Where to begin? Or the tougher question: where to leave off? The shorter list, certainly, would be what is not the trouble: firstly and foremostly the Vermont autumn, with its fiery Van Gogh palette. Perhaps the chief reason why this Hitchcock "black comedy" dates so badly is that the movie is all attitude. That, and the accompanying difficulty, at this remove, of figuring out exactly what that attitude is, or was — whether the movie already seemed in 1955 to be as quaint and timid as it does now, or whether at the time it may have seemed a bit more impish, a bit more impious, even. The first possibility — a sort of gasping and giggling old ladyishness such as would regard Agatha Christie as something to be read by flashlight under the bedsheet, or such as would turn up a coat collar and pull down a hat brim when going to see Arsenic and Old Lace — is not a very attractive attitude in a grown-up. But neither is its likeliest alternative: the supercilious presumption of one's own grownupness and of everyone else's old ladyishness. If the movie holds any interest today at all, it is as a kind of tuning fork for the tone of the Alfred Hitchcock TV series, a tone much more tolerable, or at least less likely to put one into a trance, at the anecdotal half-hour length. John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick. (1955) — Duncan Shepherd