His ability to shock audiences was well known, but his capacity for sophisticated wit and subtle irony were not easy for most Americans to grasp at the time. But despite his popularity, Hitchcock himself remained an anomaly in Hollywood throughout the '50s. And really, prime Hitchcock is the director Fleming would have had in mind while writing this book. And that the producers felt the need to go this route shows that they themselves really had little understanding of where Fleming was coming from - which was really Somerset Maugham's 'Ashenden, or the British Agent,' filmed in the early '30s by Alfred Hitchcock. Third, the producers of the show were trying to make the British Ian Fleming's break-out novel accessible to American audiences only familiar with American espionage B-movies, a '50s genre that has not gotten preserved, so most people now will not be familiar with the drab back-alley feel of this show drawn from that genre. Secondly, the surviving recording is incomplete and not very good. First, this is a recording of a live performance - when something went wrong, they were stuck with it and since this is cheaply made, they had little rehearsal time, so a quite a number of things go wrong.
