User Reviews

With a good set up and good pay off the middle section of this episode falls a little bit flat. It's a courtroom drama with the seemingly pointless twist of an actor father defending his son but there's a reason to it all. Director Pevney doesn't add much flash to this episode but Basehart has a good and unusual opportunity in this episode that puts it as an above average episode that could have used a bit more flash and snap to the courtroom aspects to make it better. Mild spoiler follows to explain what I mean about Basehart's role. I won't try to spoil it but you have been warned.

The whole key to the dad character deals with a speech his gives as his son's lawyer that is revealed to be from one of his father's old movies. Basehart plays the role of the dad as roughly his own age so this "0ld" movie shows him younger. What's really good about this is the way Basehart plays two versions of the same scene. In the old movie he plays it with an almost faux English accent and in a slightly higher voice--which would be true of both a younger man but also of a earnest, if not very good, actor playing a scene. This comes after we've seen him give the speech to sum up and try to save his son for what we thought was real. He's much more convincing in that version of the speech. It's a master stroke from Basehart and or director Pevney. But whoever had the idea, could have been suggested in the script it's Basehart who pulls it off and it would belong on his acting reel.

It's too bad Pevney visually doesn't do anything differently in the film and in the real trial that's a missed opportunity on his part. Instead the real trial and the reel trial are filmed as if he directed both at the same time--which of course he did--but it shouldn't look that way.

BIGGER SPOILER: It's too bad the sort of double twist way the end works out, which is quite clever, isn't built up and paid off as well as it could have been, again Pevney isn't in top form here. You sort of feel how good the ending is after it's over rather than having the true "ah ha, wow." moment that a true powerful twist can have.

Not much of a mystery or even a twist to this episode. The resolution hinges on a replay of a scene from one of former actor Miles Crawford's (Richard Basehart) screen roles of thirty years prior. Now a civil attorney, Crawford decides to defend his son against a first degree murder charge that could very well put the youth away for life or subject him to a death penalty. It seems superfluous after the fact for Crawford to have consulted with a criminal attorney (S. John Launer), when all that role called for was to sit aside during the trial while Crawford went through his motions. I guess you could say that Crawford's defense summation was somewhat unethical since he was repeating his lines from a movie in which he portrayed an attorney. Who would have known except for a keen-eyed prosecuting attorney who remembered the picture! In a case of life imitating art, young Tod Crawford was found guilty of murder just like the defendant in the movie, but with the judge's (John Zaremba) caveat that he would recommend a parole board review as soon as feasibly possible to reexamine Tod's behavior and attitude while serving time.

As an aside, I haven't seen Barney Phillips in all that many roles as an actor; he was prosecuting attorney Hanley in this story. But the one defining portrayal I recall him in was when he appeared as Haley the Bartender in one of my all-time favorite Twilight Zone episodes, 'Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?' You have to see it, the ending of that story had me and my Dad looking at each other and just cracking up!

Richard Basehart is an ex actor turned lawyer. His son kills someone in a knife fight and is arrested and tried. Basehart defends him in court and delivers a stirring summary. The prosecutor, however, finds that the speech in its entirety was lifted from one of Basehart's old movies in which he played a lawyer. Basehart demonstrates to the judge that, in the movie, the speech didn't save the defendant, who was duly executed. The execution scene is harrowing, as all of them are, and when Basehart's son is found guilty, the judge gives him life instead of the chair and recommends early parole.

It may be my imagination but the hour-long show seemed to have a bigger budget than the half-hour quickies. There are more sets, more elaborately appointed. When Basehart visits a criminal lawyer for advice, there is a shot of him walking down a fully dressed hallway, pausing in front of the door, then entering the office. Money could -- and would -- have been save by a simple shot of the lawyer's name on the door and the door's being opened by Basehart. The shot of the hallway makes the scene more expansive, lavish, real. I applaud that hallway. I applaud its little table and the decorations on its walls.

Basehart is good, as always, whether in old-age make up or as a younger man in the movie within the movie. Alas, his son, cannot act. He has a curious face with a flat nose, and that's it. His friend, a witness to the knife fight, doesn't take us anywhere either. He had a smallish skull from which is suspended a massive jaw. One of the girls the two boys fought over is okay, though. She can't act either but she's young, glamorous, and slutty. Any normal man would throw himself at her tiny shoes and beg to be allowed to run his toes through her lissotrichous mane.

The story is an adaptation of a piece from "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine," edited by Hitchcock's daughter, Pat. She was a clumsy editor. The magazine still owes me a manuscript that they never bothered to return despite the stamped, self-addressed return envelope. I hope she's shaped up.

I've often wondered if William Shatner and Richard Basehart were separated at birth. They both are windbags who overact. Their voices are nearly identical. Let's get down to brass tacks. There is no way a grand jury would put down an indictment of first degree murder in this case. It was a knife fight between two people, both armed. Manslaughter is the perfect charge here. There is no premeditation here. Other than a couple idiot kids, cases of arrested development, little men acting stupidly, it is not first degree murder. Also, it appears that the judge never realized how traumatic going to the electric chair would be. The one thing that is probably true is that this kid, with his temper, will probably not be a model prisoner, and when that parole hearing comes (many years later) he may not have much of a chance.

I won't add much more to what has already been told about this court room scheme episode. It's pretty effective if you compare it to other Alfred Hitchcock's Hour series épisodes. The only little thing that I found very funny, amusing, is the scene where Basehart goes to see the lawyer, to defend his son, at the beginning of this story. He enters the lawyer's office and the lawyer's secretary is no one than the lawyer's young daughter, a ten year old child. Believe it or not, I found this very amusing, offbeat, unusual at the most. For the rest, it's good, I repeat, and I also agree to what the other user said, concerning the viewing of the old Richard Basehart's character's movie, when he plays a lawyer. The cameras angles are exactly the same between the actual sequence of Basehart defending his son and the cameras angles in the old feature.