"The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" Consider Her Ways (1964)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Robert Stevens

Writers:

Oscar Millard (teleplay)
John Wyndham (story)

TV Series:

"The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" (1962)

Original Air Date:

28 December 1964 (Season 3, Episode 11)

Genre:

Mystery | Romance | Thriller

Plot:

Dr. Jane Waterleigh wakes to find herself in an obese body, having just given birth to her fourth baby...

Plot Keywords:

Amnesia | Biologist | Doctor | Virus | Narcotic

Cast

Alfred Hitchcock	...	Himself - Host
Barbara Barrie	...	Dr. Jane Waterleigh
Gladys Cooper	...	Laura
Robert H. Harris	...	Dr. Perrigan
Gene Lyons	...	Max Wilding
Ellen Corby	...	Chief Nurse
Virginia Gregg	...	Third Doctor
Carmen Phillips	...	Mother Daisy
Diane Sayer	...	Mother Hazel
Dee J. Thompson	...	First Doctor
Alice Backes	...	Second Doctor
Eve Bruce	...	Amazon
Ivy Bethune	...	Nurse
Jennifer Gan	...	First Worker (as Ginny Gan)
Stacy King	...	Female Worker

Runtime:

48 min

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Filming Locations:

Universal Studios - 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California, USA

Company:

Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions

Quotes:

Dr. Jane Waterleigh: Suppose that in ridding society of a pest it has gotten along with for centuries, you also destroyed society.
Dr. Perrigan: Sort of throwing the baby out with the bath water, hmm?
Dr. Jane Waterleigh: Or the operation was successful, but the patient died.

The Most Bizarre Episode in the Entire Hitchcock TV Series?

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Warning: May contain partial spoilers!!!

"Consider Her Ways" begins bang in a nightmare state, with no warning or explanation beforehand: A woman (Barbara Barrie) awakens in a hospital maternity ward to find herself in a dystopian society she doesn't recognize. It's a quasi-totalitarian state in which an educated class of doctors and police oppress an illiterate class of servants and women whose sole function is to be "mothers"--to crank out babies that are taken away from them immediately and which the "mothers" never see. Though the "mothers" are to some extent coddled and pampered, they are also oppressed by being grotesquely overfed and kept under sedation. Adding to the strangeness of the society, all the members of both classes--oppressors and oppressed--appear to be women. There are no men anywhere. Our protagonist's attempts to convince others that she is not a "mother" but Dr. Jane Waterleigh, a physician herself with a husband but no children, are met with shock or disbelief--until she is taken to see Laura (Gladys Cooper), an elderly historian. Laura remembers her grandmother telling her about a society, long ago, that contained men.

Things are not as they appear to be in this Hitchcock episode, but what makes it more bizarre than most--and peculiarly memorable--is that the explanations don't even begin until 40 minutes in. For the first 40 minutes, the viewer is just dumped into an alternate reality, without preamble, and left to find his own way. The grotesquerie of the alternate reality brings "Consider Her Ways" closer in tone to one of the farther-out "Twilight Zone" episodes than to most of the Hitchcock series, but it's quite gripping, contains a neat (if unnecessary) extra twist at the end, and is very well acted by Barrie and Cooper, playing the only two characters who really matter.