If you enjoy taking an hour to find out if a guy ran a stop sign, then you might enjoy this episode. Actually, things are more serious than this. Mystery writer Barnes (Forsythe) is involved in a traffic accident that caused a motorcyclist's death. Now he's up on charges that he caused the accident by not stopping at the stop sign soon enough and then driving off. A number of eye-witnesses claim he's at fault, while he denies it. So now we get an hour's courtroom procedure to determine who's right. At least with Perry Mason, there was the fun of a whodunit. Here, unfortunately, the courtroom generates little Hitchcock suspense.
The main interest lies in the eye-witnesses testifying, especially scatter-brained blonde, Penny (Evans), who seems more interested in boys and "creeps" than testimony. (With a name like Evans Evans the actress specialized in loopy roles. But then she couldn't have been too ditzy, being married to heavyweight director John Frankenheimer, e.g. Seconds {1966}.) The ending, unfortunately, comes out of left field and is not very believable. Good thing the cast is full of familiar faces making that part worthwhile.
Whatever the entry lacks, it does contain a serious subtext: namely, just how reliable is eye-witness testimony. The narrative shows how what we think we see is often colored by our state-of-mind at the time. That's an interesting and substantive topic to dramatize for an audience, though its treatment here is less dramatic than expected for a dark series. Nonetheless, the question is one to consider.
Anyway, I wish Hitch's last TV directing turn had featured a less static and more memorable 60-minutes than this episode turns out to be.
The main interest lies in the eye-witnesses testifying, especially scatter-brained blonde, Penny (Evans), who seems more interested in boys and "creeps" than testimony. (With a name like Evans Evans the actress specialized in loopy roles. But then she couldn't have been too ditzy, being married to heavyweight director John Frankenheimer, e.g. Seconds {1966}.) The ending, unfortunately, comes out of left field and is not very believable. Good thing the cast is full of familiar faces making that part worthwhile.
Whatever the entry lacks, it does contain a serious subtext: namely, just how reliable is eye-witness testimony. The narrative shows how what we think we see is often colored by our state-of-mind at the time. That's an interesting and substantive topic to dramatize for an audience, though its treatment here is less dramatic than expected for a dark series. Nonetheless, the question is one to consider.
Anyway, I wish Hitch's last TV directing turn had featured a less static and more memorable 60-minutes than this episode turns out to be.