick (Ray Milland), whom she has never actually met. Fennick runs a private sanitarium, where he practices “permissive therapy,” allowing the inmates more latitude than is usual in such institutions.
Natalie isn’t really surprised by the behavior of the patients — that they would be rather egocentric is to be expected. Her apprehension level rises, however, when she encounters a man locked away upstairs who keeps claiming that he is the doctor’s assistant and that Natalie’s uncle is no doctor.
Imagine Natalie’s level of apprehension when she discovers that dead body in the dumbwaiter ….
Ray Milland (1905-86) was a versatile Welsh actor, a leading man when he was younger but a fine villain in his latter days. He was murdered in Payment Deferred (1932) but came back as Bulldog Drummond (Bulldog Drummond Escapes) in 1937.
He also appeared in Ministry of Fear (1944), The Big Clock (1948), Alias Nick Beal (1949), Dial M for Murder (1954), The Safecracker (1958), Markham (a TV series, 1959-60, as a lawyer/detective), tangled a couple of times with Lieutenant Columbo (1971-72), featured prominently in “Too Many Suspects” (1975, the prequel to the Ellery Queen TV series), and even menaced the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (1978).
Robert Bloch (1917-94) specialized in horror, but he could do suspense as well. After Psycho (1960), he got into TV with five episodes of Lock Up, ten installments of Thriller, ten with Alfred Hitchcock Presents and seven more with The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as well as three episodes of Star Trek (including “Wolf in the Fold,” in which 23rd-century spacemen encounter Jack the Ripper).
“A Home Away from Home” can be viewed on Hulu here.
September 27th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
One of my favorite Hitchcock Hours, which was repeated recently here in Chicago, which is how I can make bold and correct the above recap of the story.
To start with, Dr. Fenwick (that’s the right spelling, but it’s pronounced Fennick) isn’t the owner of the sanitarium; that’s Ben Wright’s character (whose name I can’t recall at the moment). Wright is Natalie’s uncle (whom she has never met), and after Milland kills Wright, he passes himself off to her as her uncle.
Milland-Fenwick has been a patient at the san after having had a breakdown some years back. As part of his treatment, Wright was letting him act as his assistant, treating other patients as part of his own therapy.
(These aren’t spoilers, by the way; all of this is established in Act I.)
Anyway, the story goes on from there, and I won’t give away more than necessary.
About the other cast members:
Claire Griswold, the damsel in distress, was the wife of Sydney Pollock, and was under contract to Hitchcock when this show was filmed.(Hitch was reportedly using her as a threat to keep Tippi Hedren in line.)
As to the rest of the players, I guess that’ll have to wait till I have more time to look stuff up. My apologies.
September 27th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
I love these old TV shows, movies, and especially old radio shows in which you can’t tell the inmates from the keepers. Or all of the above in which escapees are on the loose and masquerading as normal people, and no one can tell ones from the others.
One really good book along these lines is PITY HIM AFTERWARDS, by Donald E. Westlake, which I reviewed way back here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=241
Make that really, really good.
September 28th, 2010 at 12:42 am
Ironically this is pretty much the plot of Francis Beeding’s THE HOUSE OF DR. EDWARDES which was liberally adapted as Hitch’s SPELLBOUND — and then too it’s the plot of one of Poe’s stories.
September 28th, 2010 at 5:02 am
To save Mike a little work familiar character actor Ben Wright played Sherlock Holmes on radio following Basil Rathbone, and Virginia Gregg was a well known character actress from DRAGNET and many others
September 28th, 2010 at 6:57 am
Of course Milland was the villain in one of the dumbest and cheesiest horror films ever, Frogs.
Sorry, but no matter how many of them there are, frogs just aren’t very scary.
September 28th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
THE COBWEB is a classic movie melodrama about a mental institution.
Gloria Grahame says right away: “You know how you can tell the difference between the patients and the staff? The patients get better.”