Alfred Hitchcock Presents 1.07

Breakdown

starring Joseph Cotten

directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Cutthroat business owner William Callew (Joseph Cotten), gets into a car accident on a mostly deserted road. He crashes into a prison vehicle. The guards are killed. The prisoners take off running. Callew is paralyzed in the accident and can't speak or do anything to indicate to the men who come by scavenging that he is still alive.

Three men take Callew's luggage and the wheels off the car. Another man, one of the escaped prisoners, takes his clothes. Callew discovers he can move one of his fingers but his body gets moved to the morgue before he can get anyone's attention. 

Thoughts

This is the first of three episodes of this show in which Joseph Cotten appeared. He also appeared in two episodes of Tales of the Unexpected. I've also seen him in a few movies but the only one of which I have seen recently is Citizen Kane (1941).

Cotten voices Callew's inner thoughts as he waits for someone to see that he's still alive. In some ways his performance (and the way the episode played out) reminded me of a radio drama. I later learned that this had been a radio drama.

James Edwards played one of the convicts who comes back to see what he can scavenge. This is the first of two episodes of this show in which he appeared. I've seen him in a few movies. I saw him most recently in The Killing (1956).

Aaron Spelling, who later went on to become a producer of television movies and shows from the late 1950s to the early 2000s, played the part of one of the scavengers.

This is the second of 17 episodes that Alfred Hitchcock directed himself. I like this one much better than the previous one, 1.01 Revenge. 

Despite the way Callew treated one of his employees, whom he had just fired, in the opening minutes of the episode, I couldn't help but want to see what would happen to him in the end. I wasn't exactly rooting for him but I couldn't look away.

This is possibly my favorite episode so far and it definitely belongs in the upper tier of episodes of this show.