"Alfred Hitchcock Presents" Decoy (1956)

User Rating:

7.3/10   

Director:

Arnold Laven

Writers:

Bernard C. Schoenfeld (teleplay)
Richard Pedicini (story)

TV Series:

"Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1955)

Original Air Date:

10 June 1956 (Season 1, Episode 37)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

Plot:

Secretly in love with a married singer, Gil Larkin learns that she is being abused by her husband. Confronting the man in his office...

Plot Keywords:

Alfred Hitchcock | Famous Opening Theme | Murder | Looking At Camera | Performer Name In Title

Cast

Alfred Hitchcock	...	Himself - Host
Robert Horton	...	Gil Larkin
Cara Williams	...	Mona Cameron
Jack Mullaney	...	Dave Packard
Philip Coolidge	...	Lieutenant Brandt
David Orrick McDearmon	...	Ben Cameron (as David Orrick)
Harry Lewis	...	Ritchie
Frank Gorshin	...	Page
Wallace Earl	...	Secretary (as Eileen Harley)
Mary Jean Yamaji	...	Mrs. Sasikawa
Edo Mita	...	Mr. Sasikawa
Harry Tyler	...	Theater Doorman

Runtime:

USA:30 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound Recording)

Filming Locations:

Republic Studios - 4024 Radford Avenue, North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Shamley Productions

Trivia:

Frank Gorshin's TV debut.

She Bruises Easily

Average episode, but average for Hitchcock still means entertaining with a twist. Piano player and arranger Gil Larkin (Horton) has secret crush on song bird Mona Cameron (Williams). The trouble is she's married to a high-powered businessman, so Gil's left to pine away until he finds a bruise on Mona's arm. Convinced that husband is abusing her, he confronts Cameron in his office. There, however, he's slugged, and Cameron is shot by an unknown assailant. Now the cops will think Gil did it and he's got only a few hours to clear himself.

Gil's search is fairly suspenseful, but what I like is the effort to make it unusually colorful. His first stop is a Japanese Kabuki theatre— not exactly a staple of 50's programming—where the two interviewees argue tantalizingly in Japanese, while he's left to puzzle it out. Then, in deep contrast, he goes to a very 50's record hop, where the DJ (Mullaney) sounds like he's only one step away from the funny farm. Two very clever venues for TV of the day.

Horton was an early Hitchcock favorite. Nonetheless, the hunky actor is somewhat miscast as a muscular piano player, but is clearly on his way to bigger roles, which he would get on the long-running Wagon Train series. Mullaney was another early Hitch favorite, unsurprisingly, since he was adept at the kind of offbeat characters the series specialized in. Here his nervous giggle comes across as a neurotic defense mechanism and there's something satisfying in Gil's finally manhandling his giggly evasions. And, of course, there's Cara Williams who, along with Patricia Berry, seemed to have a monopoly on the archly feminine of the day. Anyway, it's an entertaining , if unmemorable, half-hour with a better-than-average Hitchcock epilogue.