Kelsey and Wes Carmichael are still co-workers at a chemical plant but are now roommates too, so cutting out all the subsidiary characters at Mrs McCartney’s rooming house from the novel where David stays. Having Psycho author Robert Bloch pen the script (one of several he did for the show) strikes me as a very good bit of casting as there is more than a touch of ‘Norman Bates’ about David – and this is certainly borne out by the heavily revised ending that fans will recognise as being fairly typical of Bloch’s blackly comic sensibility. Many of the changes in Bloch’s script though are simple expedients to reduce the size of the cast and the number of sets, pretty much boiling everything down to its bare essentials. Despite the inevitable simplifications of the narrative to fit its 60-minute slot and the predictable prettification of the book’s highly disagreeable cast of characters, this reduction (starting with Highsmith’s Annabelle losing the last two letters of her name) is none the less quite an effective adaptation on its own highly unfaithful terms. It was originally screened on 1 November 1962 as the first episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the new incarnation for the Hitchcock anthology when, after seven years on the air, it expanded on its original half-hour format and moved back to CBS after being screened on NBC for two years. Arguably though this is no bad thing as Highsmith’s novel does in fact feel overlong, slowing down considerably on its way to its nihilistic finale as Kelsey succumbs to his obsessions with murderous results.
Much of the plot and character material has been removed entirely and the timeframe condensed massively.
#YOUTUBE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR EPISODES MOVIE#
This TV version (there is also a French movie from 1977, Dites-lui que je l’aime starring Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou that I have yet to catch up with) compresses and shortens the narrative greatly and should be seen as a palimpsest of the novel.
“I understand, I always understood you, ever since we met, ever since we fell in love” This review is offered as part of the 2013 Book to Movie Challenge at the Doing Dewey blog – for review links, click here and Tuesday’s Overlooked Film meme hosted by Todd Mason over at his Sweet Freedom blog. Dean Stockwell starred as Kelsey and Susan Oliver played Annabel in an adaptation scripted by the great Robert Bloch that substantially altered the book. This is the premise of Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness (I reviewed it here last week), which shortly after its publication became the debut episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. During the week David Kelsey lives in a little apartment in Froudsberg but at weekends he drives off to a large secluded house near Ballard to become ‘William Newmaster’, where he dreams of a life with his ex-girlfriend Annabel, now married to someone else.
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