Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV Series) Burglar Proof (1962) User Reviews

Pretty simple, but well done

[talonjensen · 8/10 · 7 May 2018]

Pretty obvious twist at the end, but I still enjoyed it. The acting and obfuscation at the beginning was well done. I would have liked a little more on what happened to the ad exec with regards to the safe company at the ending, but I can guess. Don't read the rest of this review unless you want to read spoilers.

SPOILER: Sammy alludes to the fact several times he is in a new business now, but we never find out what business it is until the end of the episode.

When he stumbles into the guard putting the $50,000 into the safe it becomes quite clear what business he is now in. This begs the question, does he fake some of his efforts to open the safe? Because opening the safe would have given everything away!

A dandy episode.

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 21 April 2021]

Paul Hartman was a very boring actor...or, at least when he was on the later seasons of "The Andy Griffith Show" as well as "Mayberry RFD". However, in his younger years he and his wife did a dandy stage dancing act and he made a variety of episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" which were quite good....meaning his boring acting seemed to be because he was given a dull character.

The episode begins with a couple of executives (Robert Webber and Whit Bissell) for a safe company talking about a publicity stunt one of them has created. Their new safe is supposedly impossible to crack...and they'll arrange to have the world's best safe cracker try his hand at it (Paul Hartman). If he can open it, he can have the $50,000 locked inside of it.

When the event takes place, there are a lot of folks from the press there to witness the three hour challenge. And, while the safe cracker isn't able to crack the safe, he is successful! What does this mean? See the show.

This is well written and fun. I did predict the outcome during one scene but it still worked well and it sure is worth seeing.

This is no totally burglar-proof safe, is there?

[FlushingCaps · 9/10 · 19 March 2021]

Safe cracker parolee Sammy Morrisey (played by Paul Hartman, best remembered as Mayberry's Fix-it Man Emmitt) is hired by an advertising agency to "endorse" a supposed burglar-proof safe. The stunt is that he will receive only $500 if he cannot open the safe, and if he does, there's $50,000 in cash inside the safe that will be his.

Instead of a filmed commercial or print ad that would just come across as phony, he is to do his work live before an audience of police officers and newspaper reporters at the company's headquarters.

They announce how much money is in the envelope, then hand it to a cop who is to take it directly to the safe, which he does. Then Sammy has 3 hours to open the thing in front of all those witnesses. We see him spinning the tumblers and then trying various sorts of drills and welding torches and finally nitro. Everything fails. He is given his $500 and thanked for his work, as he walks away looking perplexed.

Everyone at the ad agency and the safe company is delighted, knowing the publicity from the reporters will be far better for sales than any multi-million dollar ad campaign.

But the next morning, when the time lock lets them open that safe, suddenly everything goes wrong and that's as close as I'm getting to a spoiler here.

This is clearly one of the most humorous episodes in the series and the twist at the end definitely will surprise many first-time viewers. I will say I had it halfway figured out, and that's closer than I normally get. It was well done and they did show enough to reveal what happened at the end. Sometimes we just learn the finish from Hitch, which is usually disappointing to me.

A happy 9 is my score. Even if you figure out the ending it's still fun to see how it's handled.

Good Bump, Bad Bump

[Hitchcoc · 9/10 · 3 June 2021]

Paul "Emmet" Hartmann is hired to crack a safe. It is legit because it's the safe company asking the best in the business to prove how good their product is. Most of episode involves every method he can think of to crack a conventional safe: from sensitive fingers to explosives. The whole thing was given away when he trips and bumps into one of the cops observing the event. All in all, it was OK.

GOOD CROOKS ARE HARD TO FIND!

[tcchelsey · 10/10 · 19 January 2024]

Next to playing Emmett on the ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, Paul Hartman is also fondly remembered for this campy episode that is a must see.

Henry Slesar, behind nearly 3000 episodes of the EDGE OF NIGHT, wrote this gem, and possibly based on fact. There are many documented cases where the "best and brightest" criminals are (legally) recruited by companies to test their products to see how safe and protective they actually are.

Case in point, Hartman plays easy-going former safe cracker Sammy, hired by Harrison Fell (Robert Webber) and Mr. Bliss (Whit Bissell) --and note their characters' names! -- to literally try to open a new, revolutionary safe. His payment: IF Sammy succeeds, he can have the $50,000 dollars inside!

What do you think about that? This is fun, over the top stuff for Hitch, and well directed by one of the best, John Newland. John directed four episodes for the series, long associated with creepy ONE STEP BEYOND. He also directed four episodes for Boris Karloff's tv show, THRILLER. He and Hitchcock had to have some laughs over this one.

See how it all ends... it's addictive! From SEASON 7 EPISODE 21 remastered Universal dvd box set.

"You were saying something about fifty grand?"

[classicsoncall · 7/10 · 27 March 2022]

There's a pretty significant 'tell' in the story when Morrissey (Paul Hartman) bumps the security guard holding the fifty-thousand-dollar challenge envelope about to be locked in the Holdwell Safe Company's newest and most impregnable offering. With all those witnesses present to see if Sammy can crack the '801 Burglar Proof' box, it never occurred to anyone that a master safecracker might also have a secondary sideline as a pickpocket. If the security guard bump wasn't made so obvious, this would have been a more satisfying episode, because once it happens, the viewer's antenna goes up as if to say, what gives? This story seemed awful familiar to me, so I went back and checked my prior reviews to find that it was only about six months ago that I watched the story titled 'Operation Safecrack' as part of the Eighties British anthology series 'Tales of the Unexpected'. All the principal character names remained the same, but in keeping with the filmmakers' country of origin, the prize offered by the Holdwell Company was twenty five thousand British pounds, which approximates America's fifty grand.

Of the lighter variety

[TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews · 7/10 · 8 November 2012]

Harrison(played enthusiastically by Webber) Fell(someone really should help him back up), an ad exec, has not had a good idea for a campaign for months(personally, I think it's because all his time is spent thinking up more or less fitting metaphors for seemingly every situation he's in that relates to his job being done successfully... most of them are about space travel, which, to be fair, was on everybody's mind at the time... still, they can get to be grating). He's sure he has it now, however: having the best safe-cracker see if he can open the most recent box, in front of a crowd including policemen and reporters. His boss Stark apparently agreed(presumably after his Mark II came to a safe landing), so now he has to convince Morrisey(Hartman, who does well with the comedic material, physical and verbal alike), and then it's a wash! Because... he couldn't... really open it... could he? This is one of the humor-oriented episodes, as the wacky music will reveal... there are a few gags(such as the long running one of different methods and tools being used against the sturdy container) and jokes, but more than being outright funny(and if you aren't into the way they went for laughs in the period this was made, you're outta luck for even those), it's just an overall less serious approach(and mercifully doesn't get as goofy as it at times threatens to). The ending is clever and surprising. I recommend this to fans of this type of more family-friendly crime-mysteries. 7/10