"The McGregor Affair" is the Hitchcock hour's take on the grisly doings of Burke and Hare, the 19th century graverobbers who supplied their own murder victims to the respected Doctor Knox (Boris Karloff's THRILLER did the same story with George Kennedy in 1962, "The Innocent Bystanders"). While the basic setup remains the same, including the three main protagonists, this version centers around simple minded John McGregor (Andrew Duggan), who earns easy money delivering the corpses from Burke (Arthur Malet) and Hare (Michael Pate) to Doctor Knox (John Hoyt), who tell him the boxes are full of tanbark, used to 'spread around.' Most of his bounty goes for booze for his fat spouse Aggie (Elsa Lanchester), who spends most of her lazy time sleeping off her hangovers, leaving her lonely husband with nothing to do but daydream about bumping her off (even in his own mind, he proves a miserable failure). When McGregor notices a lock of hair sticking out of his latest delivery, belonging to a young woman he had seen alive only hours earlier, he realizes that the boxes contain dead bodies, and soon devises a way to provide Burke and Hare access to his eternally slumbering wife. Much of the running time is padded out with the lead character talking to himself, not the best way to engage the audience with an already familiar tale whose outcome can easily be predicted. Among the supporting cast is William Smith, still a year away from his co-starring role on the Western series LAREDO, and already a Hollywood veteran of more than two decades. Playing a medical student is Michael Macready, son of character actor George Macready, best remembered as both actor and producer of 1970's "Count Yorga,Vampire" and its 1971 sequel "The Return of Count Yorga."
Review of The McGregor Affair
