This episode is a spin on all those TV and movie Westerns that had a story about a boxing promoter who hit town with some self designated 'champeen', and after hammering a lot of the local opposition, would wind up losing a big money fight to a guy who was in cahoots with the other two. Same idea here, but the guy pulling the strings is a small built man (Norman LLoyd), who purports to have some unfathomable power to strike down Copper Pocket's pair of over-sized brothers (Arch Johnson, Read Morgan), who have cleaned up the town from miscreants and outlaws. The gimmick with the invisible barrier surrounding The Little Man was kind of weak, and the idea that the bandits got away with thirty thousand dollars in that small saloon didn't pass the smell test for me. But otherwise it was a nifty grift the three swindlers pulled off with no one the wiser. Until of course, Hitchcock had to come along in his epilogue and explain how the trio eventually got tripped up.
Review of The Little Man Who Was There
