The best suspense TV of the 1950s has been released again, in a monster set with dozens of discs … and its just the kind of thing that collectors need when streaming options are nil. Hitchcock, Joan Harrison, and Norman Lloyd combined Hollywood experience, good taste and a wicked sense of humor to make murder a weekly household pastime. The 263 (!) episodes in this Legacy Collection put a wealth of talented star power to excellent use; each 24-minute drama has character depth, and often a powerful narrative twist. Hitchcock’s mordant introductions are a feast in themselves. “Good Evening!”

Alfred Hitchcock Presents The Legacy Collection
DVD
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
1955-62 / B&W / 1:33 TV / 6,847 min. (113 hours, 1 minute) / Street Date October 10, 2024 / Available from Moviezyng / 99.98
Starring: Alfred Hitchcock, and practically every actor doing TV in the 1950s, and plenty that normally didn’t.
Cinematographers (selected names): Ellsworth Fredericks, Joseph LaShelle, Benjamin Kline, William A. Sickner, Joseph F. Biroc, Ernest Haller
Cinematographers (at least 11 episodes): John L. Russell, Reggie Lanning, John F. Warren, Lionel Lindon, Neal Beckner, Dale Deverman
Main theme: Charles Gounod
Writers of note: Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Stirling Silliphant, Robert Bloch, Roald Dahl, Halsted Welles, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Alec Coppel, Andrew Solt, Cornell Woolrich, Evan Hunter, A.A. Milne, Casey Robinson, John Cheever, Fred Freiberger, Alexander Woolcott, Mel Dinelli, Don Marquis, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Ambrose Bierce, George Clayton Johnson, Garson Kanin, Robert Lees, Charles Beaumont,
Producer & Associate Producer: Joan Harrison
Associate Producer: Norman Lloyd
Produced by Alfred Hitchcock
Directed by (selected names): Bernard Girard, John Newland, Robert Altman, Ida Lupino, Arnold Laven, David Swift, Gordon Hessler, Alf Kjellin, Richard Whorf
Directed by (at least 5 episodes) Robert Stevens, Paul Henreid, Herschel Daugherty, Norman Lloyd, Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Hiller, Alan Crosland Jr., James Neilson, Justus Addiss, John Brahm, Robert Stevenson, Don Taylor, Don Weis, Stuart Rosenberg, Robert Florey

Oh good, an opportunity to have a discussion about vintage TV series, streaming and hard media!

A while back we reviewed a monster DVD box of a TV series that was on the air for a full 20 years. We were pleased with the presentation even though the quality remained at a (very good) Standard Def level. That positive experience induced us to bite on this The Legacy Collection of the TV monument  Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which comprises 263 episodes spread over seven years. We have several seasons of  The Twilight Zone on Blu-ray, and both years of  The Outer Limits on remastered Blu-ray. They now look much better than we remember them back in the day on old B&W NTSC monitors. They’re also wider: old TV sets cropped the image on all four sides.

We disc collectors are addicted to hard media that remains in our possession. Streaming keeps visual content in total control of ‘media providers.’ Seeing that an old show called NYPD Blue had been remastered for streaming, we began to re-watch it from the beginning. A couple of weeks into our ‘plan’ the streaming carrier dropped them without notice. We found them on another serice, but only with an extra $ charge per episode. If a good DVD box for that show turned up, I might go for it.

Most of the rabid collectors that read CineSavant will want to know one thing — has Alfred Hitchcock Presents been remastered?  Collectors don’t want to double-dip for no reason.The answer is No. This is another release of the existing Standard Def DVD transfers we’ve seen for 20 years. They look decent but certainly not spectacular.

This basic full set of Alfred Hitchcock Presents apppears to have been reissued several times. Amazon is still selling a 2022 DVD set called ‘The Complete Series’ that we suspect contains the same good SD encodings. This new set has not been remastered, but we’re glad to have it … the shows are just too good.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is top quality 1950s TV fare. Director Hitchcock was already a household word, and audiences loved his hilariously droll introductions, his own parody of a TV host. TV production was so frantic in the 1950s that dozens of dramatic shows began with hosts, usually movie stars, reading a few introductory lines and maybe making a farewell speech. In most cases it was padding for time. America loved Alfie’s eccentric introductions. They begin with his face filling his own self-caricature, which reminds us that he entry into the business was creating cartoon artwork for silent movie inter-titles. Then, with a minimal prop or two, Hitchcock launches into a mock-reverent speech that includes a sly joke about the commercial break. Hitchcock’s intros play with his public persona, politely injecting hints of malice and murder.

We became fond of Alfred Hitchcock Presents by watching random episodes syndicated on daytime TV, sandwiched between ads for plumbers and carpet stores. Having them all in one resource, with the IMDB at the ready to scan the contents, is too much to resist. The shows are even more interesting now that we have a better perspective on the hundreds of name actors in them. I watched several episodes looking for particular actors, but every show has what I’d call surprise casting. I know actresses Barbara Harris and Norma Crane from big movies of the 1960s, but here they were much younger, playing very different character types. [ We did the same kind of actor-surfing through discs of western series, but those roles tended to be more limited, especially for women. ]

These shows were produced while Hitchcock had a full plate of feature work to pursue– he turned out twenty hours of TV in the years that he made  The Man Who Knew Too Much,  The Wrong Man,  Vertigo,  North by Northwest and  Psycho. He apparently felt comfortable delegating authority over much of the shows. Alma Hitchcock had helped guide her husband’s career from the beginning, and it’s assumed that she took a serious role in his business dealings, uncredited. Ten years before, Alma and Hitch had formed a strong working relationship with with Joan Harrison, who became a fine producer in her own right.  ↗  She headed the long-running TV show plus a now less well-known drama series called Suspicion, also executive-produced by Hitchcock.

Helping Harrison in all producing aspects was Norman Lloyd, an actor whose career fanned out to producing and directing as well.  ←  One of Orson Welles’ Mercury players, Lloyd’s first work in Hollywood was for Hitchcock, and they remained friends and collaborators. Over his long life, Lloyd became a popular guest and speaker for his first-hand stories about Welles, Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin and even Joseph Losey; many people unaware of this background knew him from the 1980s TV show St. Elsewhere.

Between Harrison, Hitchcock, Lloyd and presumably Alma Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents had enough industry experience, good taste and sound judgment to find good material and good directors; the show’s casting was phenomenal.

Viewers aware of the ups and downs of film careers will be fascinated by the casting in Hitchcock’s show. The very first episode (“Revenge”) veers toward psychological horror. It stars Ralph Meeker in the same year that he played  Mike Hammer, opposite a powerhouse performance by Vera Miles.  →  When John Ford hired Ms. Miles for  The Searchers, was it because of her performance in this episode, or was it for her role in a modest western by Jacques Tourneur?

Not every episode is a gem, but most Alfred Hitchcock Presents entries have a story element that grabs us, beyond the already-good casting. A few are humorous but most are reach for suspense. Many end with baleful surprise twists, often ones that end just when we see that ‘the jig is up.’  That leaves Hitchcock’s outgoing message to calmly assure us that justice was meted out to the guilty.

We watched 12 shows this time around, and in about a third we could guess the ‘surprise’ without a lot of effort … but only because we’ve seen the same narrative machinations reworked dozens of times. A great many are perfectly capable of catching us off guard, and more than a few can induce a serious case of the creeps. I don’t remember the title, but I’ll be trying to find a terrific episode about two lover-murderers who carry the body of their victim to a cabin in Baja California … and get a big surprise. The same goes for a great show about a housewife terrified that her husband is spending too much time working on a ‘secret’ in the basement. I’ll be looking for that one too.

This time around we went straight to “A True Account”, an episode featuring favorite Jane Greer, whose film career had been derailed by a contract with Howard Hughes.  ←  She is a major player with a key part opposite Kent Smith and Robert Webber. The finale was guess-able, but the show had the surprise element of a ‘lying flashback,’ a narrative construction that Hitchcock had experimented with in his feature work.

Our plan was to see more episodes featuring specific actresses. We were interested in Lyn Cartwright and so checked out the 1958 episode “The Equalizer.” Her part was small and the story not the best, but we really enjoyed seeing Martin Balsam play opposite Norma Crane. It’s a bad habit to presume that Vera Miles or Martin Balsam got a big role because of a particular previous role, but we do wonder if the impression Balsam made her, led directly to his casting in Psycho.

And we had to find the 1961 episode “Beta Delta Gamma” with a young Barbara Steele.  →  We remembered its blood-curdling story twist long before we knew about Steele’s presence. She turns in a very nice performance, possibly shot when she was in town for  The Pit and the Pendulum.

We couldn’t resist several episodes directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which include “Revenge” and the Joseph Cotten-starring “Breakdown,” which becomes an interesting experiment with still (or near-still) images. We also looked at a highly-recommended Hitch-directed show called “One More Mile to Go” from 1957. It turned out to be an exercise in ‘business as usual,’ a term my editor friends made up for shows that string us out, waiting nervously for something bad to happen. Our main takeaway is that the episode reminded us of Psycho, with David Wayne spending a couple of screen-time minutes cleaning up after a murder. The most frequent cameraman on the series was John L. Russell. Hitchcock must have been impressed with the quality of his work; perhaps Russell was a big factor in the decision to shoot the big-feature Psycho with a TV crew.

Next up we want to see the 1960 episode “Man from the South”, to see how director Norman Lloyd works with the very different actors Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre … both of whom were notorious scene stealers.  ←  The episode may be the only time that McQueen and his spouse Neile Adams performed together.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment’s DVD set of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Legacy Collection is indeed a monster box; it weighs almost 3 pounds. This show averaged 38 episodes per year; each keep case has 19 hours of programming on 5 discs. With a set like this we’re grateful for small favors. The disc holders in the keep cases are easy to use and don’t fall apart. Each keep case has a master list of episodes that’s easy to read, something many TV sets make too difficult. A Univeral logo plays just once when a disc loads, not before every show.  ^*

Most of the shows look very good, but they clearly have not been remastered. Some title sequences feel dull or have slightly unstable contrast; the dramatic content usually looks very good. I noticed what looked like some missing material in one credits sequence, but am not sure. Otherwise everything looks 100% intact. I didn’t see anything that made me think that the quality is a detriment. Considering the amount of entertainment presented — there are dozens of superb shows here — we like this box very much.

Universal has put in a couple of featurettes about the show. One is an interview based making-of with Patricia Hitchcock (who performed in the series) and Norman Lloyd. He lived to the age of 105, and was making rousing good public appearances way right up to the hundred-year mark.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Alfred Hitchcock Presents
DVD rates:
TV Shows: Excellent
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Featurette:
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Look Back
Fasten Your Seatbelt: The Thrilling Art of Alfred Hitchcock.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: 34 DVDs in Seven keep cases in card sleeve
Reviewed: January 1, 2026
(7447hitc)

^*  One many of the MGM DVDs I contributed to, the 9-second MGM Home Video logos played before and after every menu item. How could they expect anybody to watch the featurettes, and put up with all that repetition?

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