However, he’s not entirely unhinged either. He enjoys the security of it, so when he’s fired he quickly goes off the deep end. King as characters.īenjamin is very much a mousy old man whose existence seems to revolve around his job. Everything past that point sheds light on both Benjamin and Mr. This is one of those stories that’s difficult to talk about, because the reason behind Baldwin being back is revealed halfway through the story instead of at the end. After the supposed murder, we follow Benjamin and his second boss Mr. While it has a little ambiguity in its ending, I really liked how it all came together. This was a tightly focused story with a rather bookend-ish feel to it. Is Benjamin just seeing things, or is it possible that Mr. But upon being called into work that Monday, he finds his boss seemingly alive and well with no recollection of the incident. Upset, Benjamin takes his anger out on him by shooting him dead. Benjamin is growing old and accidentally misplaces a file, causing Mr. This is “A Bullet for Baldwin.”īenjamin Stepp has been a loyal clerk for 21 years for investment banker Mr. And like the bomb under the table, he clearly preferred that guns not go off either, judging by his sobering epilogue to “Bang,” in which he drops his “usual flippancy” to address parents directly about the importance of keeping guns from children.Welcome back to my “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” marathon! Have you ever had a boss fire you for making a mistake? Ever wished you could get back at them for it? Well, today’s episode sort of centers around that idea. He preferred weapons demanding proximity-knives, neckties, a good old-fashioned push-over firepower. Looking back over a career chronicling villainy, guns play a surprisingly secondary role in Hitchcock’s work. The key, Hitchcock felt, was that the bomb must never go off. The sequence violated his own “ bomb under the table” aphorism, which went like so: The audience should know from the start that there’s a bomb beneath the table, thus ratcheting up the tension with each passing moment as the unsuspecting victims at the table blather on, obliviously. Hitchcock agreed and expressed his regrets. “Bang!” is ostensibly Hitchcock’s corrective to the infamous bus bombing scene in his 1936 film Sabotage, a sequence so explosive Francois Truffaut dubbed it “an abuse of cinematic power” during his extensive interviews with Hitchcock at Universal Studios in 1962. Friends and neighbors all bashfully obey, teasing out the boy’s joke-and the audience’s horror. For a pulse-pounding afternoon, the boy waltzes around town, slipping through each townsperson’s grip as he plays cowboy. A young boy replaces the toy gun in his holster with the real revolver he finds in his uncle’s suitcase, which he partially loads with live rounds. The episode “Bang! You’re Dead,” which originally aired in 1961 and can be viewed in full online, tracks an afternoon of agonizing roulette. With incessant surveillance, melting planets, and robot warfare consuming headlines, there’s no shortage of potential comparisons.īut following the recent wave of accidental shootings at the hands of children-culminating in the heart-wrenching story of a sibling fatality in south-central Kentucky from a gun marketed for children as “My First Rifle”-there’s another classic TV show that applies to a chilling degree: Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Each news cycle is replete with Twilight Zonecomparisons.
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