User Reviews

This was fun to watch, despite its flaws. I particularly liked the innuendo surrounding the match girl and her pursuer. I wonder what percentage of the audience knew what she was really selling. Sure, the accents were fake, but if they had been real, I could never have understood them without subtitles.

The story of Burke and his partner, Hare, is a famous one....and it's not surprising "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" would base an episode on their evil deeds. Burke and Hare were real men who procured bodies for the local medical college in Scotland. The problem was that getting LEGAL bodies donated was tough and the school needed cadavers. So, the pair found they could supplement their supply by simply killing folks and selling the murder victims to the school. They were eventually caught....and Hare turned evidence on his partner and Burke was executed...and dissected. A grisly true story...and one that was retold many times in films and TV shows.

What makes this version of the Burke and Hare murders is that the story really focuses on a third party, a peasant who worked with the killers. John McGregor (Andrew Duggan...sporting a ridiculous wig) eventually realizes what Burke and Hare have been doing. So what does he do next? And, how does his awful wife (Elsa Lanchester) play into all this?

I know some reviewers hated the bad Scottish accents, but what I noticed more was Lanchester's over-the-top performance as a drunk. She was not exactly subtle! As for the story, it's only okay....nothing more. That, combined with the lack of subtlety make it a bit of a klunker.

I sure hope those feral snoring sounds were from the effects department and not from actress Lanchester. No wonder husband John (Duggan) is thinking about a bachelor's life. No wonder also that the strapping Duggan was hired for the part. As a slow-thinking coffin carrier he better be strapping since the anatomy class needs lots of deliveries for its prospective doctors. It's a different Hitchcock entry, set in early 19th century Scotland. Coffin carrier John's pretty well fed up with his lazy alcoholic wife, so we know the story's direction. Of course no production with the goofy Lanchester can afford to be passed up. Here she's appropriately ditzy between swigs from the bottle. Good thing John can only think out loud; that way we know what's passing through his slow-moving brain—Duggan's excellent in a difficult role. Fortunately I had no trouble understanding the dialog through the thick Scottish accents. There's not much story development, but the characters are colorful enough to hold interest. All in all, it's a rather exotic entry, maybe not to everyone's taste, but with a number of compensations.

Andrew Duggan pairs with Elsa Lanchester (The Bride of Frankenstein) as a long suffering husband of a hopeless drunk. He is sad, works very hard, is quite naive and a bit daft. He unwittingly brings cadavers to the medical laboratory where they are dissected by students. He thinks of ways of doing away with his wife, but never can act on it. Then comes the old switcheroo. It's a pretty cool story of the macabre and Duggan is quite a good actor, we would remember from the television of the Hitchcock era. Lanchester is simply disgusting in her character, more of a living corpse than a real character. It creates a time in history a little Dickensian (Oliver Twist-like). Not a bad episode, but it has been done before.

"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."

Yes, "The McGregor Affair" is talky, and yes, the ending verges on the unavoidably predictable. But it has the strikingly handsome Andrew Duggan (in a ridiculous Dutch Boy wig to make him look retarded), and the always wonderful Elsa Lanchester as his slovenly alcoholic wife. (William Smith is in it, too, but the director apparently couldn't think of an excuse for him to take off his shirt.)

The acting and directing are so good you almost think you're watching a theatrical film. The fantasy sequence, with Duggan pondering different ways to off his unwanted spouse, is particularly well-done.

Perhaps the best element is the outstanding score, which actually adds something to the experience. (I could go on for several pages about the empty mediocrities that are most TV scores, but won't.) It's from Bernard Herrmann, but sounds nothing at all like "Bernard Herrmann".

This "Affair" is "too long", but given the Procrustean nature of TV production, it's a forgivable sin, when everything else is so good.

Have you ever seen Robert Wise's BODYSNATCHER, Freddie Francis's DOCTOR AND THE ASSASSINS, Vernon Sewell's BURKE AND HARE or the most know of all: John Gilling's FLESH AND THE FIENDS? If not, of course this story will seem terrific, and it actually is, but if you have seen at least one of those films, well this tale will sound familiar to you. A doctor who always need fresh corpses to use them for autopsies, asks to outlaw undertakers to provide him with recently buried corpses. But the problem happen when the body snatchers run out of fresh corpses. So the simplest way for them to provide the doctor is to provoke deaths... Get it? So this story for this episode is based from those movies where for, at least one or two of them, the very same characters Burke and Hare are used. So in this episode too... See for yourself folks

I never heard so many ridiculously bad accents. Hitchcock must have known how bad they were. Some American actors can do accents, some definitely cannot, and it seems that all the one's that cannot are gathered in this episode.

There have been many versions of the infamous Burke & Hare killings, on both television and the big screen, but this stands out as one of the most laughable. Not only does the plot play fast and loose with historical facts, the script is lamentable and the direction indifferent. As for the acting, it's difficult to focus upon individual performances when the majority are buried beneath some of the worst fake accents ever committed to tape.