Most reviewers on this board for the early episodes of 'Thriller' seem to give them short shrift for their crime and mystery slant, but I'm finding them kind of interesting. Case in point is this one, 'The Mark of the Hand' which has a bit of a creepy plot going for it. Gold-digger Sylvia Walsh (Mona Freeman) manipulates a wealthy widower (Shepperd Strudwick) into an engagement, intending a quickie marriage and divorce, then splitting the divorce settlement three ways with her boyfriend Charles and his brother Paul (Berry Kroeger). Trouble is, Charles doesn't want to go along with the scheme, but as we see, he doesn't have much say in the matter.
With a slight revision in plans, Sylvia concocts a scheme to murder Charles and pin it on her fiancée's daughter (Terry Burnham). Paul's supposed to back up Sylvia's story about how Charles died, and the little girl is just going to lay back and take it because she's had some psychiatric counseling already over her mother's death. The psychological angle is given further credence because the father hasn't paid much attention to daughter Tessa since his wife died.
You know a shrew like Sylvia is going to get hers eventually, so you just have to sit back and let the story take it's course. Personally, I would never have come up with a second murder attempt using a butter knife by an eight year old, but what do I know. Somehow I just knew old Lt. Gordon (Judson Pratt) would be right around the corner to make the save. Poor Sylvia.
I recall seeing young Terry Burnham in any number of TV episodes as a kid, as I would have been her age back in 1960 when this show first aired. Just a few months earlier, she appeared in an episode of The Twilight Zone called 'Nightmare as a Child', a story with a somewhat supernatural bent in which she portrayed the 'subconscious' aspect of a grown woman who was the target of a murderer. Just to show you that lightning can strike twice, the actor who played the potential killer in that show was Shepperd Strudwick.
With a slight revision in plans, Sylvia concocts a scheme to murder Charles and pin it on her fiancée's daughter (Terry Burnham). Paul's supposed to back up Sylvia's story about how Charles died, and the little girl is just going to lay back and take it because she's had some psychiatric counseling already over her mother's death. The psychological angle is given further credence because the father hasn't paid much attention to daughter Tessa since his wife died.
You know a shrew like Sylvia is going to get hers eventually, so you just have to sit back and let the story take it's course. Personally, I would never have come up with a second murder attempt using a butter knife by an eight year old, but what do I know. Somehow I just knew old Lt. Gordon (Judson Pratt) would be right around the corner to make the save. Poor Sylvia.
I recall seeing young Terry Burnham in any number of TV episodes as a kid, as I would have been her age back in 1960 when this show first aired. Just a few months earlier, she appeared in an episode of The Twilight Zone called 'Nightmare as a Child', a story with a somewhat supernatural bent in which she portrayed the 'subconscious' aspect of a grown woman who was the target of a murderer. Just to show you that lightning can strike twice, the actor who played the potential killer in that show was Shepperd Strudwick.