Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Shopping for Death (1956)
Season 1, Episode 18
5/10
An interesting story from legend Ray Bradberry, but, it suffers from some issues.
1 June 2019
Clarence and Elmer are retired insurance agents, and hope to use their years of experience to save people they believe will die soon, especially in high heated temperatures above ninety degrees. Clarence has his sights of Mrs. Shrike, a boorish and loud mouthed alcoholic who he believes has a death wish. They try to advise her to change her life and fix her house, but this just causes her to lash out. The thing I loved so much about Ray Bradberry was he could really right some interesting stories of peoples behavior, here you have an interesting story penned by him (even Hitchcock name drops him in the opening narration) about the likelihood of people to lose control and commit horrible acts when the heat level is high. It's an OK premise, but, it defiantly has some issues. The first of which is I don't know how neither of these two men expect to get far by just walking into someones house and literally telling them that there horrible behavior Is gonna get them killed, your more then likely to get murdered yourself trying to pull something like that off. The other issue is our lead actress Jo Van Fleet who was on the grasp of winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in the James Deen film "East of Eden", here she comes off extremely unlikable, which I get is suppose to go along with the story, but, Van Fleet spends most of the episode literally screaming her lines, and it gets old really quick. Your suppose to feel sorry for here towards the end as a woman who has been pulled down in poverty, and for 10 seconds they sorta pull it off, but, its right back to screaming and overacting again. The ending is alright and what you figure will happen happens, however the opening and closing shots of Harris and Qualen going threw the smoke is a nice added on touch, both of which are really good here by the way.
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