Stepp, whatever happened? You weren't home last night, were you? No, I was riding on the ferry.Īnd- On the ferry? Have they Has anyone been here looking for me? No, not a soul.Īll that rain last night, you'll catch your death of cold. It'll be all right to clean the office on Monday.ĭon't open your umbrella on the inside, sir.ĭon't you know that's bad luck? No, I didn't know that. You working kind of late for Saturday, ain't you? Yes, a little. We leave for Denver Monday for the final meeting on the Bonanza issue and I'm not inclined to spend Saturday night arguing with you anymore. I've no time to discuss it any further, Stepp. It was only a slip in filing, only misplaced. I'm sure it couldn't possibly - Yes, here it is.īaldwin, won't Can't you possibly reconsider my- We've been over that, Stepp.īaldwin don't my 21 years of loyal service count for anything? Loyalty is no substitute for accuracy and efficiency.Īnd the paper you lost yesterday was a serious matter. Stepp, you still here? Where's that paper listing Bonanza's Lead Mountain holdings? Well, I'm sure it's right there, sir. These objects play an important part in tonight's tale. And like the bomb under the table, he clearly preferred that guns not go off either, judging by his sobering epilogue to “Bang,” in which he drops his “usual flippancy” to address parents directly about the importance of keeping guns from children.I hope you'll excuse me if I appear a trifle excited but I've just come into possession of a cure for insomnia.įor best results, they must be taken internally.Īn idiot can operate it and indeed many do. He preferred weapons demanding proximity-knives, neckties, a good old-fashioned push-over firepower. Looking back over a career chronicling villainy, guns play a surprisingly secondary role in Hitchcock’s work. The key, Hitchcock felt, was that the bomb must never go off. The sequence violated his own “ bomb under the table” aphorism, which went like so: The audience should know from the start that there’s a bomb beneath the table, thus ratcheting up the tension with each passing moment as the unsuspecting victims at the table blather on, obliviously. Hitchcock agreed and expressed his regrets. “Bang!” is ostensibly Hitchcock’s corrective to the infamous bus bombing scene in his 1936 film Sabotage, a sequence so explosive Francois Truffaut dubbed it “an abuse of cinematic power” during his extensive interviews with Hitchcock at Universal Studios in 1962. Friends and neighbors all bashfully obey, teasing out the boy’s joke-and the audience’s horror. For a pulse-pounding afternoon, the boy waltzes around town, slipping through each townsperson’s grip as he plays cowboy. A young boy replaces the toy gun in his holster with the real revolver he finds in his uncle’s suitcase, which he partially loads with live rounds. The episode “Bang! You’re Dead,” which originally aired in 1961 and can be viewed in full online, tracks an afternoon of agonizing roulette. With incessant surveillance, melting planets, and robot warfare consuming headlines, there’s no shortage of potential comparisons.īut following the recent wave of accidental shootings at the hands of children-culminating in the heart-wrenching story of a sibling fatality in south-central Kentucky from a gun marketed for children as “My First Rifle”-there’s another classic TV show that applies to a chilling degree: Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Each news cycle is replete with Twilight Zonecomparisons.
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