The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (TV Series) Good-Bye, George (1963) User Reviews

A Top-Notch, Forgotten Episode

[mackjay2 · 8/10 · 4 September 2009]

"Good-Bye, George" is a case of TV doing a fine job of emulating the movies. Not only is the story set in the Hollywood movie industry, but in its pacing and variety it comes closer to feature film than most TV shows ever did.

Lana Layne (Patricia Barry) is a big movie star who is about to have her greatest triumph: she's up for the Academy Award this year. On top of that, she's engaged to smart and successful Harry Lawrence (Robert Culp). Managing her career and the childish demands of gossip columnist Haila French (Alice Pearce, in a rare substantial role) is full-time work for Lana. She's got it all under control until one day in walks George (Stubby Kaye) the husband she has long thought was dead. Could Lana and George ever really have been married? That's something that might require a leap of imagination, but there it is. George informs Lana (he knew her when, under a different name) that, in California, since they are still married, what's his is hers and what's hers is his. And with Lana on the verge of super-stardom and great financial rewards, George sees himself rather well-placed. Not finding this an acceptable situation, Lana, in a moment of panic, smashes George in the head with one of her previous award statues. Resourceful Harry comes to Lana's aid with a clever plan to dispose of George's corpse and have their wedding and honeymoon, all in one night. Another leap of imagination is needed to understand why Harry doesn't dump George in Mexico when they cross the border instead of waiting until they reach the honeymoon bungalow.

Patricia Barry was a regularly seen beauty of early 60s television. She had memorable appearances on The Twilight Zone and other great series, but she never achieved true fame. As Lana, Barry seems perfectly cast. Robert Culp and Stubby Kaye are more than adequate in their parts, and so is Alice Pearce as the often drunk, mean-mouthed gossip columnist who holds Lana's career in the palm of her hand.

A tongue-in-cheek black comedy ribbing Tinseltown clichés

[melvelvit-1 · 8/10 · 1 November 2009]

When Academy Award-winning movie queen Lana Layne's (Patricia Barry) long-lost jailbird husband George (Stubby Kaye) returns from the dead and threatens to expose her secret past, she bashes his brains in with one of her acting trophies at a press party and, with the help of her resourceful agent/lover (Robert Culp), hides his body in her trousseau trunk before heading to Mexico for a quickie wedding -and a "surprise!" ending.

I vividly remember the murder moment on this particular show from a childhood viewing but the tongue-in-cheek black comedy that sends up many a Tinseltown cliché (including an overbearing, meddling gossip columnist with a penchant for outré chapeaus played by an annoying Alice Pearce) went right over my head back then. The "Sarah Bernhardt of the Boob Tube", guest star Patricia Barry, makes a glamorous nun in the film-within-a-film and seeing the sister in an off-the-set clinch with her main squeeze or knocking back bourbon as she spars with her sweaty schlub husband while still in her habit only adds to the amusement. There's also a fair share of suspense as the lovers cart Stubby's corpulent corpse all over creation in the back of their car. Former flash-in-the-pan leading man Elliot "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" Reed pops up fourth-billed as a studio publicity hack and the end credits thank the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences for allowing the producers to use "Oscar" but, alas, that wasn't the murder weapon (another wieldy award was used). Two years earlier, Boris Karloff's THRILLER featured a remarkably similar episode entitled "A Wig For Miss Devore" which starred the same "leading lady" :

Fun to watch...but not especially believable or well written.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 15 May 2021]

"Good-Bye, George" is a most enjoyable episode of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour", though I also must admit that it really is one of the least believable episodes and one with an enormous plot hole, big enough to drive a truck through it!!

This is an odd episode in that Patricia Barry didn't receive top or even second billing in this show...even though she clearly is the star. Barry plays Lana Layne, a famous actress who has just been Oscar-nominated. However, her joy with this is short-lived when he old, supposedly dead husband (Stubby Kaye) reappears and insists on sharing his wife's success...and wealth!! It seems that the dumpy guy was a crook years ago and he was assumed to have been killed in a shootout with the cops....and Lana went on the reinvent herself and change her name. However, his reappearance threatens to destroy all she's worked for...and the man is a leech. What's next? See the show.

I enjoyed this show quite a bit and was rooting for Lana to kill her beloved hubby. He was a jerk and I wanted to see her and her new husband (Robert Culp) to kill him and get away with it. But you know that on network TV in 1963 this would not be the case...and the ending, though fun, really made little sense. After all, after killing the jerk (by accident), they could have done so many different things to get rid of the body that would have made MUCH more sense then what they did in the episode....and it was a serious weakness to the script. Still, it is enjoyable and that's what is important.

A Sneak Peek at Hollywood

[dougdoepke · 15 April 2015]

Pretty good entry. Barry and Culp shine as a sleek Hollywood power couple, amid the gaiety of a big post-Oscar party. The party scene is really well-staged with all the earmarks of a glamorous tinsel town bash. Then too, the sniping coming from gossip queen Pearce is priceless and says a lot about inside the industry. So how will our conniving twosome get rid of the inconvenient body of Barry's long-ago husband Kaye, who suddenly turns up at the party. He's such an obnoxious character, it's almost a relief when she conks him, though it looked like she was conking a Lou Costello look-alike. But if he sticks around, her career is probably over. Good thing the cool-headed Culp is there to figure things out. Anyway, the ending's a surprise, befitting the Hitchcock brand. All in all, it's an entertaining entry providng a peek into backstage Hollywood that the producers likely had fun with.

One of the better episodes

[lbkrahn · 9/10 · 6 January 2015]

This is one of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, for several reasons. First, Patricia Barry gives a very fine performance as a glamorous Hollywood beauty who deep down is helpless without Robert Culp. I think it is quite interesting at how ridiculously helpless she is, considering Patricia also plays an over-confident over-bearing woman in at least one other Hitchcock episode. Her performance is fascinating.

Second, George's lines are extremely interesting in this episode. I find that the screenplay for this episode is more interesting than other episodes. Stubby Kaye and Patricia Barry's scenes together are extremely witty and well-written, at least until the point of the accidental murder.

Finally, one reviewer here indicates that Robert Culp does not bring any "life" to this role. In my view, Robert Culp was never very good at showing emotion. His performances on TV shows always seem very wooden to me, so I don't think this episode is an unusual performance for him. Here, he has to be the strong, unfeeling character in order to be able to put up with Lana Layne.

Also, who can resist the great performance of the late Alice Pearce (otherwise known as the "first" Mrs. Kravitz on Bewitched)? Alice has never been in finer form than she is in this episode - shrewd but outspoken. A perfect casting choice for the Hollywood set.

I recommend this episode to anyone who is a fan of this TV show.

ONE OF HITCHCOCK'S BEST TV EPISODES.

[tcchelsey · 10/10 · 21 February 2022]

The ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR was a longer and much demanded variation of his iconic half hour television series. The stories naturally had more depth and precision, and case in point "Good-Bye, George." Robert Arthur wrote this gem, who did lots of work for Hitch and for Boris Karloff and his tv show, THRILLER. Patricia Barry, best as a femme fatale, is effectively paired with Robert Culp (and a frequent tv partner), who have their hands literally full when her ex husband returns from the grave. Didn't this ever happen to you?

He was supposed to be dead, but as Hitchcock luck would have it, he is alive and kicking and very much wants to be recompensed after all the years he has been forced into retirement. Barry happens to be a successful actress, and with a few bucks in the bank. Watch what happens... This is one terrific black comedy that only Hitch could cook up. Good support from comedian Stubby Kaye as poor "George" and the hilarious Alice Pearce (BEWITCHED) as the ever nosey hanger-on. Wait till she screams! SEASON 2 EPISODE 10. Catch this if you can on a late, late night.

Decent episode, bad decisions

[amber-delong · 7/10 · 22 February 2021]

A decent story about a young actress who wins an Oscar and, at her party afterwards, is confronted by her old husband-a crook from across the country that has been "dead" for 5 years, but turns out he planted his ID on someone else to throw the cops off his tail. So, he shows up, acts like a jerks babbling about spending "their" community property and threatening to expose her past and ruin her career instead of taking a payoff. So, she gets a little upset and cracks his head with an award (not the Oscar).

Mostly, though, this story is about IDIOTS! It's very common for the killers in a Hitchcock story to be beyond incompetent at covering their tracks, but this is mind blowing. 1) this is during a party, and they have a great place to keep the body, but instead of waiting until it quiets down, they announce they're getting married and going to Mexico that night. 2) not only does this make leaving with their "luggage" more risky, it also is the last of a string of incidents that have pissed off her agent, because they've also been pissing off an important reporter.

Now, the plan. Drive to Mexico with the dead guy in her luggage. Drive to Mexico and get married. Drive through the middle of nowhere for hours to make sure nobody's following them to their "secret" honeymoon location, then double back and cross back to the US from a different city, and continue to his cabin near that city, and bury the body there.

OMG THE STUPIDITY! They drive for HOURS in Mexico without seeing a single car but instead of realizing "hey, why don't we dump this body that wouldn't be linked to us because he's 'dead' already right here" they chance another border crossing and still plan to bury him at the cabin-the one sure way to connect them to the body if found. But they get theirs cuz they're pissed off agent figures out where they're going and sets up a surprise party there to make the pissed off reporter happy.

All for Fun on Oscar Night

[Hitchcoc · 8/10 · 19 May 2023]

Did anyone ask how that beautiful, though incredibly dense, starlet ended up married to Stubby Kaye. So old George shows up to collect his community property when the beautiful actress is up to her knees in attention. Robert Culp uses his lips to great advantage, smooching with her every five seconds. Anyway, it's another body in the trunk episode. Once again a cop shows up and we hold our breath for a few moments. I figured out the ending way ahead of the actual thing, but it was still fun. The newspaper picture said it all. You have to feel a bit for old George. He was a legitimate husband. He overplayed his had by thinking he had more coming than a piece of the action, so to speak.

"I say let's go for the brass ring!"

[classicsoncall · 7/10 · 6 November 2022]

I only have one question. Well, maybe two. First of all, why wouldn't Harry (Robert Culp) have gotten rid of George's (Stubby Kaye) body on one of those deserted back roads in Mexico where Harry didn't see anyone for miles and miles? This observation has been made by other reviewers so it was obviously on the mind of those who watched this episode. The whole idea of bringing the corpse back to Harry's home in California didn't make any sense.

My other question - what the heck did the lovely Lana Layne (Patricia Barry) ever see in George in the first place to marry him so many years ago? Sure, she was only seventeen at the time, but come on, the contrast between them was probably even greater back then.

Cast those two issues aside and this was a fairly entertaining story. Alice Pearce was particularly effective as the snobbish gossip reporter, constantly snubbed by Lana and Harry for just an extra five minutes before she could get her potential scoop. The ending of course was classic Hitchcock and set the template for at least one other series program that I recall seeing some time ago. It was an episode of 'Tales From the Crypt' in which a surprise birthday party planned by a woman and her close male friend for the woman's husband ended with the jealous husband killing the guy in a deadly showdown, as the party guests waited to shout 'Surprise!' when he entered their home, while covered in blood from the lethal ordeal.

lame

[HEFILM · 3/10 · 22 June 2013]

The George, of the title, is the only character to possibly root for and that's not the point at all. It's not the actors' fault though neither can breath either sympathy or interest into their roles. Even Culp who can usually add some life to anything can't bring anything to this one.

The characters are uninteresting snobs. Not wicked enough to hate but the better way would have been to put you in their shoes which the show never does. It has nothing interesting or black comedy worth saying about Hollywood either.

The story is protracted or lack of story really. The central situation isn't exploited for any suspense and the ending, if it makes sense or no, doesn't add anything very compelling.

Flatly directed and shot, if you did see and forget this episode it's no wonder. If you haven't perhaps re-watch a great one instead. Hitchcock wrap around is worth a look but skip the rest of it.

Almost unwatchble

[Ripshin · 19 April 2024]

First of all. The casting of Stubby Kaye? Horrendous in the role of "George." He is a cartoonish mess, and it is completely unbelievable that he would ever have been married to "Lana," regardless if she were seventeen at the time. His line delivery belongs in some lame C-level comedy from the Forties. Fortunately, he is the victim almost half-way through (as was obvious from the start) - I came very close to turning off the episode.

And, of course, Alice Pearce plays a variation of the same character she performs in almost everything she does.

The whole border inspection scenario seems quite unlikely.

The ending is idiotic, and you can see it coming. The body would NOT have been moved before the house was unlocked. The agent would NOT have snuck the press into the cottage, no matter the attempted plot set-up of appeasing "Haila."

An episode to be missed.