What is The Alfred Hitchcock Presents About?
Alfred Hitchcock Presents is well known for its title sequence. The camera fades in on a simple line-drawing caricature of Hitchcock’s rotund profile. As the program’s theme music, Charles Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, plays, Hitchcock himself appears in silhouette from the right edge of the screen, and then walks to center screen to eclipse the caricature. He then almost always says “Good evening.” The drawing was the work of Hitchcock himself.[2] He began his career in the 1920s as an illustrator for silent movie intertitle cards. The sequence has been parodied countless times in films and on television. The caricature and the use of Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette as theme music have become indelibly associated with Hitchcock in popular culture. Hitchcock appears again after the title sequence and drolly introduces the story from a mostly-empty studio or from the set of the current episode. At least two versions of the opening were shot for every episode. A version
