Norman Lloyd Movies

Chaim Sigerski (Martin Balsam), an Auschwitz survivor who runs a Holocaust museum, is convinced that his old friend Isaac (Than Wyenn) did not die in a traffic accident, but was instead deliberately murdered by a fugitive Nazi war criminal. Finding the authorities indifferent to his suspicions, Chaim turns to medical examiner Quincy (Jack Klugman) for help. As a result, Quincy ends up butting heads with Cornelius Sumner (Norman Lloyd), a wealthy and influential activist who denies that the Holocaust ever happened. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Maxwell Smart, the infamous Agent 86 from the '60s television sitcom Get Smart makes his feature-film debut in this goofy espionage spoof. This time, Smart and his cohorts must stop enemy spies from detonating a bomb that would destroy all the world's clothing. On television, the film was renamed The Return of Maxwell Smart. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This television miniseries is based on Thomas Tryon's complex and suspenseful occult thriller Harvest Home, delving into the forbidden rituals of the small New England township Cornwall Combe, whose residents offer annual human sacrifices to pagan gods in return for a bountiful corn harvest. The production is notable mainly for the participation of Bette Davis, who plays the powerful Widow Fortune, the town's leading practitioner of the black arts. A very young Rosanna Arquette co-stars as one of the new kids in town. Beware the severely cut home video version, which omits almost 200 minutes of footage and thus loses a great deal of clarity. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Audrey Rose is a "thinking man's" horror film, which in a way is unfortunate, since it tended to be ignored amidst the many spell-it-all-out scarefests of the late '70s. Marsha Mason and John Beck play Janice and Bill Templeton, a happily married couple, the parents of well-adjusted preteen Ivy (Susan Swift). Their family security is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Elliot Hoover (Anthony Hopkins). At first mistaken for a potential child molester, Hoover explains that his obsessive interest in young Ivy is actually paternal. It is Hoover's contention that their daughter is the reincarnation of his own child, who died in a horrible accident. This information is dismissed out of hand-and then strange things begin happening. Directed by Robert Wise (who had previously helmed the psychological thriller The Haunting), Audrey Rose was adapted by co-producer Frank de Felitta from his own novel. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An uprooted African-American family is forced to confront their traditional values and ponder the effect that the emerging civil rights movement will have on their lives after relocating from the deep-south to Chicago in the filmed version of Phillip Hayes Dean's insightful and acclaimed stage play. Mary Alice and Maidie Norman star, and Ivan Dixon directs for television. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Bruce Jay Friedman's acclaimed off-Broadway play, which offers a decidedly unusual perspective on the afterlife, is brought to the screen in this production originally created for public television. Tandy (Bill Bixby) is a New York Police Department employee who suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself enjoying a steam at a public bathhouse overseen by an elderly Hispanic gentleman, Morty (Jose Perez). As the evening wears on, Tandy and Morty are joined by several other guests -- a stock trader (Kenneth Mars), a cabbie (Stephen Elliott), an attractive woman (Valerie Perrine), and a schlubby nebbish (Herb Edelman) -- and it begins to dawn on Tandy and his companions that they've all recently died, and that the steam bath is actually the waiting room to the next life, where Morty is judging their fates. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Walter Matthau stars in this made-for-TV adaptation of Clifford Odets' classic stage drama (which became one of the inaugural production of the famed Group Theater in the mid-'30s). The Berger family are an extended Jewish family living in the Bronx who are struggling to survive in the face of poverty and difficult circumstances. To earn some extra money, the Bergers have decided to rent a room to a boarder, and Moe Axelrod (Matthau), a veteran of the Great War who lost a leg in battle, becomes the new face in the household. Moe has a bitter sense of humor and a willingness to speak his mind, and his outspoken nature soon wins him an ally in Grandfather Jacob (Leo Fuchs), an outspoken leftist who believes the family should rise up and take action against the economic and political circumstances which hold them down. The supporting cast also includes Ron Rifkin and acclaimed director Martin Ritt. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Filmed in Flagstaff, Arizona, The Bravos top-bills George Peppard as a frontier cavalry commander. It is Peppard's job to protect his fort, and the wagon train passengers sheltered within, from the 2000 Kiowa Indian warriors who dot the surrounding hills. This being a 1972 TV movie, the Native Americans are "savage" only when provoked. When they abduct Peppard's son Vincent Van Patten, it is in retribution for the death of their own chief's son. The Bravos was the 90-minute pilot film for a never-sold western series. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Filmed on location in Austria and Italy, the made-for-TV The Smugglers stars Shirley Booth as an American tourist and Carol Lynley as her stepdaughter/travelling companion. Attempting to sneak a few souvenirs past customs, the ladies inadvertently become the couriers for an international smuggling ring. Booth and Lynley unknowingly face death at every turn as the desperate smugglers chase them up and down the Tyrol. With gratuitous violence and murders galore, The Smugglers was a curiously chosen offering for NBC's Christmas Eve 1968 premiere slot. Perhaps the network was embarrassed by the project and sincerely hoped it would be pre-empted by coverage of the Apollo 8 space mission. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Season ten of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour marked the suspense anthology's move from CBS to NBC, where as Alfred Hitchcock Presents it had previously run in a half-hour format from 1960 through 1962. At the same time, the series forsook its sparsely attended Friday-night time slot to a slightly more advantageous berth on Monday evenings, opposite the long-running but now lagging Ben Casey and the born-loser Slattery's People. As was the case during season nine, season ten contained no episodes directed by Alfred Hitchcock himself. The season began with the Arnold Laven-directed "The Return of Verge Likens," starring Dennis Hopper as a hillbilly who uses psychological torture to avenge the death of his father. It is fairly grim stuff, but nowhere near as gruesome as some of the other tenth-season offerings. "Water's Edge," adapted from a Robert Bloch story, concludes with the spectacle of Ann Sothern preparing John Cassavetes to be devoured by a horde of rats, and "The Final Performance" features Franchot Tone as a washed-up vaudeville performers who employs his peculiar talents to nastily divest himself of his faithless young wife. A handful of episodes this season represent rare Alfred Hitchcock Hour forays into fantasy and the supernatural, notably the offbeat fable "Where the Woodbine Twineth" and the futuristic murder yarn "Consider Her Ways." Also, the series occasionally plundered the classics, adapting Andre Maurois' mordant "Thanatos Palace Hotel" as a vehicle for Steven Hill and Angie Dickinson, and W.W. Jacobs' Grand Guignol masterpiece "The Monkey's Paw" as a showcase for prolific series director Robert Stevens. In the tradition of such past efforts as "Bang, You're Dead" and "Hangover," this season features one of the few episodes in which Alfred Hitchcock foregoes his characteristic humorous epilogue in favorite of a deadly serious message addressing an acute social problem. "Memo from Purgatory," adapted by Harlan Ellison from his own experiences while posing as a juvenile delinquent in order to gather information for a book, stars James Caan as the Ellison counterpart, and a pre-Star Trek Walter Koenig in a searing performance as a vicious street-gang leader. Canceled at the end of its tenth season, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour wrapped things up with its 361st episode "Off Season," written by Robert Bloch and directed by a young William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Impoverished and terminally ill Mexican peasant Juan Diaz (Alejandro Rey) makes a deal with gravedigger Alejandro (Frank Silvera) that will enable Juan to provide for his wife, Maria (Pina Pellecier), and their children after his death. When Maria discovers that her late husband had promised to allow Alejandro to mummify his body and display it as a tourist attraction, she takes it upon herself to break into Alejandro's crypt and steal Juan's corpse. An ironic ending caps this ghoulishly poignant Ray Bradbury story, which also boasts a typically superb Bernard Herrmann musical score. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After two years on NBC, the long-running suspense anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents returned to its original stamping grounds, CBS, for its eighth season on the air. Only it wasn't Alfred Hitchcock Presents anymore: responding to a then-current industry trend, the series had expanded from 30 to 60 minutes per week, and had been rechristened The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Not only did this provide the series' production staff with the opportunity to do longer, more complex and more in-depth stories, but it also allowed host Alfred Hitchcock to make three between-the-acts appearances per episode, rather than just two. Moving into its new 10 p.m. Thursday slot in the fall of 1962, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour kicked off its eighth season with "A Piece of the Action," starring veteran Gig Young and relative newcomer Robert Redford, and directed by frequent series contributor Bernard Girard. Former Hitchcock contractee Vera Miles, who has headlined the series' very first half-hour episode, "Revenge," back in 1955, returned to star in the second hour-long entry, "Don't Look Behind You," helmed by John Brahm. As for Hitchcock, his only directorial foray this season is the fourth episode, the Rashomon-like "I Saw the Whole Thing." It would be the last of the series' Hitchcock-directed installments; thereafter, The Master confined his TV activity to his hosting and story-editor duties, reserving his directorial energies to such theatrical features as The Birds and Marnie.

Highlights of the series' inaugural one-hour season include "Captive Audience" and "Dear Uncle George," a brace of "perfect-murder" yarns penned by Richard Levinson and William Link of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote fame; "The Black Curtain," adapted from Cornell Woolrich's famous whodunit; "Ride the Nightmare," scripted by Richard Matheson, who also wrote the episode The Thirty-First of February" under the nom de plume of "Logan Swanson"; "Diagnosis: Danger," directed by Sydney Pollack, who had previously worked on the series as an actor; "The Long Silence," co-authored by Charles Beaumont; and "Death of a Cop," written by veteran Hollywood scenarist Leigh Brackett, whose film credits ranged from The Big Sleep to The Empire Strikes Back. In the tradition of the previous season's "Bang, You're Dead," season eight offers another "serious" episode, in which Hitchcock foregoes the traditional humorous epilogue to deliver a straightforward cautionary message about an all-too-real social problem. In this case, the problem is alcoholism, and the episode in question is "Hangover," co-written by mystery author John D. MacDonald and co-starring Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. After a shaky start opposite the high-rated NBC variety series The Andy Williams Show, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour moved from Thursday to Friday evenings in January of 1963, where it fared somewhat better opposite the flagging 77 Sunset Strip and the low-rated satirical series That Was the Week That Was. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After being injured in a train wreck, salesman Pedro Siqueras (David Opatoshu) is told by a doctor that he will never walk again. But after spending time in a wheelchair, Siqueras discovers that he has regained the use of his legs. However, he does not reveal this recovery, having already collected a sizeable insurance settlement. Ultimately tiring of faking paralysis, Siqueras concocts a scheme whereby he can undergo a "miraculous" cure -- a scheme that involves the unwitting aid of a genuine paraplegic named Maria (Miriam Colon). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide