User Reviews

Most reviewers on this board for the early episodes of 'Thriller' seem to give them short shrift for their crime and mystery slant, but I'm finding them kind of interesting. Case in point is this one, 'The Mark of the Hand' which has a bit of a creepy plot going for it. Gold-digger Sylvia Walsh (Mona Freeman) manipulates a wealthy widower (Shepperd Strudwick) into an engagement, intending a quickie marriage and divorce, then splitting the divorce settlement three ways with her boyfriend Charles and his brother Paul (Berry Kroeger). Trouble is, Charles doesn't want to go along with the scheme, but as we see, he doesn't have much say in the matter.

With a slight revision in plans, Sylvia concocts a scheme to murder Charles and pin it on her fiancée's daughter (Terry Burnham). Paul's supposed to back up Sylvia's story about how Charles died, and the little girl is just going to lay back and take it because she's had some psychiatric counseling already over her mother's death. The psychological angle is given further credence because the father hasn't paid much attention to daughter Tessa since his wife died.

You know a shrew like Sylvia is going to get hers eventually, so you just have to sit back and let the story take it's course. Personally, I would never have come up with a second murder attempt using a butter knife by an eight year old, but what do I know. Somehow I just knew old Lt. Gordon (Judson Pratt) would be right around the corner to make the save. Poor Sylvia.

I recall seeing young Terry Burnham in any number of TV episodes as a kid, as I would have been her age back in 1960 when this show first aired. Just a few months earlier, she appeared in an episode of The Twilight Zone called 'Nightmare as a Child', a story with a somewhat supernatural bent in which she portrayed the 'subconscious' aspect of a grown woman who was the target of a murderer. Just to show you that lightning can strike twice, the actor who played the potential killer in that show was Shepperd Strudwick.

This was a very good episode and worth watching it again. Not only was it a thriller but also a mystery. From the beginning, all was blaming the little girl for murder because she was found holding a gun. She was going through PTS or post traumatic stress after losing her mother and seeing a murder, seeing the killer, and being so frightened that she chose to be silent. All this was distressing to the kid. If you see this twice, you get to learn what is happening with the child and the effect it has. The real killer messed up by being too ambitious and cruel. I guessed it was them who did it anyway.

Generally speaking, I have become a huge fan of the 1960 Horror anthology series "Thriller" hosted by the iconic Boris Karloff. That being said, the first few episodes of the first season are rather cheesy and Horror-less affairs that must aptly be described as very un-mysterious mysteries rather than Horror. Fortunately, the makers of the series must have realized that, which is why the later episodes are almost entirely fantastic and very eerie Gothic tales. "The Mark of the Hand" is one of the early episodes, and indeed one of the most unspectacular ones.

After a gunshot is heard, the eight-year old Tessa (Terry Burnham) is found with a gun in her hand, standing next to the body of a dead neighbor. Even though the evidence seems to point to Tessa as the murderess, Lt. Gordon (Judson Pratt) has his doubts about her guilt. The girl refuses to say a word...

"The Mark of the Hand" is easily one of the most predictable and suspense-less "Thriller" episodes. It is obvious from the beginning that the little girl isn't the killer; and the friendliness of her future step-mother does seem very fake. Personally, I knew the exact outcome of the story after a few minutes into the episode. Overall, the most memorable part of "The Mark of the Hand" is the unintentionally funny introduction by Master Karloff. Apart from the terrible "Child's Play" (Season 1 Episode 2), this is one of the least recommendable episodes. My recommendation: watch some of the many great episodes ("Well of Doom", "The Terror in Teakwood", "The Return of Andrew Bentley",...) instead.

Certainly, young Terry Burnham is made up to look a little bit nutty. She is a troubled young girl who is accused of murdering a next door neighbor, but it is soon revealed that this family is as nutty as she looks. There's a wheelchair-bound grandmother veteran actress (Jessie Royce Landis) neglectful father Shepperd Strudwick, cheating stepmother Mona Freeman and perhaps the only decent person in the household, nanny Rachel Ames.

Somehow, we are meant to believe that the young girl shot the neighbor in cold blood, and it is very apparent that some hanky-panky was going on between him and Freeman. This episode tries hard to emulate the film noir genre and really doesn't give enough detail in 50 minutes to explain everything concretely. the only really interesting scene is when the young girl tells police detective Judson Pratt that she refuses to ever talk again, but as we know about little girls, that promise is impossible to keep. I found myself fidgety and restless throughout the hour-long running time, and wasn't really surprised by the twists and turns at the end. Of the first four episodes, this is by far the weakest.