Frank Killmond Movies

While renovating her new apartment in an old Victorian mansion, Quincy's girlfriend Jenny Drake (Marj Dusay) unearths the mummified remains of two women. Later on, two other female corpses are found within the same walls. After a thorough examination, Quincy (Jack Klugman) concludes that three of the women died of natural causes--but that the fourth was murdered. Our hero's subseqent fact-finding misison brings him in close contact with the truly bizarre residents of the crumbling old mansion (and any resemblance to Hitchcock's Psycho is undoubtedly purely intentional). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Two feuds are fired up in the course of this episode. For starters, Hooterville vies with Crabwell Corners over the ownership of a cannon originally used in the Spanish American war. Meanwhile, Hooterville's Betty Jo Bradley (Linda Kaye) squares off against Crabwell Corners' Tad Winslow (Frank Kilmond) as to who owns the best and smartest dog. Robert Shayne, best known as Inspector Henderson on the 1950s TV-series version of The Adventures of Superman, appears as Mr. Fillmore. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Hooterville has always prided itself on being the first community in its state to file election returns. All this may soon change, however: It seems that nearby Crabtree Corners (later known as Crabwell Corners) has installed an automatic voting machine. Ironically, Petticoat Junction would be pre-empted by the 1964 Presidential election coverage one week after the airing of this episode, in which Virginia Sale makes her first series appearance as Kate's arch-rival Selma Plout. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was already famous as the screen's master of suspense (and perhaps the best-known film director in the world) when he released Psycho and forever changed the shape and tone of the screen thriller. From its first scene, in which an unmarried couple balances pleasure and guilt in a lunchtime liaison in a cheap hotel (hardly a common moment in a major studio film in 1960), Psycho announced that it was taking the audience to places it had never been before, and on that score what followed would hardly disappoint. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is unhappy in her job at a Phoenix, Arizona real estate office and frustrated in her romance with hardware store manager Sam Loomis (John Gavin). One afternoon, Marion is given $40,000 in cash to be deposited in the bank. Minutes later, impulse has taken over and Marion takes off with the cash, hoping to leave Phoenix for good and start a new life with her purloined nest egg. 36 hours later, paranoia and exhaustion have started to set in, and Marion decides to stop for the night at the Bates Motel, where nervous but personable innkeeper Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cheerfully mentions that she's the first guest in weeks, before he regales her with curious stories about his mother. There's hardly a film fan alive who doesn't know what happens next, but while the shower scene is justifiably the film's most famous sequence, there are dozens of memorable bits throughout this film. The first of a handful of sequels followed in 1983, while Gus Van Sant's controversial remake, starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, appeared in 1998. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi