I found Vicious Circle to be just a so-so entry in the Hitchcock series. Overall, it's below par in my book because while the story its adapted from, written by Evan Hunter, may be first rate the script for the television adaptation is simply below par, unusual for a Hitch half-hour.
The episode is also vague as to the precise nature of its villain's apparently small and tidy empire of crime. Is it a hit man for hire service,--that's all? It appears that way. Yet honcho George Macready seems an incongruously patrician and Ivy League type to be running such an enterprise.
That Macready's character comes off as unambiguously gay makes the episode unique but doesn't raise it in quality. His hit men,--nearer to hit boys, it appears, as they're all quite young--are, it's inferred in the script but not stated outright, his boy toys as well. He appears jealous of his new kid on the block Dick York's girlfriend, who's also threatening to start a one woman campaign against him and his criminal operation, and he orders York to kill her!
This is where the episode falls apart in feeling unreal and contrived. It shies away from the provocativeness inherent in its setup in favor of extreme and difficult to swallow melodrama. That the story is melodrama to begin with makes this "doubling up" of improbabilities too much for it to bear. The ending feels both telegraphed and hurried.
Still, flawed as it is, there are good things in this one, among them the performances of Dick York, an unlikely seeming criminal at first, especially if one is familiar with his later work in comedy, he handles his part well; and George Macready, with his sunglasses,--nicely suggestive of his lifestyle of concealment and secrecy--and his need for eye drops, symbolic of moral blindness and possibly sexual difficulties most of us would rather not dwell upon.