Alfred Hitchcock Presents “Banquo’s Chair”

“Banquo’s Chair”, an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, adapted from Rupert Croft-Cooke’s story by Francis M. Cockrell, featuring John Williams, Kenneth Haigh, Reginald Gardiner, Max Adrian and Hilda Plowright, produced by Joan Harrison, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was first broadcast on May 3, 1959:


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From Chapter Ten, “Cinema and Bullring”, of The Dogs of Peace (London, 1973) by Rupert Croft-Cooke, p. 171:
I had been fooled by a letter from a literary agent’s assistant who told me that a film company in America wanted to base ‘a small incident in a film’ on a one-act play of mine called Banquo’s Chair.  They offered about £300 for this seemingly trivial agreement and I accepted while I was still in the army in India.  When I came home I managed to see the film at a small cinema in south-east London.  It was a ‘second feature’ but they had used my entire play almost word for word.  What was more, a few years later appeared on television an adaptation of it by Alfred Hitchcock, but it appeared that my contract included television rights and I had no redress.  It is long ago and I do not know whose fault it was—that of the agent’s assistant or the film-makers, but I do remember my resentment at having been misled and deprived of a reasonable fee for the only film work I had so far sold.
See also “The Fatal Witness”: