Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

He is an imbecile, strictly from hunger, who kills The Great Sadini at the behest of Mrs. Sadini so that she may have her funambulist. The kid has a trick up his sleeve, however, and divides to conquer.

A perfect example of Hitchcock surprise (cp. “An Out For Oscar” on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, dir. Bernard Girard), in this instance prepared by Robert Bloch, translated as it were out of hocus-pocus parlance, and set amid Keeley’s Circus doing the Midwest at Toledo.

12 o’clock High: The Pariah

The Reiniger Engine Works, a camouflaged target hard to hit.

The scion flies as M/SGT So-and-so, it’s destroyed.

Emergency landing on the Russian front, captured.

A Nazi oberst divines how it was done. Everyone goes to the wall.

The Russians attack, the Yanks get the upper hand, the oberst flees a Russian tank. “I want to always remember him,” says the skipper of the Piccadilly Lily, “frightened.”

The scion is buried under his nom de guerre. “They’ll know he was an American airman,” says the skipper, “and that’ll be enough.”

Rossellini’s L’Uomo dalla Croce is rather strikingly evoked in the later scenes.