User Reviews

Veteran actor Robert Loggia stars in this memorable episode, playing a drunken piano player named Tommy Grant who one day impulsively murders his girlfriend with a knife in an alley after catching her with another man. He gets away with it temporarily, and another man gets arrested for the crime, but Tommy finds to his horror that he literally has blood on his hands that he cannot wash off, and is terrified that others will see, and connect him with the murder, which drives him into desperation... Basically a variation on Edgar Alan Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart", but a good one, with an effective climax and fine lead performance.

I think that ONE STEP BEYOND TV show belonged to the above average anthology series. And this episode is one proof of what I say. Excellent acting, story telling, directing, and atmosphere that glue you to your seat for a very dark tale. Robert loggia was excellent even in the late fifties, and he did not lose anything till SCARFACE, twenty six years later. This very episode tells the story of a loser, a piano player who gets himself involved in a nightmare for the greatest pleasure of the audience. It is short, it is sharp, tense. Only the ending could have been a bit better, I think. That's only a matter of opinion.

Addendum, and apologies; the actress is Miriam Colon, not Alma Rodriguez (the character she plays in the episode). She plays Tony Montana's mother in Scarface.

Pretty cool lil episode--especially interesting how, years later, Robert Loggia and Alma Rodriguez, play Tony Montana's (Al Pacino) boss and mother in the movie Scarface.

Makes me wonder did they remember acting with each other in this episode? It is also refreshing to see that Loggia's acting has always been 'intense'.

In a jazzy New Orleans bar, handsome piano man Robert Loggia (as Tom Brandt) fends off lonely "Chopsticks" playing blonde Ann Carroll (as Nina Olson) to make eyes at the exotically sexy Miriam Colon (as Alma Rodriguez). When he gets off work, Mr. Loggia follows Ms. Colon into an alley, and builds up some sweaty passion. "I'm dead without you!" he begs. When Colon rejects him for another man, Loggia stabs her to death with a broken bottle. Then, he gets a case of guilty conscience Edgar Allen Poe would envy (if he hadn't already thought up the story). Loggia finds himself unable to wash away the dead woman's blood.

"The Hand" isn't too original, but Loggia performs the part nicely; he and the "Alcoa" crew seem to court censorship with the opening murder. The eerie music, by Harry Lubin, plays well. But, the "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" coda seems to come out of nowhere.

***** The Hand (12/28/59) John Newland ~ Robert Loggia, Miriam Colon, Ann Carroll, Joe Sullivan

We hardly know who to thank, Lady Macbeth or Hawthorne's Scarlet Woman, but all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the blood-stained hand of nightclub piano-player turned murderer Tommy Grant (Robert Loggia) until... the ending we'd love to reveal, but can't.

It's Puerto Rican actress Miriam Colon who steals this distinctly cheap show (before going on to better things such as Scarface, also with Robert Loggia), speaking her lines with charm and conviction. She dies in the first few minutes, stabbed by insanely jealous ex-lover Tommy, who has had to stay at the piano all evening, watching her canoodling with her new man.

The cops don't suspect Tommy at first, because the new lover was supposedly too drunk to know what he was doing, though he does not act in that way at all. The one who succeeds in acting drunk (quite difficult, in fact) is Anna Lee Carroll as Tommy's spare girlfriend, little cutesy-pops Nina.

Neither the plot, the dialogue or the acting measure up to the rest of the series. A whole lot of Tommy's mates suddenly descend on his flat to try and cheer him up with a card-game before the inquest, which does not move the plot forward at all. Loggia is only pretending to play the piano (he would have done better with his hands out of sight). Nina is stuck with that cliché line "And now, if you'll excuse me..." that should have been given a decent burial long before 1959. Also, just for once, your host John Newland fails to hold the attention in his top-&-tail commentary.

And this short video needed two scriptwriters? Yik.

"One Step Beyond" always claimed to be based on real cases involving the supernatural. I always took this with a grain of salt and enjoyed the shows anyways. However, this one was hard to ignore because the story idea was so patently ridiculous.

Robert Loggia plays Tom Grant--a brooding piano player in a dive. When he sees his ex-girlfriend about to go out with a customer, something snaps and he kills her. While he did not get cut during this stabbing, he keeps seeing blood all over his hands--especially when he washes them. This drives him batty and eventually he turns himself in to the police.

This is a very heavy-handed episode. Loggia is a fine actor but here he seems ridiculous and fake. Fortunately, this didn't appear to harm his career and I'm assuming producers didn't see this episode--if they had, his film career might have ground to a halt!