It's amazing to me that at a time when he was doing, arguably, his best work for the movies, Alfred Hitchcock was also helping to manage this popular anthology series for television.
Yes, he had able accomplices—his long-time secretary/assistant Joan Harrison who'd worked with him on his British films and early American ones, and Norman Lloyd, who was repaid for having been dropped off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur to be the show's "jack-of-all-trades" acting (5 episodes), directing (19), and producing, (184!)—but the output of the television show was prodigious, the quality amazingly high, and the talent attracted in terms of writing and acting astounding*. Watching all of them surprises in how many actors from Hitchcock's films appeared, how many future stars show up (here's two: Steve McQueen and Walter Matthau), and familiar names that would go on to directing careers (William Friedkin's first directing job was for "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour").** Hitchcock was so impressed with the technical crews that he economized by using them (rather than more expensive movie crews), when making his classic Psycho (he had, after all, mortgaged his house to get the funds when studios proved to be a little squeamish to finance it due its macabre subject matter).
Today would have been his 127th birthday.
It's brilliant casting. Hitchcock had already seen how Miles conveyed mental trauma in The Wrong Man and her vulnerability immediately gains an audience's sympathy. And Ralph Meeker was the favorite "hot-head" of the Movies, always able to make unsympathetic characters relatable and sympathetic ones dark. And he was still able to convey a native intelligence to what he was doing. One could see why his character does what he does in "Revenge"...even if it does turn your stomach a little...that and the "dubious" psychology and sociology of the piece.
This one is good from start to nerve-wracking finish and one can understand Hitchcock's attraction to it. A lifelong neurotic, Hitchcock had a fear of (and an innate ability to convey) vulnerability and helplessness, and this simple premise (despite some disregard to medicine's ability to detect life) falls right into his trembling wheelhouse.
One would think it's an easy role for Cotten to play (and he's helped by quite a bit of use of freeze-frame, so he doesn't betray breathing or eye-blinks), but his voice-over of the character's inner thoughts during the crisis is extraordinary and effective. 
Or...he has a double, who is gradually infiltrating his life...and maybe trying to take it over. He could be dissociating. Or someone is targeting him. So, is the problem with him, or some outside agency? And, what can he do about it, if anything?
Ewell had just come off his success with The Seven Year Itch and his "not exactly handsome" everyday ordinariness comes into play, even if the performance is less comedic and more dramatic. There's a cartoonishness to Ewell, even when he's being serious, and that duality keeps one guessing until the end.
This is one of the two episodes for which Hitchcock was nominated for an Emmy Award for directing.
"Back for Christmas" (AHP, S1:E23, 1956) Metallurgist Herbert Carpenter (John Williams, of Dial 'M' For Murder and To Catch a Thief) and his wife Hermione are planning to leave their impeccable long-established British home for a job that he's taking in America. Of course, the wife assures everyone that they'll be "back for Christmas"—Herbert's been busy in the basement digging a wine cellar for their return. But, the new job will leave the task unfinished and the two busy themselves with the details of their extended trip and buttoning-up the house for their extended absence, an exercise that the fussy Hermione obsesses over and makes the prickly Herbert fume.
But, even if it is the twenty-third episode of the first season, one must realize that if anybody in the episode is digging a hole anywhere, someone else is going to end up in it.
Williams often played officious and downright stuffy, but it's fun to see him play nastily passive-aggressive. He would have made a great Basil Fawlty.
Oh, bother. What to do?
Simple. Frame someone else for the murder! It's a good thing the Princey's good friend, Captain Smollett (John Williams) stops by. Being the only practical one on the family, the elder Mr. Princey (Sir Cedrick Hardwicke) constructs an elaborate frame to make sure all the (manufactured) evidence points to Smollett, to make sure a) the body is never discovered and b) that Smollett never talks about it.
It's a veddy British black comedy, quite droll in the writing and execution (if I can use the term), while also being quite absurd, not unlike the Princey's, themselves. No Hitchcockian directorial flourishes, just solid story telling with a dark sensibility.
The episode is memorable for Scott's non-stop manic performance, and for a sequence where she imagines the murder, with slashing shadows that suggest Hitchcock's roots in German Expressionism and over-the top enactments (it IS conjured up in her fevered imagination, after all), that suggest the ham-acting in the movie parodies on "The Carol Burnett Show."
So, what makes this one special? It begins with a bravura sequence with no dialog for the first 8:30 (or until the second commercial break) before the first line of dialog is heard. The first shot...after a perfunctory establishing shot...itself lasts 2:10, and is shot through windows that muffle the sound of the argument that preceded the crime.
Hitchcock was a fan of "pure" cinema (or "cinemah" as he pronounced it), where a movie-goer could discern what was going on if the sound suddenly quit, and just had to rely on the picture (he did, after all, start his career in silent pictures).
The second half of the episode is pure suspense, as Wayne's murderer (who is driving at night to dispose of his wife's body hidden in the trunk of his car) gets pulled over for a busted tail-light that the cop insists be fixed at a service station...tonight.
Watching the episode may make you think that lots of it resembles the third reel of Psycho.
The premise is that it is 1912 and two men considered at the top of their field, brilliant amateur detective Charles Courtney (Price) and a defense attorney John Gregory (James Gregory), are having a perfectly amiable chat about "the perfect crime" and the circumstances of a past case in which both men were involved.
But, it's never that simple. Is it?
Hitchcock employs three silent flashbacks with voice-over narration to show three different versions of the "past case" from different points of view, and the acting in a verbal cage-fight, with Price at his prideful, plummy best and Gregory, coarse and blunt, is great to see.
Hitchcock may have been inspired by the darkly witty script by author Roald Dahl. There are no fancy angles or Hitchcock flourishes, just simple, straight-forward direction that focuses the attention and establishes dynamics between characters, and, thanks to Dahl's darkly humorous script, has one of the best "cappers" in the entire series.
It's one of the best remembered episodes of the Hitchcock show and the second episode for which Hitchcock received an Emmy nomination for directing.
Botibol is hooked. He takes the vacation money and bets it all on a figure using "insider information" and his own boastful brio.
But, don't bet against Mother Nature. Not even Hitchcock can direct it. 
As in "Breakdown," we're back to that theme of vulnerability and helplessness, and Hitchcock's camera placements emphasize Pope's dilemma and his partner's upper-hand.
Wes Anderson remade this for his Roald Dahl Netflix series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Ben Kingsley, in 2023.
Hitchcock's bizarre first shot in "Poison"
It's also based on his lead suspect (Kenneth Haigh) being so unhinged that parlor tricks could force a confession out of him.
It's something of a stiff episode, with a conceit that the major looks towards the camera in bewilderment, speaking to himself whenever Brent says something surprising. In legal terms, that might be called "leading the witness."
Hitchcock does some nice things in it, employing some of the claustrophobic shots he had used in an episode of "Suspense" to suggest mental instability, but the last shot is rather smirk-inducing, employing the same "well, I'll be blinkered" shot that had been used before.
Whets the appetite, doesn't it?
His production plant is completely automated, something he takes extraordinary pride in, and so he lives his life a contented bachelor, processing chickens, and their feed from the cradle to the grave, isolated and all the happier for it. Snapping necks is merely a fringe benefit.
Complications arise, as you would think. And it's another one of those episodes that provides an idea of what to do with a dead body. Harvey, who had always relished roles of ethically dubious characters, chews the scenery (and a chicken dinner) delightfully. The episode could make one go Vegan.
Nice little role by Patrick MacNee.
Arthur (Laurence Harvey) applying his trade.
"The Crystal Trench" tells the story of obsessive love with Donald's narrator recalling the first time he met Stella in September, 1907, and of how she was entranced by her husband Michael. Michael is killed in a climbing accident and his body lost, but Stella remains steadfastly true to her marriage, staying friends with the narrator but rebuffing any entreaties of marrying him.
This one seems extra special to Hitchcock with its story of obsession to the point of madness and of devotion to the point of denial.
Based on another Roald Dahl story (but with a script by the prolific Halsted Welles, who wrote the Western 3:10 to Yuma and contributed six scripts to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"), it's not as macabre or grisly as some of the popular episodes. Unless you're a mink, of course.
It does have a delicious "comeuppance" scene with triple consequences.
The episode speaks to Hitchcock's Catholic faith and the strictures it demands and the resulting guilt when succumbing to "the near occasion of sin", and the episode isn't too flashy but dramatically efficient, and there's something nicely layered about Rains' frequent looks to Heaven—is he beseeching God or cursing the condition of the roof? 6_17_Horseplayer.jpg)
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But, when his uncle comes to stay after an extended trip to Africa, Jackie finds his uncle's pistol, and it's a lot better than his toy one. Unbeknownst to the elder Chester family, Jackie has taken the real gun, loaded it with real bullets (just like his toy one!) and is wandering the neighborhood, taking aim and *pew-pew*-ing anyone who gives him a second glance. It's only a matter of time before the real gun kills somebody "real dead." The uncle and Jackie's parents realize what has happened and spend the episode frantically looking for the kid, while Hitchcock amps up the tension, slowing down time with close-ups of the trigger getting closer and closer to firing.
The episode is so tense, and potentially commonplace (kids being the curious, non-consequential monsters that they are), that Hitchcock chose to throw out his usual droll end-commentary and speak seriously.
"On rare occasions, we have stories on this program which do not lend
themselves to levity. "Bang! You're Dead" is a case in point. We only
hope that this play has dramatized for parents the importance of keeping
firearms and ammunition out of reach of children. Accidents of this
type occur far too frequently nowadays and the tragic fact is that with
proper precaution, it could be avoided. That is all for tonight. Please
join us next week when we shall return with another story. Until then,
good night." 
John Forsythe (from The Trouble with Harry and Topaz) returns to the series as a crime writer who is accused of a hit-and-run accident that leaves a motorcyclist in the hospital near death. Five eyewitnesses swear that they each "saw the whole thing" (and Hitchcock makes the point by zooming in on each of them at the time of the incident and freeze-framing on them—a quick technique that I don't recall Hitchcock ever using in anything he'd done previously or since—unless you count some of the shots of "Breakdown"), their testimonies going to the police and leading to the arrest of Forsythe's mystery writer. Forsythe's writer (for some reason) decides to defend himself against the charges as his own attorney and the majority of the episode entails his unraveling of the five eyewitnesses' "expert" testimony. Once thing is undeniable. Forsythe's car was the vehicle involved in the hit-and-run.
In a last ditch effort to prosecute, the DA calls the writer to the stand...and Forsythe's character repeatedly takes the Fifth, leaving him with a contempt citation and a jury leaning against "reasonable doubt."
It's a bit too much "Perry Mason"-lite and the story feels a little slight to stretch to an hour (especially with its twist-reveal!), and the story doesn't so much have you guessing as leave you confused throughout ("why the heck is he doing that?").
Perhaps Forsythe projects too much American competence to pull it off. Maybe if was his fault, after all.
Well, you're ALMOST seeing the whole thing...
While he was working on the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" series, the director had a couple opportunities from his network to see what he could do with an hour-long format (before he could convince them to do "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." Both of them are notable for different reasons.
The film has minimal dialogue up to the second commercial break, merely relying on the director to tell the story visually about a watch and clock repairman (E.G. Marshall), setting up a time-bomb to blow up his wife and her lover (and his house!) to avenge their infidelity. It's a relentless nail-biter with a soundtrack cruelly composed of ticking clocks to amp up the tension. And the closing minutes are as crazy as anything Hitchcock has directed, with tight close-ups, editing that isn't so much quick as relentless, and a denouement that borders on the surreal.
Look for Harry Dean Stanton as a hoodlum who complicates things.
Hitchcock starts by showing one "incident" three times from three different angles: a 68 year old school crossing guard, James Medwick (Paul Hartman) puts out his stop sign and the head of the Parent's Safety Council (Leora Dana), ignores it and turns the corner to park and enter the school. Medwick and the woman, Mrs. Tawley, get into a spitting tiff about her getting sighted for ignoring a stop sign, something witnessed by one of the school's teachers, Mr. Batle.
Just a simple disagreement. Until Medwick is fired from his temp-work on his birthday by the school principal...something about an "anonymous complaint" ("can't say who...") that Medwick is "too fond of little girls." The old man is devastated, but his granddaughter (Vera Miles, right off the lot from Psycho) and her fiancee (George Peppard) are determined to fight the smear campaign and get the old guy's job back. And, incidentally, his reputation.
The episode drips with irony as people get defensive, self-righteousness, and get into hissy-fits over who did what to whom (and 'for the sake of the children"), with both sides being wrong at some point. And the ending's a bit on the neat side of "oh, well, things happen (chuckle)" that left me with a grousing final thought.
The lesson being, if someone really wants to smear a person's reputation, they should wait until they're too dead to defend themselves and write a badly-researched biography.
* I was watching one night when I saw an episode starring director/actor Sydney Pollack (okay...but that was early days in his career) only to have my jaw dropped when the episode turned out to be based on a story by Philip Roth!
** The only thing that is a little nagging about binge-watching it is that pretty soon the anthology series gets a little...episodic. Last minute twists and deus ex machina's show up all too frequently and take the piss out of the suspense that had gone before.
*** Hitchcock and Price (and Gregory) apparently got along very well.
