User Reviews

I can't add much to the other comment here. This is one of the few truly classic Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, along with "The Jar", "Final Escape" and "An Unlocked Window". "Consider Her Ways" tends to be overlooked, but it certainly deserves attention. This is surely one of the most sustained hours of strangeness ever made for television. Veteran TV director Robert Stevens must have been working at his peak: the Twilight Zone-like atmosphere is remarkably convincing as is acting. Especially noteworthy is the lead, Barbara Barrie, who deserves recognition for this impressive work. Fans of John Wyndham's writing should be pleased with this adaptation as well. Absolutely not to be missed.

Thoroughly enjoyable and intriguing if you can take John Wyndham's weird world where a woman (Barbara Barrie) wakes up finding her name has been changed to Mother Orchid. At first it might seem like the vision of very right-wing politicians as we see mindless women with absolutely no choice about the defining role of giving birth they are chosen for.

As time goes on you will see an infinitely more complicated situation unravel and find out why the other women of this dystopia insist there is only one sex. The sight of Barbara Barrie rolling in the bloated body make-up (incongruous with her face) has to be the weirdest moment in this series. (Maybe not a good episode to watch if you're currently pregnant).

Man does appear in the form of Leif Erickson (much too far in for anyone to confuse this with an episode of 'The High Chaparral'). Gladys Cooper plays a historian shedding some light for the confused woman. The historian's take on consumerism sounds like one of Mr Hitchcock's digs at the commercials. Also there's Virginia Gregg (excellent character actress of so much Hitchcock TV) adding to the fine acting support as a doctor.

I recommend this very singular episode which is carried nicely by a stirring central performance from Barbara Barrie.

Having volunteered as a test subject for a mind-altering drug, Dr. Jane Waterleigh (Barbara Barrie) is plunged into what she at first believes is an incredibly detailed hallucination.

She awakens to find herself in the grotesquely bloated body of "Mother Orchis", a woman bred and raised solely for her ability to bring to term multiple births of implanted embryos. Unable to even walk unassisted, tended and massaged by squads of diminutive and strangely sexless women, her dimwitted, pampered and obscenely overfed sisters are at first puzzled, then repulsed by the change that's come over Orchis: her crazy claims that she's a doctor, that she can read and write, and especially her disturbing questions about strange creatures called "men".

In a brilliantly choreographed series of revelations, Oscar Millard's meticulously faithful adaptation of John Wyndham's short story constructs a world where a deadly and still virulent plague has killed off all the males down to the youngest infant, while the other half of our species managed (just barely) to survive and go on to build a superficially similar but in the end radically different civilization.

Unfortunately it's a ruthlessly totalitarian society modeled on a plan that -- although hideously alien to Dr. Waterleigh -- at least has the advantages of being very old and very successful, as the Historian (Gladys Cooper) reminds her. (If you know your Old Testament proverbs, the title is a major clue.)

Although this might seem at first like some kind of anti-feminist diatribe, Wyndham is making a rather profound and humbling observation about precisely how unnecessary the male gender might be, in a civilization with sufficiently advanced biotechnology. The story is about extreme adaptation under the threat of impending extinction -- and the price that might be paid for survival.

Barbara Barrie gives a riveting performance, bringing strength, passion and eloquent humanity to her role, as she slowly becomes convinced of the truth of her horrific vision. The final twist -- surely as grim a denouement as ever graced an episode of this series -- may have been the Hitch's trademark, but here it's taken straight from Wyndham's original story.

For its thought-provoking plot, faultless direction and superb acting by Ms. Barrie, I'd already be inclined to rate this with "The Jar" as the cream of the crop for the hour-long series. But this episode also contains one of my favorite Bernard Herrmann TV scores, reminiscent of some of his music for the "Twilight Zone" series and "Farenheit 451" with its use of strings and vibraphone to lend a cool emotional texture to the piece that's both futuristic and unsettling.

As you've probably guessed by now, I highly recommend this superb and very atypical entry in the Alfred Hitchcock Hour series.

OMG! This must be one of the most bizarre things to air on TV back in the early 60s. Sure, the Hitchcock shows occasionally touched on sci-fi, but, this Wyndham adaptation goes in full bore. Most importantly, it plunges the viewer straight into its alternate reality for a full 40 minutes or so. No winking at the viewer. No easy way out.

When it does get to the 'present' day, it loses a bit of steam, but the finale is still quite strong even if Hitchcock's outro seems to dismiss it with the back of his hand.

And, has there ever been another Time Travel story based on a drug?

12 hours later and my mind is still blown by this episode - as in, I CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT I JUST SAW!!!

One of the best hours of television I have ever seen. I still feel that way more than fifty years after I first saw it.

The plot to "Consider Her Ways" is really weird...much more like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits" than "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour". In many ways, it's as if the human race has become like insects! Let me explain. In the future, a drug has had unexpected results. Instead of just eliminating brown rats, it wiped out men! As a result, society needed to change radically for it to continue. So, in this future world, women are assigned duties like Workers, Mothers, Doctors and Servitors.

Jane (Barbara Barrie) is from 1964 and is a doctor. However, she suddenly awakens to find herself in this future society where she is a Mother. And, as a Mother, she is taken care of like a Queen Bee....she's fattened up and taken care of by the Workers. She is NOT expected to read or do anything productive...just spit out babies! And, the women around her are alarmed that she doesn't fit in and doesn't want to fit in to their world. Apparently, she's time traveled and no one seems to understand that...and she certainly has no idea why nor how it's occurred.

This is a very fascinating bit of sci-fi....very clever as well. Well worth seeing....and very creepy! It also helped that the ending was quite good...satisfying and weird.

Yes the material is great but the episode itself is pedestrian. The set up, featuring well done makeup is just a solid wall of static talking heads in one room which is kind of the point. You certainly will be screaming for something else and you'll get it once, and if, you can make it through, and the story and ideas are both ahead of their time and still timely. The remaining parts of the episode move around more and the resolution is satisfying but well within science fiction norms. So congrats to the producer Joan Harrison for taking on this material but shame on them for doing it so statically, still worth a watch. Herrmann music helps, naturally. If you have read the story you can probably skip it.

... Came true. Corrupt doctors now rule as dictators in 2022. I watched this a few years ago marvelling in the creative script and thinking we were heading for disaster (I don't buy the nukes hoax) but that there might be a bit more time before the Stasi police arrived at the door. Here they are. Brilliant oracles of the 1960s.

Barbara Barrie could look beautiful or plain, but with her angular bone structure and fine features, she had trouble looking fat, which is the main requirement for this odd role. Miss Barrie wakes up into an hallucinatory, all-female world in which she and her fellow "Mothers" (don't ask) are all wearing unconvincing "fat suits," and are fed like pigs from platters of cream puffs. There are too many styles going on in this odd episode, with some ladies in their fat suits, others obviously played by men, and others played by children. What to make of it all? Miss Barrie is puzzled by this world peopled only by women, because she has strange recollections of men. Gladys Cooper appears (stepping from "My Fair Lady" in turn-of-the-century attire) as the town historian, who instructs Miss Barrie in the ways of this world, where all men were wiped out years ago by some plan gone awry. Unfortunately, none of this is very interesting or compelling. The back story is too complex, and it all points to nothing. Ivy Bethune also appears as one of many nurses.

By this final year, it looks as though the series was experiencing a squeeze on story ideas. This is not typical Hitchcock fare. Instead it's science fiction more consonant with The Twilight Zone than a thriller series. Nonetheless, there's a nightmarish quality that holds interest despite poor production values (e.g. the obvious padding for obese effects) and a string of talky scenes.

The 60-minutes opens with Jane (Barrie) waking up confined to a bed in a nightmare world where everyone insists she and others like her are nothing more than obese brood mares. There are no men, only women, since the males die off early. How reproduction is accomplished with women only remains a mystery. Jane's completely lost in this bizarre world, thinking the entire experience must be a delusion. But it seems so real. So will she wake up, return to her real identity, and escape this nightmare.

Barrie's okay in the pivotal role, plus I really like the use of midget women lending an exotic air to her wake-up surroundings. There's also a subtle philosophical question that comes together at the end. Namely, is history in some sense predetermined such that only unavoidable fatalistic events take place, or is the horizon open to contingency such that our actions do make a difference. The episode deals with the question in an ironic way that I didn't see coming. All in all, the entry's definitely an unusual one for the series. And if you can manage the drawbacks, the 60-minutes is definitely not without rewards.

I feel like Jane's meeting with the historian Laura is something people are missing. The purpose of this whole story is to present the thesis that women of the time were shunted by the capitalist system into becoming primary consumers rather than anything creative or useful on its own. Of course as Jane says, this view is exaggerated, but many American women of the time would agree more with Laura than with Jane.

That said, it has much more of a sci-fi bent than most Hitchcock stories. It's good to see Gladys Cooper as Laura the Historian. In that era she appeared in a few Hitchcocks and Twilight Zones. And Virginia Gregg as the 3rd Doctor, she can get a good mean look to her face. In the last half hour it comes back to reality, with a typical Hitchcock twist at the end.

This is typical of Twilight Zone or the New Outer Limits. As is often the case, trying to correct the passage of time changes nothing for we become part of the cause of events. In this one a young woman agrees to a test of an experimental drug. While on it, she slips into a future society where men have been eliminated and people live like ants or bees. She is a producer of children. The children are assigned roles at their births and can never change. When she returns from her drug trip, she is sure it was a real experience, so she sets about to correct a fatal mistake made by a well-meaning scientist. Of course, this is Hitchcock.